CELEBRATING JEAN VANIER
Many
tributes have been paid to Jean Vanier, the founder of the l’Arche communities
for people living with intellectual disabilities, over the past few days since
his death early on Tuesday morning (7 May). Jean came to visit us in Zimbabwe four
times. The first was in 1982 after I had
written to him to say I had discovered l’Arche in Canada and a few of us wanted
to start a community in Zimbabwe. We had two large gatherings and he told us what
he had discovered from sharing his life with people living with disabilities.
He came back in 1988 to lead a retreat at Silveira House and again in 1997 by
which time we were ready to start our community of l’Arche in Harare and he
formally opened it. It happened to be a day
when there were violent riots in town and the Canadian ambassador had her car
stoned on the way to Waterfalls. But we
put politics aside and, with great joy, celebrated the birth of our community
with Moses, Gerald and Irene.
Five years
later he made his last visit and this time we tried to invite many people and
hired the National Sports Centre. As well as l’Arche the communities of Faith
and Light came from all over the country as well as Zambia and the Congo. But we did not succeed in attracting many
from outside our circle of friends as we were not good at publicity.
In all these
visits Jean taught us again and again what he had learnt, namely, that we are
called not only to care for people living with disabilities but to share our
life with them. In other words we are invited to become friends. He often used to say he started l’Arche (in
1964) to provide a home for Raphael and Philippe and care for them. But he soon
discovered they were teaching him. In the secure atmosphere he had created for
them they felt free, as in any family, to vent their angers and
frustrations. He was not expecting this
and it challenged him sharply; he had to face the anger and frustration and
even latent violence in his own heart. They healed him. He became the Jean Vanier we knew – not
through training he had received as an officer in the Canadian navy or through his
becoming a professor of philosophy at Toronto University – but by discovering
the gifts and beauty of people living with handicaps.
He often
told us that he did this by ‘stopping’. Instead of rushing around ‘doing things’, he
would say, we need to stop, to spend time with vulnerable people, to listen to
them (even if they do not speak) and to learn their language, that is, whatever
way they can respond. He told us he had
to learn patience. He had to slow down and put aside the ways he had learnt in
the navy and at the university. He used
to speak about a very wounded member of l’Arche, Eric, who was dumb, deaf,
blind and in other ways physically as well as intellectually handicapped. The
only way you could get a response from Eric was when you were giving him a bath
and you took time to gently and tenderly wash him. Then he would suddenly relax and all his
tension would disappear.
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.
The best way
we can honour the memory of Jean Vanier is to make his dream our dream and
build on the foundations he laid.
12 May 2019 Easter Sunday 4 C
Acts 13: 14, 43-52 Revelation 7:9, 14-17 John
10:27-30
No comments:
Post a Comment