The Valley Catholic June 11, 2019 | Page 15
tvc.dsj.org | June 11, 2019
COMMENTARY
15
Jean Vanier (1928-2019)
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Theologian, teacher, award-winning
author, and President of the Oblate
School of Theology in San Antonio, TX
Our differences are not a threat but a treasure.
Jean Vanier, the Founder of L’Arche, who died in
Paris on May 7 th wrote those words, but their truth
is far from self-evident. One might question whether
those words are simply a nice-sounding poetics or
whether they contain an actual truth. Our differences,
in fact, are often a threat.
Moreover, it’s one thing to mouth those words;
it’s quite another thing to have the moral authority
to speak them. Few have that authority. Jean Vanier
did. His whole life and work testify to the fact that
our differences can indeed be a treasure and can, in
the end, be that precise element of community that
serves up for us the particular grace we need.
Vanier saw differences, whether of faith, religion,
culture, language, gender, ideology, or genetic endow-
ment, as graces to enrich a community rather than as
threats to its unity. And while Vanier gave witness
to this in all aspects of his life, he was of course best
known for how he appropriated that apposite among
the differences that have, seemingly since forever,
separated people with intellectual disabilities from
the rest of the community, isolating them, assigning
them second-class status, and depriving the rest of
us of the unique grace they bring. Someone once
described Vanier as initiating a new Copernican
revolution in that, prior to him, we used to think of
our service to the poor one-sidedly, we give to them.
Now that we recognize our former arrogance and
naiveté, the poor bring a great service to us.
One of the persons who gave a powerful personal
testimony to that was Henri Nouwen, the renowned
spiritual writer. Tenured at both Yale and Harvard, an
immensely respected speaker, and a man loved and
adulated by a large public, Nouwen, nursing his own
disabilities, was for most of his life unable to health-
ily absorb very much from that immense amount of
love that was being bestowed on him and remained
deeply insecure within himself, unsure he was loved,
until he went to live in one of Vanier’s communities.
There, living with men and women who were com-
pletely unaware of his achievements and his fame
and who offered him no adulation, he began for the
first time in his life to finally sense his own worth
and to feel himself as loved. That great grace came
from living with those who were different. We have
Jean Vanier to thank for teaching that to the rest of
us as well.
I first heard Vanier speak when I was a twenty-two
year-old seminarian. For many of my colleagues, he
was a spiritual rock-star, but that idolization was a
negative for me. I went to hear him with a certain
bias: Nobody can be that good! But he was!
Admittedly that’s ambiguous. Talent and charisma
can seduce us towards selfishness just as easily as
invite us towards nobility of soul. Someone can be a
powerful speaker without that charisma witnessing
at all to that person’s human and moral integrity and
without that seductiveness inviting anyone to what’s
more-noble inside him or her. But Vanier’s person,
message, and charisma, through all his years, suffered
from no such ambiguity. The transparency, simplicity,
Aloysius Gonzaga
c. 1568 - 1591
feast - June 21
CNS file photo
Born to a noble Italian family, Aloysius served as a page in Spain
and Italy. His father opposed a religious vocation, planning instead
a military career for his oldest son. But Aloysius joined the Jesuits in
Rome in 1585, taking his vows two years later. His health had been
compromised by kidney disease, but he served in a Jesuit hospital
opened in Rome when plague struck the city. He died of plague while
ministering to the sick. St. Robert Bellarmine, his spiritual director,
said the young Jesuit’s austere religious practices and penances were
so extreme that others should not follow them. Canonized in 1726,
Aloysius later was declared protector of young students and patron
saint of Catholic youth.
Saints
© 2014 Catholic News Service
depth, wisdom, and faith that were contained in his
person and his word beckoned us only in one direc-
tion, that is, towards to all that’s one, good, true, and
beautiful, which are the properties of God. Meeting
him made you want, like the disciples in the Gospels,
to leave your boats and nets behind and set off on a
new, more-radical road. Few persons have that power.
Perhaps the best criterion by which to judge Chris-
tian discipleship is look at who’s moving downwards,
who fits this description of Jesus: “Though he was in
the form of God, he did not deem equality with God
as something to be grasped at. Rather he emptied
himself and took the form of a slave.” Jean Vanier
was born into a world of privilege, blessed with ex-
ceptional parents, a gifted intelligence, a handsome
body, enviable educational opportunities, financial
security, and a famous name. Those are a lot of gifts
for a person to carry and that kind of privilege has
more often ruined a life than blessed it. For Jean
Vanier, however, these gifts were never something
to be grasped at. He emptied himself by immersing
himself into the lives of the poor, letting his gifts bless
them, even as he received a rich blessing in return. He
modeled a true discipleship of Jesus, namely, stepping
downward into a second-baptism, immersion into
the poor, where community and joy are found. And
to this he invited us.
In her poem, The Leaf and the Cloud, Mary Oliver
wrote: “I will sing for the broken doors of the poor,
and for the sorrow of the rich, who are mistaken and
lonely.” Jean Vanier, through all the years of his life,
stepped through the broken doors of the poor and
found community and joy there. For him, our dif-
ferences were not a threat but a treasure.