Jean Vanier: A personal tribute from Ann Shearer, biographer of Thérèse Vanier.

‘Already Jean Vanier’s life, teachings and extraordinary gifts are acquiring the distant glow of myth.  Yet when I first encountered him, it was the sheer immediacy of his humanity that drew me.’

Already Jean Vanier’s life, teachings and extraordinary gifts are acquiring the distant glow of myth.   Yet when I first encountered him, it was the sheer immediacy of his humanity that drew me.

This was back in 1972 in Montreal, when we e and 1  were both speakers at an international conference about people with severe intellectual disabilities. The session was about ‘ ‘normalisation’, which here  meant that  the more people have the chance to experience  an ordinary life , from the sort of home that anyone would be glad to live in, the more others will accord them their human dignity and the more likely their  psychological and social growth. Set against the then received ‘treatment’ of warehousing in an overcrowded, understaffed and often abusive institution, this simple proposition seemed revolutionary, and we debated its implications with enthusiasm.  Then Jean Vanier uncurled his great height at the back of the room and threw us off course. He questioned the very concept of ‘normality’ for its inbuilt emphasis on achievement, and the inevitable consequent devaluing of people who failed to meet its demands.  I don’t think I was the only one to be shocked into wondering whether somehow we’d missed an essential.

Meeting Jean really did change the course of my life, and he, his family and L’Arche have been dear to me ever since. But more to the point, that first intervention seems to me to encapsulate much of the enduring core of his mission: the quick intelligence, the passionate eloquence and the unfailing advocacy of love and community as primary, in a ‘normal’ world which knows too little of either.

These were L’Arche’s heroic years, the years of adventure when health and safety regulations were barely heard of. Jean was dispatching people here and there across the world until by the mid-70s there were already nearly 40 communities in nine different countries. The energy was huge and the times were on L’Arche’s side. In Europe and North America there was a revulsion against those bleak institutions.  Young people were on the move in search of a better world and Jean tapped right into their longing to recruit the assistants for his ambitious enterprise.  But more deeply, his message had a timeless appeal. That each person is loved not for what they achieve but for who they are, that our deepest calling is to love and be loved: who could not long, however secretly, for that to be so?   And in his recognition of the people who live by their hearts not their minds as our greatest educators, he offered a means to bring it closer.  

Through all the years of public talks, books and interviews, the message remained   essentially the same: it seemed that people could never hear its promise often enough.   And Jean was golden-tongued.  I have seen him gather a crammed and restless audience in St Martins in the Fields church in London by a silence that lasted just long enough and then almost a whisper of introduction.  We were all craning to hear him, entirely focussed on this untidy figure, stooped from so many years of bending to hear what people had to say. If there was artifice in this, it was in the service of his message. And in the very intensity of that, there was perhaps the echo of an unassuaged longing of his own. By the time he was born, his emotionally delicate and exhausted mother had already had to cope with three children and his father’s many military and diplomatic postings, and for Jean’s first three years she was hardly available to him. Then came the many moves of home and continent, the tumult of war, boarding school and naval college across the world from his family - all by the age of 13. No wonder perhaps that the essential vision for L’Arche has always been of the joy of communities where love and stability are assured?

But to dwell on the pain would be to miss a lot. Jean was a real enthusiast for life, with a gift for celebration on the grand scale, whether in community events or the huge pilgrimages that took the message of L’Arche singing and dancing into the world.  He saw beauty in each person and loved to acclaim it with almost schoolboy enthusiasm; endearingly, ‘super’ remained a favourite adjective. This positive emphasis could seem a bit relentless to those of us who knew just how demanding the life of L’Arche could be.  His sister Thérèse, who combined a distinguished medical career with establishing L’Arche in the UK, only once, she said, publicly lost her temper with her little brother’s approach.  At a preliminary meeting for a Spirituality Commission, she exploded:  there would be absolutely no point in musing about the spirituality of L’Arche if there were no assistants left to live it. After 30 years of urging, finally she was heard. Thérèse never lost the physician’s careful sensitivity to the individual. By contrast, for all that countless individuals have felt so deeply touched by his attention, Jean’s focus was always the wide one.  People with disabilities, prisoners, slum-dwellers, the poor and dispossessed of the world:  whole categories of suffering were drawn into his embrace.

If there was impersonality, even a certain ruthlessness in this mission for love, there was the gift of leadership too. I’ve seen those blue eyes narrow in pursuit of a necessary strategic move. And Jean could pick a winner. How many people have discovered through him that they could go further in their human weakness than they might have thought possible when relying only on their strengths? He knew how to get what he wanted, but he also knew when to stand back and let things develop.  I remember the dismay that greeted his decision not to lead the nascent international federation of L’Arche, back in 1975. ‘Authority’, he once said, ‘knows how to mourn the death of its own projects for the other’. And so his authority grew as his formal roles in L’Arche were relinquished.

For many years, I saw little of Jean. But when about a decade ago we reconnected, he   seemed to have gentled   - still tireless in his advocacy, but less restlessly driven, more trusting in the unfolding of events, more humorous in the face of human absurdities.   I remember a walk with him through his domain of Trosly. It was like a royal progress among loyal subjects - except of course that it wasn’t like that at all.  If the young assistants were indeed a bit awed, the lengthy exchange of greetings with the people with disabilities among whom he’d grown old radiated a huge mutual delight and affection. Here and now, I thought, he really is at home.

Since Jean’s death, many people have emphasised his humility, attained over the long years and not, as he said himself, without personal struggle. He has left an enduring vision of a more just and loving world and charted its terrain. But he’s also left anyone who cares to embark for themselves the freedom and encouragement to steer their own course within it. Super.

Ann Shearer is a Jungian analyst in London and has worked with L'Arche , on and off, for many years.  She translated Jean Vanier's Community and Growth (1979) and Signs of theTimes (2013) and is the author of Thérèse Vanier: Pioneer of L'Arche,Palliative Care and Spiritual  Unity ( 2016).