Daily Verse
Monday, May 18, 2026
Community and Fellowship
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Monday's Reflection
Proverbs 17:17 — A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
In August 1940, a twenty-five-year-old Swiss theology student named Roger Schutz loaded his bicycle and rode alone from Geneva into war-torn France. The country had just fallen to Germany, and people were fleeing in every direction. Roger was going in. He had felt a call to be near suffering, to offer shelter, to build something in the middle of the wreckage. He settled in a small, nearly abandoned village called Taizé in the hills of Burgundy, close to the line dividing occupied France from unoccupied France. He bought a house and opened it. Jewish refugees came. Families fleeing the fighting came. He hid them, fed them, prayed over them. When the Gestapo came looking for him in 1942, he was in Switzerland and could not return for two years.
When the war ended, he came back with a small group of brothers who had committed to live together in prayer, simplicity, and welcome. Over the following decades, what began in one old farmhouse grew into something no one had planned. Young people from across Europe began making the journey to Taizé — not for a conference, not for a programme, but simply to be there, to pray together three times a day in the Church of Reconciliation, to sit in silence, to talk honestly about their lives and their faith. By the time Brother Roger was in his eighties, more than a hundred thousand young people a year were coming from every country and every Christian tradition — Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox — drawn by something they could not always name. What they found was a community where the walls that divided people had been quietly dismantled, not through argument but through shared prayer and shared life.
In August 2005, at the age of ninety, Brother Roger was killed by a mentally ill woman while kneeling in evening prayer with his brothers and thousands of young visitors around him. He died as he had lived — in community, at prayer, with his arms open.
Prayer: Lord, give us Brother Roger's willingness to ride toward the suffering instead of away from it, and to build community in the places where people are most alone. Amen.