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Most of the pilgrims share a vague spiritual hunger. "What struck me most here was the experience of finding so many people of my own age who were searching," explained Magdalene, 21, a Norwegian at the camp. Alois, a 19-year-old German, suggested that "it's not even Christianity we're searching for, since many of us are not believers. What we all share is a search for meaning." Stefano, a 15-year-old from Milan on his third visit to Taizé, said that "we all push to love God." Taizé's pilgrims are not so much ecumenical as postecumenical; a young man and woman who had known each other for weeks did not realize that both were Catholics until an outsider asked their religions.
Christian Life. Visitors pay for tent space and meals according to their means. Some join group discussions, especially concerning ways of living a Christian life in modern society. Others combine half-days of farm work with periods of silent contemplation; still others make more structured individual retreats under the guidance of one of the brothers. But the key element is their roughhewn communal life. "Here words and actions come together," says a French girl named Marie-Joseph. "Here we see what it is like to live and work and discuss and play together, what it is like to form a community. Many young people are not religious because they do not understand that the church should be community above all."
This August a series of conferences will begin at Taizé and later move on to other countries. The meetings, to be called the Council of Youth, will explore ways that the young can help offset the injustices of the world so that, as a council slogan puts it, man will "no longer be victim to man." Brother Roger does not want the council to become a bureaucratized movement. There will be, he says, "no successions of votes, amendments, commissions, representations. It will be like an ever-widening river ... it will be what we shall have become."
He has asked his followers to suggest goals for the council, and ideas have flowed in. As collected in a new paperback, Dare to Live: The Taizé Youth Experience (Seabury; $2.95), the ideas are eclectic and ambitious. Often they reflect local versions of radical Christianity. A Latin American, for instance, looks forward to a somewhat Utopian kind of social, economic and political liberation—a Christian "revolution" that will set the world aright. Others view Christian life as a "sign of contradiction" in a pagan civilization—to see their role as an example of selfless living in a selfish world. "The council will not give us an answer to everything," says one of the young organizers. "The Gospel is a call, not an answer."