This Community of Grandchamp in Switzerland is a convent located near the shores of Lake Neuchâtel, where the peaks of the Alps hover like a mirage in the far distance. The four eighteenth-century stone buildings that make up the monastery are modest, yet in their simplicity, striking. Flowers line the buildings and frame doorways. Fountains in the courtyard spill out water from the seemingly untouched, unpolluted lands of Switzerland.

The chapel, a large barn that was used centuries ago for drying painted muslin, is aptly named L’Arche—the Ark. The inside opens up into a surprisingly modern, simple, and warm chapel. The centuries-old wood beams make it easy to imagine that one is praying in an ark-like structure. Stained glass in rectangular and square shapes appears spontaneously arranged on two sides of the wood barn in varied greens, blues, oranges, reds, and purples. Time passes through glass made for assorted light, changing tones as the sun journeys up and over. It is a display of the beauty of subtlety—little reflectors of the sun direct the gaze.

The architecture and interior design of each room at the monastery is a physical expression of the ending stanza in the rule the sisters and volunteers pray to start the day:

I arrived at the monastery as a volunteer for three weeks to mend my own fragmentation, but I left with something much larger. I was given a model of unity for my disunified self, but also a model for a church and a nation. There, in the swirl of joy, simplicity, and mercy, while washing dishes, ironing clothes, praying the Taizé liturgy, and sitting in silence, I learned the contours of unity from this group of women who view unity and reconciliation as their vocation.

In The Fruits of Grace: The Ecumenical Experience of the Community of Grandchamp, sister Minke de Vries, the third prioress, who wrote the book before she passed away in 2013, notes how this community formed after a few women were drawn into a budding ecumenical movement in Europe through a series of silent retreats and guidance from spiritual mentors. A leading ecumenical figure in Europe, a Catholic priest named Abbé Paul Couturier, who founded the ecumenical Group des Dombes in 1937, met and began to correspond with Geneviève, the first Mother of Grandchamp. Geneviève wrote to one of the other founders to say that her encounter with Abbé Couturier reinforced “her conviction that the unity of the church was an issue that needed to be addressed at their Retreats.”

A seed was sown.

Over the next few years, the monastery’s commitment to reconciliation and the unity of the church turned from a seed into fields and a harvest—a metaphor used frequently by another one of the founding sisters, Marguerite. Abbé Couturier wrote frequently to encourage the women of Grandchamp to spread “the word that our divisions cause suffering to our Lord Jesus Christ” and his hope that “Grandchamp become an ecumenical spiritual center.”

The rooting of Grandchamp’s identity in unity took on a new tone when Europe fractured again along deeply entrenched lines of hatred, division, and death. Reactions to World War II, especially Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own communal endeavour described in Life Together, tilled the soil of Europe for a Protestant monastic movement. Many of the monasteries created at that time were committed, like Grandchamp, to the unity of the church and reconciliation. Taizé was grown from this same soil, enjoying a long, enriching friendship with the sisters at Grandchamp.

Courageously, Grandchamp and these other protestant monasteries “stood in the gap” of the fissures caused by World War II, becoming “oases of a simple and warm welcome, a sign of the coming kingdom, which is here already, and wherever two or three are gathered in his name.” These communities became facilitators of forgiveness when others did not know where to start. One of the sisters wrote during that time, “Praying the Beatitudes, ‘Blessed are the peace makers’ took on new meaning.”

In practice, a type of unity that preserves difference took the form of radical hospitality at Grandchamp and these other Protestant monasteries. Gathered around, bread broken, food consumed, these communities became houses of hospitality to guests irrespective of national or religious differences. The actions were simple. Pray together and extend a warm welcome to those who had become used to having their personhood—whether ethnic, religious, or cultural—be a source of fear and animosity. Between community members and guests, unity was and still is created through praying together and extending hospitality. After World War II, a Dutch sister silently prayed with and passed the salt to a German sister. Today, a Catholic volunteer silently washes dishes alongside and refills a glass of water for a volunteer who has no faith.

