THOUGHTS TO PONDER

Jean Vanier and the Civilisation of Love

I was fortunate enough to hear Jean Vanier speak at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh in March. He is the founder of the communities of L’Arche for people with learning disabilities. These are world-wide communities – small family-sized homes – where a few people with special challenges live with ‘assistants’, sharing day-to-day life together. There are two such groups in Edinburgh.

I found his talk one of the most moving I have ever heard.  I ask myself why. It wasn’t terribly emotional. On a head-level I didn’t learn anything new. Then I remembered a line from Emerson: ‘We mark with light in the memory those who told us what only we knew….’  That was the key. It was that deep sense of having been reminded of some vital truths about our human condition.  Jean Vanier spoke with the simplicity of a man of great depth and insight. He spoke about his dream of a civilisation of love.  In church we sometimes call it ‘the new creation’. ‘Dream’ will do for me.  Dreams keep us motivated, and keep our focus on the future.

Out of many, let me pick four threads which struck me as fundamental to his theme…

DIFFERENCE: Despite our declared liberal values of tolerance and acceptance, there are other less conscious, more primal aspects behind our assumptions, based on self-preservation, and the shoring up of fragile identities. The reality is that ‘birds of a feather flock together’.  We are drawn to relationship with those who are like us, who share our interests, our life-styles and our world-view. We confirm one another.

Those who are different, then, disturb out self-image. We create distance from those who are less than acceptable to us. We’ve done it with immigrants, with minority groups of all kinds. We project our own ‘shadow’ stuff onto other.

Vanier started his communities because he was appalled at the way the mentally-handicapped in France were treated. Jurgen Moltmann puts it succinctly: ‘The handicapped are not our problem. We are theirs.’ Difference is a reality; our boundaries of exclusion are constructs of our own making.

COMMON GROUND: For Vanier, the basis for the civilisation of love is the search for genuine solidarity, the deep awareness that ‘they ’are ‘us’ because of our shared humanity, our common experience of brokenness, our universal failure to become what we are, and our need for the experience of love, forgiveness and acceptance.  When we recognise this common ground, then we touch a truth with the potential to set captives free.

ACCEPTANCE: Undergirding all, for those on the Christian journey, is the grace of acceptance by the ground of our being.  In Christ we are accepted despite our brokenness. We know that the life of another belongs to the same ground to which we belong.  Acceptance provides the rationale for every movement of reconciliation.

GOOD NEWS: Vanier concluded by reminding us that Jesus in the Gospels was there present to those who were by and large on the margins of his society. He recognised violence, but he healed by love. Just as the evening began with a increasingly-inclusive dance on stage by people with learning difficulties, so it ended with an invitation to his audience to join the Lord of the Dance in helping to turn the world right-way- up at last… May it one day be so.

Mary McMahon