JEAN VANIER – MOURNING A REPUTATION

JEAN VANIER – MOURNING A REPUTATION

Around Easter last year Jean Vanier, the founder of the l’Arche communities for people living with intellectual disabilities, died, aged 90, and I wrote in this column: “Jean defined his vocation as ‘revealing the beauty of people who are wounded’. It is the sort of sentence you will not find even in the best meaning of our laws.  In fact, many people will not even know what you are talking about.  Yet there it is: the cornerstone of l’Arche.  It is about helping people who are living with disabilities to discover their gifts and rejoice in them and share them with the world”.

This vision inspired me and many others and there are now 154 communities of l’Arche around the world. Those of us who knew Jean came to revere him as a great witness of the gospel and an inspiration in revealing what lay hidden in the lives of handicapped people.

But now, less than twelve months later, another picture has emerged, one that destroys the one we lived with for so long. After a painstaking process of investigation by outside professionals the present leaders of the International Federation of l’Arche have released a report which reveals that over a period of thirty years Jean had relations with women each of who ‘report that he initiated sexual behaviours with them, usually in the context of spiritual accompaniment. Some of these women have been deeply wounded by these experiences’.

If we mourned last year over the death of a great and holy man, we now mourn over the death of his reputation. His achievements were colossal but now they have to stand with this revision of the man himself.  How could this have happened? How could someone who was so sensitive to the sufferings of the poor and the disabled himself inflict suffering on people who were vulnerable? There are no grounds for saying he took advantage of disabled people. The women were not in l’Arche and they were adults so it could perhaps be said the relationship was consensual. This is not the view of the women who, courageously and individually, answered the questions the investigators put to them. They each felt manipulated by the spiritual context of their encounters with Jean.

Only today, by chance, I came across a letter of Jean to me in 1989. He was taking time out in a monastery in Belgium and he wrote, ‘Tonight I feel the joy of Jesus and want so much to give Him thanks for everything and I feel a great desire that we may know His goodness and love.’ When I first read those words thirty years ago I am sure I felt encouraged and shared his joy. Now, rereading them, I feel confused and deeply sad. I cannot begin to understand what has happened. Someone we looked up to had this secret life where he was hurting others.  The report commissioned by l’Arche concludes, ‘It will take more time and work, with help from outside L'Arche, to try and understand this part of our history and the roots of such behaviours’. Is it possible for a person to be imaginative, generous and devoted to others while at the same time be deviant and manipulative? What a question to try to answer.

1 March 2020              Lent Sunday 1

Gen 2:7-9; 3:1-7          Rom 5:12-19               Matt 4:1-11

IN SEARCH OF THE AMAZON

IN SEARCH OF THE AMAZON

On the 2^nd of this month Pope Francis issued his much anticipated letter, Querida Amazonia, the Beloved Amazon.  The BBC ignored the thrust of the letter and reported only on one aspect which, it knew, would interest people who would be unmoved by the sweep of the letter. That aspect was the ordination of married men, a question which, Francis knew, would distract people from his message. 

We are not searching for the Amazon as explorers from Europe once searched for the source of the Nile.  We are searching to understand the gift of this vast rain forest and river system that stretches across nine countries and whose health or otherwise has a vital effect on the people who live there and on us who live far away. It affects world climate.

The pope begins; ‘The beloved Amazon region stands before the world in all its splendour, drama and mystery’. Using vivid descriptions, arguments and poetry Francis shares with us his four dreams

1.      For an Amazon region that fights for the poor, the original people; this is a cry of the earth and a cry of the poor. He goes on to describe the indiscriminate and irresponsible plunder that affects the people.

2.      That the people of the Amazon can preserve their distinctive cultural riches

3.      And that the region preserves its overwhelming natural beauty, its superabundant life teeming in its forests and rivers

4.      And finally, that Christian communities in the region become capable of generous commitment in incarnating the faith in the Amazon region.

Pope Francis develops each of these points at length often, as mentioned, using the words of poets;

                        Many are the tress

where torture dwelt

and vast are the forests

purchased with a thousand deaths

The people, driven from their forests migrate to the cities where they find worse enslavement, subjugation and poverty. They are a dispensable obstacle to the exploitation of the Amazon and can be eliminated.  They are not human beings. Francis says we need to feel outrage, as Amos, ‘They turn justice into wormwood and throw uprightness to the ground’ (5:7-12).

The letter runs to many pages.  It is a celebration and a warning.  And it affects us in Africa because the Amazon is not just a river system in South America; it is a vital part of us.  Today we need a universal mind and a universal heart.  Otherwise we will perish.

