Back in my teen years I was struggling with my Roman Catholic environment. Growing up in a small, overwhelmingly Catholic town it was was socially demanded to go to church each Sunday. Being altar girl or boy was an honor and a group leadership in one of the St. George boy scout groups was a high ambition.

This, of course, conflicted with my otherwise quite secular interests and a questioning mind. It took me a while to find some inner arrangement between my upbringing and my self. What did help me archiving this were some trips and several weeks stay in Taizé, a small town in Burgundy, France.

There, a Swiss Lutheran priest, Roger Louis Schutz-Marsauche, Frère Roger, was running an ecumenical Christian men’s monastic order, the Taizé Community.

The order has only about one hundred members, but each summer since the 1950’s there are tens of thousands of young people coming to Taizé to camp out, talk, discuss, meditate and chant about their relation to a higher being. We came from over twenty different countries. We cooked, eat and did the dishes together. We loved and were loved. We sang and meditated and did some skin dipping.

The important thing was the ecumenical environment. The members of the order are Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox and whatever other Christian group may exist. Other people around were from different religions. I meet a Hindi, some Muslim, some Buddhist. All the ceremonial stuff was thrown out, all the artificial differentiations of rites didn´t matter.

After the regular evening prayer/meditation in that mystic church Frère Roger was available for private talks. His English was as bad as my French but he managed to explain to me that church didn´t matter the way I had learned it did. Rites didn´t matter, the type of a god personification one could believe in didn´t matter. What mattered, he explained, was to search for something and to keep searching. And to be peaceful and to accept that different people have different concepts of believe and different insights.

So I learned a lot through him, his community and all the people who were there. Some month later I left the formal church but I kept searching. Today I am a bit of a Buddhist and I am sure he would have embraced this development.

Frère Roger died today at the age of 90. He was stabbed during the common evening prayer/meditation.

Om benza sato shri.