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Poetry—that is what the Church should be!" announced Brother Roger, founder of an ecumenical community of Roman Catholic and Protestant brothers in the tiny village of Taizé, France. That was in 1985, when he was approaching seventy and I was first researching my book about his life.
In the course of many meetings by the firelight in his room or in the garden he loved, I discovered that Brother Roger himself was a poet who drew his inspiration from nature. He was a gentle man who could make simplicity beautiful, a mystic who valued intuition as highly as intelligence: “In the life of the gospel,” he once told me, “intuition supports compassion and avoids unnecessary dialogue. It enables us to discern the reflection of God. And that is all we can do. We can try to approach the immeasurable mystery that is God. In our life here we do not know that mystery, but we draw near to it a good deal and that is enough for me to live.”
Brother Roger spoke in Swiss French, in sentences that he rarely completed and ideas that he often…
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