In Weakness, Strength

In the early 1990s, while doing research in Central America and the Caribbean on the “preferential option for the poor,” I spent some time with Canadian Jesuits who worked in the slums of West Kingston in Jamaica. Jim Webb, the local superior and a native Nova Scotian, accompanied a colleague and me as we wended our way along unpaved roads in the unforgiving sun learning something of the unrelieved heaviness of ennui and the pent-up fury of the marginalized. Webb was manifestly loved by the locals, and the children and women in particular made their way to him not so much for a benediction as for a simple validation of their humanity. At one point, he stopped at a market stand and purchased a popsicle, which he then intentionally and in full view gave to a child he singled out for special attention among the horde that trooped behind him. When I asked him why, he replied that because the young boy was mentally challenged he was the poorest of the poor and by showing him such favour he was communicating to the others that he was to be unharmed and protected.

This incident came back to mind as I read Jean Vanier’s Our Life Together: A Memoir in Letters, a collection of letters that begins in 1964 and concludes in 2007 and chronicles the genesis, history, expansion and goals of L’Arche and of Faith and Light, international networks of communities that serve people with disabilities. A former navy officer and philosophy professor—Vanier holds a doctorate from the Institut Catholique de Paris—scion of the great Canadian vice-regal family, charismatic spiritual leader, author of numerous bestsellers (including Becoming Human, the CBC Massey lectures), advocate for the abandoned and the underdog, and esteemed humanitarian, Vanier is one of Canada’s premier brand names. He brings lustre to the term Canadian, commands loyalty from multitudes and is respected by people irrespective of their ethnicity or faith tradition. He enjoys, at least on the surface, an enviable congruence of conviction and witness.

Our Life Together consists of a correspondence that is generic rather than specific; the letters are sent to the larger community of fellow workers and are designed to be both epistolary and newsletter-like in their composition and focus. The tone is oracular, inspirational, exhortative and directive. The letters reveal the author’s steadfastness, tireless devotion to the “cause,” determination to implant the vision of L’Arche— which he founded in France in 1964 under the inspiration of the saintly and influential Père Thomas Philippe—anywhere he is invited, as well as his personal commitment to peacemaking as the quintessential task for planetary survival.

The L’Arche philosophy is simple and yet revolutionary in its philosophical anthropology. It is enough to make Nietzsche mad. Vanier writes:

This is not the philosophy of the “superman,” the casual utilitarian or the earnest antinomian. This is a philosophy predicated on the inversion of values that you find in the Sermon on the Mount. It is folly to the Greeks. It runs counter to the conventional wisdom, a wisdom that fears, when it does not despise, human fragility. Vanier sees in the intellectually challenged, in all the disabled, the salvation of those deemed “whole”; he sees in the emotional openness of the broken ones the path to healing for those of us deemed successful. In other words, our collective failure to see in the beauty of the disabled an invitation to human growth, rather than an embarrassment and a reminder of the omnipresent spectre of “imperfection,” cries out for correction, a correction that is best effected by living in community. We need the disabled more than they need us; in their weakness is our strength. One can easily see why the author of Der Antichrist might find this reasoning too much to stomach. But it is what feeds Vanier. As he notes in his June 1991 letter from Trosly, his base in France, “to become a friend of the weak, to slow down in order to listen to them, to live according to their rhythm, to see the light of God in them, to allow them to disturb us.”

This fundamental theological insight—an axiomatic and orthodox Christian tenet—defines the very heart of the Vanier project. Belief is critical and not incidental to the vision of L’Arche, a point poignantly articulated by the admiring sceptic Ian Brown in his eloquent tribute to his son Walker, “The Boy in the Moon,” published in three parts in The Globe and Mail in November and December of 2007: “I can’t begin to describe the extent of my admiration for Jean Vanier, the originality and bravery of his stance, the selflessness of his work on behalf of people exactly like my son. [Walker has a rare genetic mutation—cardio-facio-cutaneous syndrome—that has rendered him severely handicapped.] I think his model for communities of the handicapped is without peer. I only wish I could believe in his God as well. Because the truth is, I do not see the face of the Almighty in Walker, and it would demean him to try.”

What cannot be glimpsed by Brown is incontrovertibly self-evident to Vanier. His faith sustains him, the love of the crucified Christ speaks through the brokenness of the disabled and heals us. There is a clarity to such Christian logic but reason is contorted in its wake. Is this a summons to holiness that mocks our human capacity to make sense of reality? How does Vanier know he is right?

And this is what is missing in these largely bloodless letters: the struggle, the self-doubt, the crippled love, the imperfect hope. Vanier’s correspondence is rich in travel details, pleas for prayers and succour for newly established foundations, and extensive homiletic excursi on the spirituality of L’Arche. Each letter is more akin to a devotional ferverino than an honest disclosure of the multiple issues that engage the core community, the assistants and the various supporters of the L’Arche communities scattered throughout the world.

Arguably, a newsletter is not the ideal vehicle for disclosing the dirty laundry of an organization, but without a sense of the internal politics that in great measure shape a community, without a sense of the spiritual warfare in the life of the founder himself and without a sense of the particular emotional upheavals of identifiable individuals, a “memoir in letters” becomes a sus- tained sermon, uplifting of purpose and noble of design, but boring withal.

And holiness is no more boring than evil is banal. Our Life Together fails to communicate the special Vanier genius; its gift for exhortation is admirable, but its avoidance of enfleshed narrative is disappointing.

Our Life Together consists of a correspondence that is generic rather than specific; the letters are sent to the larger community of fellow work- ers and are designed to be both epistolary and newsletter-like in their composition and focus.