TO DIP into a diary is to gain privileged access to the mind and also the heart of an author. How interesting, then, to read what one of the most prophetic figures on the 20th-century religious landscape had to say about his everyday life as Prior of the monastery at Taizé. Brother Roger, the founder of the community, bought the small farm in the Burgundian countryside near Macon in August 1940.

This second volume of extracts from his diary takes up the story in 1969. In the intervening 29 years, the project had grown, become consciously ecumenical, attracted crowds of young people, and generated a style of liturgy and music entirely its own. The Prior became an Observer at the Second Vatican Council. He met a stream of the world’s great and good, including politicians and what we would nowadays call influencers. Indeed, he was one himself, though, throughout his life, he maintained his inherently modest personal style and sense of his own interior poverty.

How reassuring, then, that an early entry records that he feels no need to conceal this poverty. He traces any spiritual progress in the simplest of terms, as from night towards the light, from doubt towards belief. The context within which he consciously elected to live his life was one of reconciliation. The events that he narrates date back to a time of declining religious faith and generalised hostility. Not only in Burgundy, but throughout France and, indeed, Europe, relationships between the Churches were models of suspicion and antipathy. Brother Roger held the middle ground. How refreshing to read that he directed the protest in his own Protestantism as much against certain Protestant attitudes as against Roman Catholic ones.

Certain themes emerge: a closeness to nature and close observation of the passing of the seasons; a sense that what we believe, our theology, must emerge from prayer; intense concern for his brethren and also his neighbours and family; and, above all, the mounting sense of excitement about the community’s Council of Youth, planned for 1974.

Many of the extracts in this book could make inspiring readings for the Taizé services that are part of the legacy of this unremarkably remarkable man. Brother Roger was self-effacing to a fault and is revealed in these journals to have been a genuine man of God.

Lavinia Byrne is a writer and broadcaster.

Journals of Brother Roger of Taizé: Volume 2, 1969-1972
Brother Roger of Taizé
Cascade Books £18
(978-1-66676-121-4)
Church Times Bookshop £16.20