What Jean Vanier Taught Me
20 May, 2019 // in The Coffeehouse Cleric // by Alex Rowe
Jean Vanier’s influence upon my life has been both great and accidental. His recent death has been covered by news media worldwide. I first heard of Jean Vanier not as the founder of L’Arche, an international movement of communities that welcome people with disabilities, but as the man whose friendship with Henri Nouwen helped the latter work through deep existential trauma.
Nouwen was, by the standards of society, a successful man. Though from Holland, his academic career as a professor took him to Notre Dame, Harvard, and Yale, some of the most prestigious universities in the world. But it wasn’t enough to make him happy. He was a priest too, but though he taught and counselled many, he found himself caught in a frantic world, a world which taught him to strive for success to the detriment of his soul, and which left him groping for true love and acceptance. He grew to feel far from God.
Nouwen met Jean Vanier in the 1980s at a crucial juncture in his life, on the cusp of burn-out and thick in depression. Vanier invited Nouwen to spend a year writing in the original L’Arche community in Trosly-Breuil, France. The community had existed for some twenty years by this point, and other new communities were being founded all around the world. Nouwen’s year with L’Arche was so transformational that once it had passed, in 1986, he accepted an invitation to become a carer, and later pastor, of the Daybreak community in Richmond Hill, north of Toronto, Canada.
It was when the professor became a carer that he learnt to understand our common human condition in new ways, and to experience the love God has for each and every person regardless of their ability or utility, including for himself. Many members of the community with intellectual disabilities couldn’t appreciate Nouwen’s fine mind. The professor felt anxious, but then relieved, that they accepted him and welcomed him into their community without any regard for his credentials. Before he died in 1996, Nouwen’s decade with L’Arche blessed the world with some of the twentieth century’s best writing on Christian spirituality.
During my year abroad in Canada (2016–17), I spent time with the L’Arche community in Hamilton, Ontario, not far from Daybreak. There, I encountered firsthand that which Nouwen described. There, also, I experienced the influence of Jean Vanier, the Frenchman so moved by a conviction of the love of God and the dignity of all human life that he began a worldwide community simply by inviting two men with disabilities to live with him.
Living in a city like Oxford, the meritocracy of our society impresses upon me especially heavily. It is hard not to compare myself to others. It’s difficult not to measure myself by my performance on any given day or week. But when that temptation comes, I hold on to the lesson of Nouwen, L’Arche, and Vanier. I’d encourage you to do the same. Look at your life and consider, how much is your self-worth and identity is bound up in the “stuff” of success? There’s nothing wrong with success, but can it sustain your soul?
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