What had started for Grandchamp as an external sign of unity to a fractured world also began to morph in 1957 into a practice for the community itself. At the start, they were mostly Reformed sisters from Switzerland, then women from other countries and Christian traditions asked to join them. Today, there are about fifty sisters from around the world (Asia, Africa, and Europe) from different Protestant confessions, meaningfully integrating Catholic and Orthodox icons, prayers, and liturgies into their daily rhythms. Each sister brings her whole self—in all of her national and cultural differences.

Sister Minke writes of the significance these differences have had on their community over the decades:

The sisters are not asked to abandon their differences before they arrive. Instead, they view their communal attachments in light of a trinitarian reality. To live in communion with one another is a participation in and bearing witness to the love expressed in the Trinity—God the Father, Son, and Spirit. The paradoxical and mysterious eternal communion of three-in-one.

Reaching beyond their individualism, as Sister Minke writes, they are there to work as a “leaven of communion, of unity, of reconciliation in Christ’s church, in the world: this is our reason for being, for all of us—‘to proclaim the Gospel by my very life,’ to show together this love of communion that is [the Trinity], this compassion which extends even to the laying down of one’s life.” Sister Minke is quick to acknowledge, though, that they are still learning how to live this vocation.

What they have learned so far I found refreshing in its simplicity and hopefulness. Abbé Couturier’s prayer for a group of theology students who visited in 1940 was that they would “leave Grandchamp with the wound of our divisions in their hearts and the spiritual fire of prayer for unity.” I left Grandchamp feeling the wound of our divisions—in our communities, the church, and the United States. Yet the fire of prayer for unity is still alive over eighty years later.

The Wounds of Disunity in America

The stories of how Grandchamp and the other Protestant monasteries responded to a real, violent war in Europe made me think deeply about the fear of the other and the political polarization wreaking havoc on individual lives and institutions in the United States. I could not shake a vision of a physical house of reconciliation built in the trenches of our divisions, doing the work of peacemaking when the world outside had forgotten how. I left grieved: the “house” should be real, physical churches in America. Instead, the church has become another victim to the wildfires of polarization sweeping our lands.

The ills of our disunity—alienation, loneliness, division, deaths of despair, depression, and polarization—are well-known, and the causes are not lacking in discussion, so I will not elaborate on them here. But I do believe the sisters of Grandchamp offer two lessons for how to begin to heal the wounds of our disunity in America.

The first lesson is that our fears of the other are often imagined and insignificant in the day-to-day interactions of intentional community.

The Grandchamp sisters, especially in the aftermath of World War II, had visceral experiences and extreme views of the other that could have easily ended their pursuit of unity. Sisters who were born and lived in lands once occupied by Nazi Germany had to learn to see their German sisters in a new light. When the sisters witnessed evils committed in other parts of the world, they could “no longer . . . put all of the blame on one side; the Nazis, the Germans, ‘the others,’ were no longer the only ones who could do evil in [their] eyes.” It became evident that the evil was a reality “found in the heart of every man and every woman.”

In the United States, we blame our disunity on seemingly insurmountable differences of belief and identity—which has been elevated at times to calling each other “fascists” or worse. Imagined differences and fear about those imagined differences—otherwise known as a “perception gap”—lead us to mischaracterize and exaggerate those whom we view as the other. More in Common, a research group focused on political polarization, found in their 2019 report on perception gaps that “Americans imagine themselves to be far more divided than they really are.”

With charisms of reconciliation and unity, Grandchamp and the other monasteries in Europe provided a solution to these perception gaps in postwar Europe. Time spent together, known as “contact theory,” is a proven remedy to decrease perception gaps and toxic polarization. In High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, Amanda Ripley describes how these “encounters can interrupt the cascading assumptions we make about each other, essentially slowing down conflict and making space.” The monasteries slowed down the rhythms of life through prayer and silence, creating a space to encourage meaningful human interaction.

What the Grandchamp sisters discovered when they pushed past their own perception gap of the other was that it was not their identity, religious, or national differences—fears about an irreconcilably different other—that made common life difficult. It was the much more mundane, human elements of life that became the sources of contention, such as, “That sister washed the dishes the wrong way.” The temptation to blame the division on an abstract other evaporated when the realization set in that the real conflict began in one’s own interior life—an exceedingly humbling awareness in all of its ashen humanness.

