August 19, 2005

Dear Family and Friends,

I apologize that it has taken me so long to write to you again. Although so much has happened in the past four months, I have had terrible difficulties trying to encapsulate my experience in words, and I’ll have to ask for your forgiveness again, as this newsletter is not about my work, but rather about a tragedy that happened this week. I promise I’ll send an update about my work in the next few weeks.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Brother Roger, the founder of the Taize Christian monastic community, was murdered in his church in the middle of an evening church service, on Tuesday, August 16. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Taize, there’s a description on the British Broadcasting Company's Web site. And there was also a news story on the BBC.

I was in Taize with a group from a theological school from the Netherlands, and we were among the 2,500 who witnessed this horrible event.

One of the news reports I read referred to us as “pilgrims,” which is, I suppose, as accurate a word as any. We went to Taize to step out of our normal lives for a time, for room and space to reflect, restore, reconnect, and heal. The week began normally, but 15 minutes into the seventh service of the week, during a chant whose words are “O give thanks for the goodness of the Lord...for the Risen Christ our Lord...for the Spirit of life, for God’s love will never end, alleluia!” a woman approached Brother Roger with the apparent intent to embrace him, but she instead slashed his throat. From my place at the back of the church, I saw the brothers tackle a figure to the ground. The back half of the church then panicked and began to flee the building, but the brothers and the Taize volunteers quickly restored order. While some of the brothers carried Brother Roger out, the rest resumed the chant, and we were told of the attack and Brother Roger’s death later in the service.

I suppose the question is how do we begin to come to terms with this kind of event, with the senseless slaying of a 90-year old monk in the middle of a church service being held in the church that he built, in a place of solitude, serenity, peace, worship, and reflection—now a house of God that, for some of us, will at least in part remain a place of bloodshed and violence, a reminder that we live in a world of senseless violence that respects no seniority, no sanctuary, no time, no holy place.

Not often is a monk martyred within the confines of his own church, and now those of us who witnessed the event, the brothers of Taize, and the religious community at large, are left to pick up the pieces and continue. With respect to continuing, I want to thank the brothers for the other half of the story, for the half of the story that they leave out of the news articles—for calming those of us who witnessed this terrible attack and returning us to worship, for continuing the work at Taize, and for being examples of forgiveness and reconciliation in a world desperately in need of both. The morning after the attack, we gathered with one of the brothers for a Bible study, and after clearing up a few details about the attack, he spoke about the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation, even towards such senseless violence against such an innocent, defenseless person. He pointed to Christ’s words, words spoken even as he was hanging on the cross, suffering unimaginable pain: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). This was Christ’s attitude and the attitude that Brother Roger would counsel us to have, the brother said, and so we shall continue living and seek to forgive the deed, not nurse vengeance in our hearts.

To this, I would add that death has never been at the center of the gospel or at the center of the brothers’ lives. For them, Christianity begins with a life stronger than death: “Christ is risen!” Because of their confidence in a life greater than death, they are not paralyzed by fear. Indeed, Jesus even talks of the creative, imaginative potential of death: “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). Life involves the seasons; the dying of autumn and winter, stagnant, dormant, and yet pregnant with possibility, demonstrate the rest required by all living things to achieve the exuberance and then sustained abundance of spring and summer. Life involves letting go in order to let the journey of life proceed.

For those of us who were there, the key to dealing with our collective trauma, I believe, is connecting—connecting to our own senses of loss and vulnerability and to the shock created by experiencing such violence in a place of peace; connecting to the others who were there; and connecting to our friends, family, and acquaintances who weren’t there but are also horrified and shocked.

I suppose the central part of this connecting is consciously embracing our vulnerability, the sense of which is perhaps what frightens us most from this event. This reminds me of the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot, which is often celebrated by building a sukkah—a fragile hut with a leafy roof, perhaps the most vulnerable house one can imagine. For most of our lives, we try to live in a fortress of invulnerability: we build huge missles, fantastic futuristic weapons, monstrous buildings of glass and steel, with the expectation that they make us safe, but the truth is that there are only stick and leaf huts between us; that all of life is interconnected. As Arthur Waskow wrote, “The command to love my neighbor as I do myself is not an admonition to be nice. It is a statement of truth like the law of gravity. However much and in whatever way I love my neighbor, that will turn out to be the way I love myself. If I pour contempt upon my neighbor, hatred will recoil upon me. Only a world where all communities feel vulnerable, and therefore connected to all other communities, can prevent...acts of rage and mass murder.”

We usually respond to vulnerability by trying to make ourselves more and more invulnerable, but in a world defined by vulnerability, this can only be achieved by escalating violence, fear, and isolationism. I suppose that is the true difficulty in this tragedy—a reminder of our vulnerability, even in our places of utmost peace, and the extremely difficult admonition of Christ for us to embrace this vulnerability creatively and imaginatively, and through that, to build a better world.

So this is my first attempt to connect to the vulnerability I feel because of this event, and to connect to you. Isolation, whether physical or psychological, starves the human spirit, while connection feeds and heals it. Despite our feelings of loss and fear, we will continue to work for a better world. As Barbara Kingsolver said, “I’m with Emma Goldman: Our revolution will have dancing—and excellent food. In the long run, the choice of life over death is too good to resist.”

I’ll leave you all this time with a poem by Elizabeth Barrette, “Origami Emotion”:

Hope is
folding paper cranes
even when your hands get cramped
and your eyes tired,
working past blisters and
paper cuts,
simply because something in you
insists on
opening its wings.

Peace,

Grant