Editor’s note, 2020: In February 2020, L'Arche International released a report detailing an investigation that found Jean Vanier "engaged in manipulative sexual relationships with at least 6 adult (not disabled) women," and was aware of sexual abuses against women committed by his mentor, Fr. Thomas Philippe. For additional reporting and commentary on this news, visit sojo.net/jean-vanier.
Editor's note, 1977: Jean Vanier lives in l’Arche ("the Ark") community in Trosly-Breuil, France, a village 50 miles northwest of Paris. He began l’Arche in his home in 1964 with mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed people. There are l’Arche homes in Canada and the United States in Toronto, Ontario; Erie, Pennsylvania; Syracuse, New York; Mobile, Alabama; Clinton, Iowa; Missoula, Montana; and Cleveland, Ohio. (See "L'Arche: Community with the Handicapped,"Sojourners, October, 1976.) Jean Vanier is the author of Be Not Afraid (Paulist Press: New York, 1975). On the evening of October 4, 1977 Jean Vanier spoke to members of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. and answered their questions about community. The following excerpts are adapted from his remarks.
You know as well as I do about the history of communities. They begin with great enthusiasm, they level off, then they start going down. The process raises a fundamental point in our community and in every community: the point of fidelity. God has called us to do and be something and to be really faithful about that. If we lose our focus on that call, that point of fidelity, we will deviate from God's purposes, which threatens the whole basis for community.
The point of fidelity which distinguishes us from institutions and hospitals is the call to live with marginal, wounded, and handicapped people. This living together involves much more than coexisting under the same roof and eating at the same table. We discover that we are members one of another, that we share a mutual commitment and mutual concern.
I feel very deeply that the source of our nourishment must be and is in the hearts of little people. In discovering the hearts of wounded people--in discovering the truthfulness, the light, the presence, the bread we must eat--we become bread one to another. The little person, the wounded person, the handicapped person is our bread, our nourishment. And that comes from being and living together.
There are two problems which inevitably arise, however: hierarchy, which can lead to one community of the staff and another community of the people; and busyness, which can lead to fatigue and feeling burned out. We face the danger of creating a double community of the assistants and the handicapped. If you go too far with this, you create breakage; you lose the point of fidelity. For this reason we have disbanded what we called the "permanent assistants."
We began as one little household in which we did everything together--shopping together, cooking together, praying together, and working together. Now we are 320 people in 21 living situations spread over 40 kilometers. Because of travel and other demands on my time, I don't have time to do even the washing anymore. I am not really living with my people. And because I am a model for the assistants, they begin following this model. Also, I spend more time now listening to the assistants and less time listening to my initial people.
I believe that God gives us different gifts and calls us to different vocations. What I was originally called to, others are now called to. Still, I'm concerned that I am not so present to my people. To maintain harmony and unity, I feel the need to accept the role of greater service within the community. But I am also aware of the danger that after living four, five, or six years in community with handicapped people--and not having much free time--we can become burned out.
Burned out assistants is something we have to think about. In the face of fatigue, we need to be refreshed. We need to be relaxed. You can be really tired but still relaxed. That's the secret. We have to find a harmony in our lifestyle between being present to deeply wounded people--who are often violent, depressed, or have severe emotional disorders--and being relaxed and refreshed. This is one of the key questions we keep asking ourselves: how to find a harmony between the folly, which is the folly of Jesus Christ, and a lifestyle where we get sufficient rest and nourishment.
Adapting to Community Life
The people who came to live with us were insecure, because they came from institutions where life is terribly insecure. They came with no sense of belonging to us or us to them. There was no sense of the body; they were just transplanted from their institutions. They were happy and wanted to come, of course, because anything is better than an institution.
But the point is that, in forming community with very disturbed people, you must create a very tight community, a very close unity, at the beginning. There must be as much closeness as possible, including everyone being at meals together. Out of this you begin forging a unity; you begin creating a sense of belonging, a sense of the body; you begin discovering each other and his or her gifts.
A wonderful school teacher was telling me the other day about the growth of children between ages two and six. She said that up to about age four, children's drawings are more imitative than creative. She said that creativity comes only after a period of imitation. I believe this also applies to transition in community. In order for people to grow and become, in order to gain a sense of belonging to one body and one family, there is a certain amount of imitation.
People go through an initial process in which their hearts are touched by the Spirit, by the community, and by the Spirit working through the community. This initial period involves a sort of imitation--imitation which is almost servility, because there is not yet the maturity of equal relationships between people who've discovered their own and each other's gifts. When this happens, when the maturing comes, there is a new identity and new freedom; imitation gives way to creativity.
This also changes the need for a very tight, close community; instead of existing for itself, the community opens up to others. We move out into the larger community. Sometimes this is very difficult. It is a struggle sometimes to know how to move from a closed, more therapeutic community to a more open community involving village people. In the process of opening up, I sense in myself and in others a certain fear of breakdown of community.
One of the problems with the period of imitation is the newcomer's relationship to authority. Frequently when people see authority, they don't see it as a person living a gift they have to live. Rather, authority becomes the father they didn't have, or it becomes something to be imitated. People see authority as hierarchy, and they imitate it because it's something we all want--we all want to travel and do the things we've always wanted to do.
There is a danger of people in community wanting hierarchy and seeing leadership as the result of promotion and not of service. That, of course, is the death of community. The leadership can promote this by not being close to the wounded people and not being vulnerable themselves.