In the United States, perhaps we do not need to obsess over our fears that the differences of belief about LGBTQ+ rights or gun rights are irreconcilable. The human interactions that happen in the margins of life, such as in the grocery store checkout line, or as the 2023 Netflix series Beef so artfully captures, how we respond to an angry driver in a parking lot, are where we should turn our focus for learning how to do common life well in an age of isolation, fear, and division.

The second lesson I learned was that unity, or communion, is a progression from self to community to the world.

The sisters often repeated to me, “Unity begins in your own heart.” Unity necessarily begins here, in the quiet of our own hearts, to develop the sensitivity and attention communion requires.

Through silent reflection and prayer, we embark on an interior journey toward God. This silent encounter with God occurs when you are alone; it is a deeply personal experience. But as Fr. Martin Laird describes in Into the Silent Land, arrival to a silent “Center” results in a magnified communal awareness. A greater descent into the darkness of silence, the greater the illumination of unity found in Christ. Laird writes that “in this depthless depth we are caught up in a unity that grounds, affirms, and embraces all diversity. Communion with God and communion with others are realizations of the same Center.”

This “Center” the individual reaches clarifies both imago Dei and human imperfection. There, we are forced to confront our own brokenness, the evil within ourselves. Sister Minke writes in the conclusion of The Fruits of Grace, “We must always remember that we are not ‘the good guys.’ Evil is not someone else, someone who is different from us, some other people, some other culture, some other religion, some other confession, an agnostic or an atheist. Evil is not the world either. No, evil is in us.” The individual journey toward unity opens a window in our own interior houses to see the other, out there, with grace, humility, and compassion.

Once we are right with our own self and God, we are called outward into the relationships that make up our communities and churches. For the life of the monastery, this work creates “a laboratory of communion, sowing the seeds of hospitality, openness, and ecumenical engagement.” The monastery becomes a signpost and an example.

A Christian Call to Unity in a Disunified World

The ingredients required for successful “laboratories of communion” are repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Sister Minke describes reconciliation as an incarnational act, an invitation for Christ to enter into the deepest divisions, the most heated hatreds, and to transform our churches and world into “true seeds of communion.” As living vessels of reconciliation, we are invited into this incarnational work—becoming peacemakers and initiators of healing in a disunified world.

As we become real, physical vessels of reconciliation within our churches and communities, there is a spillover effect to the rest of the world. On Sundays, when the peace is passed to your neighbour, it should continue to spill out from the pew through the front door of the church into the world, a sign given in daily encounters with strangers, and even the other—whoever that might be to you.

The Grandchamp community accomplished this spillover effect when they sent small groups of sisters to live in high-conflict countries. By being present, they extended the sign of the peace to people who were most in need of the hope and promise they embodied. In Algeria and Israel, the sisters did not take sides on the conflicts and offered “simple hospitality in silence,” becoming “small oases in the desert of violence, indifference, and negation of the other.”

One Algerian Muslim woman who was a friend of the sisters in Algeria for over fifty years provides her testimony in The Fruits of Grace after a visit to Grandchamp, writing that it is “a place of peace, comfort, faith, joy, and happiness . . . a place where we can meet the other without fear but always with hope for taking steps toward one another.”

The first step to encounter the other begins in your own heart, extends outward to those in your immediate community, and then overflows to the rest of the world. What good news for a broken and divided world—through Christ, we bear the signs and practices of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

There was no coincidence that these postwar monastic communities sprouted when they did. The work of the Holy Spirit catalyzed men and women, as Sister Minke observed, to form these communities to create spaces where people could encounter the other and move toward reconciliation. Christians everywhere, but especially in countries embroiled in toxic polarization, can look to the ingenuity of a monastic community like Grandchamp for how they have done the incarnational work of forgiveness and reconciliation within their own intimate, diverse community and throughout the world.

As Christians, we are called to grieve with Christ the wounds caused by our divisions. And we are invited into a trinitarian dance, a more creative and imaginative love, that maintains the distinctness of communion with people who are different without the fear that it diminishes us or profits the other. Daily, we have the opportunity to extend this love at the kitchen sink, in the laundry room, and out in the garden. Only there, in the space between, will houses of unity rest on bedrock thick enough to withstand the wildfires of fear and division.