23 February 2020        Sunday 7 A

Lev 19:1…18              1 Cor. 3:16-23                         Matt 5:38-48

BUT I SAY THIS TO YOU

BUT I SAY THIS TO YOU

There is a power in words and we have few orators today. We watch in alarm as the Speaker of the South African Parliament, gathered in Cape Town to listen to the President of the Republic, searches for words to respond to Mr Malema’s obstructive tactics.  Another person could have disarmed him with a few words but the Speaker could not find those words.

Jesus was the perfect speaker. He is the Word and ‘no one could think of anything to say in reply, and from that day no one dared to ask him any further questions’ (Matt 22:46).  Words are one of God’s great gifts to us. We use them all the time in daily life to express our needs, joys and pains.  But words are not limited to immediate descriptions.

‘Primordial words are always as though filled with the soft music of infinity.  No matter what it is they speak of, they always whisper something about everything.  If one tries to pace out their boundary, one always becomes lost in the infinite.  They are the children of God, who possess something of the luminous darkness of their Father.

Words like ‘blossom, night, star and day, root and source, wind and laughter, rose, blood and earth’ and so on are words in which a piece of reality is signified, a door is opened into the depths of true reality in general. ‘They are words of an endless crossing of borders, therefore words on which in some way our salvation depends’ (Karl Rahner). Through the word, spoken in powerful concentration, all realities are brought into the light of man, and redeemed from the imprisonment of their dumbness of reference to God’ (Michael Kirwan SJ, Letters and Notices 455, a Jesuit house journal).

The Sermon on the Mount is where Jesus ‘completes’ the message of the old dispensation.  He raises the bar on human behaviour, calling humanity to choose wisdom. If we are still haunted by the self-interest and fears of the old ways it is time now to become free and reach out for the new. Humanity can do better. ‘If you wish, you can keep the commandments’, Ben Sira told his hearers a century or so before the coming of the Messiah.  Jesus built on that and at the end of his sermon, Matthew tells us, ‘his teaching made a deep impression on the people because he taught them with authority’.

How much we need people who speak with authority!

16 February 2020                                Sunday 6 A

Ben Sir 15:15-20                 1 Cor. 2:6-10                        Matt 5:17-37  

    

YOUR LIGHT WILL SHINE

YOUR LIGHT WILL SHINE

The number of baptisms, ordinations and religious professions is growing in Africa but this is one sign only of the growth of the People of God.  We also look for a growth in the commitment of lay people to take their faith into the market place, the social field and the political arena. And, thirdly, we look to see what influence the Christian people are having in the world where so many have no explicit religious beliefs but they are searching for ways of being true to what they find deep within them.

A report in The Tablet this week describes how young people in Europe prefer to join small business enterprises rather than big companies. They believe that smaller companies have a sharper social sense and are more responsive to vital issues like global warming. The Tablet article traces this social consciousness in part back to a conference called by Pope Francis at the Vatican some years ago.  And there is reason to believe the pope’s letter on climate change, Laudato Si, has had considerable effect in feeding into the world’s focus on the climate crisis itself.

When Isaiah called on people to have a social conscience 2,500 years ago he said nothing explicit about keeping the Jewish law. And when Jesus took up his words and told his followers, ‘you are the light of the world’, he did not say you must be baptised in order to shine. Despite the undoubted growth of the Church in numbers in Africa, if this is not combined with an engagement in the struggles of people, which make the whole of society take notice, it will be no more than statistics – a numbers game.

Recently we remembered – 75 years ago - the discovery of the awful state of the survivors of the death camps the Nazis ran during World War Two. As the allies closed in on occupied Poland and Germany they were numbed by what they saw. One of the Jewish victims, rounded up for extermination, was a young Dutch woman called Etty Hillesum. Etty was a deeply reflective person and, instead of hiding in fear as the Nazi police closed in on her, she went about the streets trying to help people cope with the situation right up to the time of her arrest. When eventually they were herded into railway trucks for transportation to the death camps she threw a post card out the window on which she had written, ‘We left the station singing!’

Etty’s light has never ceased shining. But it is important to note she never closed her eyes to the suffering around her. She recognised that God was present in it all. Her God was a vulnerable tender Presence and she spoke to him, ‘You cannot help us … but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last’. Human beings have made a hell on earth but God does not abandon them.  He cannot force them to change but he can ‘dwell inside us’. He is the God who is with us and anyone who struggles for justice recognises, even if implicitly, that they are not alone.

9 February 2020          Sunday 5 A

Isaiah 58:7-10              I Cor 2:1-5                   Matt 5:13-16