This matter of relationship to leadership is very important. Many people coming to community begin projecting onto the leader or leaders some of their own difficulties with their parents. Then they go into the dichotomy of aggressiveness-servility. That's to say, they can become alternately very aggressive toward the leader and then terribly servile. They obey, and then--boom. They don't meet the leader as a person, which may be partly the fault of the leader not meeting the other as a person.
Leaders make good targets for people's aggressions. What happens sometimes is that people push the leader higher up on the pedestal, because then there's a better target. They never quite knock you down though. That's dangerous. They know that somebody else will have to go up there--and they don't want to take the job. So they wound you in the leg, not in the heart.
When attacked, the leader can create a warm personal relationship with each person. Or he can really hold the group in his being. But the most important thing for leaders is to be one step ahead of the group in the process of forgiveness. The psychology of group dynamics can bring a lot to community; but there is one thing that Christian communities have which others don't, and that is unconditional forgiveness. That is the foundation stone of Christian community.
Becoming like Little Children
I heard a beautiful story the other day about a woman who has been living in community for 25 or 30 years. She said she always wanted to be transparent so that she wouldn't be an obstacle to God's love in the community. But, she said, she was coming to realize that she was an obstacle and that she always had been an obstacle in the community.
Community is the place to share together that we are obstacles. That is to say, we're not perfect. Maybe our wounds from the past, the wounds that cause blockages in our relationships, maybe these will always be with us. Jesus can heal these, but it seems to me that the first thing is to be able to talk about the wounds and the blockages--to talk about them without being threatened.
We have "sacred reunions" in our community. We sit together, perhaps only three or four of us, and we pray for a while. Then everyone shares where they're at. We talk in discontinuous, rather than continuous, conversation. Discontinuous conversation is when you say something and nobody answers. You just say it; it is gathered by the group and put into the heart of God. Nobody can come back to it afterwards. You can't talk about it later on. That's why it's sacred: it is put into the heart of God.
I believe more and more that healing is essentially acceptance and humility. Many of us are amputated somewhere in our bodies, in our flesh, in our being. We need to share the amputations--the wounds, the scars, the blockages which cause difficulty--in the context of acceptance and humility.
It doesn't matter that we have blockages, nor is it important to be totally transparent. What matters is to be really humble. The perfection Jesus calls us to is not the perfection of being really perfect but the perfection of being really humble. That is to say, we need to become like little children.
One of the things I've learned from little people is that big people don't know how to celebrate. Big people celebrate with wine and stuff, but they don't know how to cope with real celebration. Little people know how to celebrate. They feel that big people don't know how to harmonize joy and God: God is a little bit too serious, and joyfulness is maybe a little bit off the track. With little people joyfulness and Godfulness go hand in hand.
That's one of the fantastic things the little people have taught me: the extraordinary beauty of celebration, of discovering how we can celebrate with Jesus and be really serious at the same time. The celebration is serious; it's like children at play. Play is a serious matter for children. It's their life, their way of communicating.
We are trying to incorporate this in our deeper community experiences together. Once a month we have what we call "Agape"--the coming together of all permanent members of our communities for an evening of worship, sharing, singing, mime, dancing, laughter, and a feast, followed by prayer.
Learning to Trust God
I don't think there is any experience more beautiful than the experience of being pardoned--of being pardoned by Jesus Christ, then being pardoned by our brothers and sisters. Entering into the world of pardon, we discover the foundation stone of community: to forgive and be forgiven. We are all terrible people who tread on each other's toes. To learn to pardon and to trust, and to keep on going, is what it's all about.
There are so many wounds and so many wounded people: people we have wounded, people we haven't succored, people we have let die on the streets, people we haven't been present to. We enter into the mystery of forgiveness. We discover that forgiveness really means to be relaxed with God. This relaxation has a lot to do with trust. Like a child relaxes and trusts when the parent is there, so we experience the deep aspect of trusting--because really God is our father. Relaxation comes from this trust.
We must distinguish between different levels of trust. There is psychological trust, when we trust our feelings. The danger here is that we get immersed in our emotions; we begin to think we are our emotions. We are angry or depressed, and we cannot take one step back from the anger or depression. Spiritual trust is much deeper. When that happens, we can offer our anger or depression to God with trust. We take one little step back from the world of our emotions. Instead of letting a depression define my whole being, I step back and say, "Fantastic, I'm depressed today." The same applies to emotional highs sometimes confused with spiritual experiences. The spiritual is much deeper than the emotional or the psychological.
We need to offer ourselves and our emotions--our psychological whizbangs, our ups and downs--to our Father. But our spiritual person is much deep than that. One thing I'm saying here is that God does not always liberate us from our psychological blockages. Sometimes we just have to live with them and sort of laugh at ourselves.
The same thing applies to fear--fear of loneliness, fear of death, fear of the broken and wounded. The first and most important thing is to share it, to verbalize it, with a person or group of people. Fear is a very, very natural phenomenon. Fear is not bad. Because we are not purified, because we have wounded parts, fear is always going to come up. The important thing is not to add to it all by being afraid of the fear. We need to accept fear as natural, and talk about it.
What frequently happens is that when we get the signals of fear, we turn back and turn inward because we are frightened. I feel that frequently we must learn to walk in fear. That's where our faith comes in, where our trust comes in. We get signals of fear, and we don't know quite what to do with them. But we believe that Jesus has called us and sent us on a mission, so we will continue to walk. Fear is disagreeable and impractical, but we must learn to walk with it.
Then we discover that it is a psychological phenomenon, something which we can't control but which we won't let control us either. So we go on walking even with fear. I think that at certain moments fear is eliminated because the presence of God is even stronger. That is a very special gift. In any case, elimination of fear is something much deeper than not feeling the sentiments of fear.
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