09 May 2019, The Tablet

Jean Vanier: ‘Everybody is beautiful. Everybody’

by Maggie Fergusson

---

Jean Vanier Tribute

Jean Vanier on a visit to a L’Arche community
Photo:

The founder of the worldwide L’Arche community was a man of action fuelled by contemplation. Profoundly humble, he was for many nothing less than a living saint
Jean Vanier was a spiritual giant. Those who lived and worked with him spoke of his almost palpable holiness; many considered him a living saint. He was unmoved by such accolades. Profoundly humble, what he longed for was to help people to know and live with Jesus – whom he spoke of as one might of a close friend – and to do so through encounters with the poorest and weakest in society, in particular those with mental disabilities.

Vanier’s great life’s work began in the summer of 1964, when he was 35 – an immensely tall, handsome, ex-naval officer. Without any clear idea of where it might lead, he invited two men with mental disabilities, Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux, to leave the miserable asylum where they had spent most of their adult lives, and to make a home in a tumbledown stone cottage in the village of Trosly-Breuil, north-east of Paris. The cottage had no lavatory, one tap and a wood-burning stove, and he called it L’Arche – the Ark. “All I knew”, Vanier would later say, “was that what I was doing was irreversible.” He could never send Raphaël and Philippe back. He imagined the three of them might remain a small family, able to fit into his battered car for outings.

But, whereas he had set out thinking he was doing something good for Raphaël and Philippe, he quickly began to realise that he was being transformed by them. They were, he would later say, “teachers of tenderness”. They had qualities of “wonderment, spontaneity and directness” that many “normal” people lacked, and that enabled him to begin to live from his heart, with joy, free from the “tyranny of normality”.
Read it all here