Surprised by joy: when Jean Vanier invited two men with handicaps to share his life, it transformed the former naval officer

Surprised by joy: when Jean Vanier invited two men with handicaps to share his life, it transformed the former naval officer

16 August 2017 | by Maggie Fergusson

The Tablet Interview

The Scots have a word for those places where the veil between heaven and Earth seems almost transparent. They call them “thin” places; and there can be few “thinner” places than the village of Trosly-Breuil, less than 40 miles north of Paris, on the edge of the forest of Compiègne.
Many Tablet readers will be familiar with the story. In 1964, a tall, handsome, ex-naval officer, Jean Vanier, was invited to Trosly to visit an asylum for men with mental handicaps. “It was a horrific place,” he says, “full of screaming and violence; and yet it filled me with a sense of wonderment. I sensed in these men a great cry – ‘Do you love me?’, ‘Will you come back?’” He visited other asylums, equally dismal, and then decided to act.
“What I love about the Good Samaritan,” Vanier says, “is that he didn’t waste time weighing up the pros and cons, he just did something.” He himself was similarly bold. Having bought a tumbledown cottage in Trosly, he invited two men with handicaps – Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux – to leave their asylum and live with him. He called their home L’Arche, “the ark”.

“There was no huge idea,” he says, “no intention to change the world.” He simply wanted to ease the suffering of two men. But, as he shared his life with Raphaël and Philippe, he gradually discovered that he was being transformed by them. “God has chosen the weak and the foolish,” he says, rephrasing St Paul, “to confound those caught up in their heads.” Raphaël and Philippe were enabling him to live from his heart, to escape “the tyranny of normality”, to laugh like a child. They were, he says, “teachers of tenderness”. Others came to join him, the community grew.
 Today there are 143 L’Arche communities in 35 countries, from Zimbabwe to Palestine, Uganda to the UK. In each one, “normal” people live as assistants to people with handicaps. While Vanier is a devout Catholic, L’Arche welcomes people of all religions and none: “My feet are rooted in my faith, but my arms are wide open,” Vanier says. “What is important is not necessarily a belief in God, but a capacity to love people as they are. You can not believe in God, but still believe in relationship.”
Vanier still lives in Trosly. Now 88, he is white-haired and slightly stooped, but his mind is crystal clear. “People who are old,” he has written, “and offer themselves to God, can become lightning conductors of grace.” He did not write this as a description of himself, but it is a good one. To visit him in his little sitting room is to feel oneself in the presence of almost palpable holiness. Around him on the floor are books and correspondence; to his left, on a pinboard, pictures of men and women who have inspired him: Aung San Suu Kyi, Etty Hillesum, Sophie Scholl, Gandhi.
There is no computer, no iPad, no mobile. “We’ve become experts in communication,” Vanier says, “but we’re not so good at presence.” Undistracted by technology, he gives every visitor his full, steady attention, and you come away from seeing him with an uncanny feeling that he knows you better than you know yourself. Meetings needn’t be long. Sometimes it takes just 10 minutes’ conversation to shift some logjam of confusion or sadness.
Vanier has been listening to people’s difficulties for 53 years now. Aren’t there times, I wonder, when he feels he simply cannot absorb any more pain? “I don’t think I do absorb pain,” he says. “If you absorb pain too much you can lose something of your identity. But often when I meet people it’s a healing experience for me. I’m not a healer or a curer; all I can be is a good listener. And that seems to be the healing part for people – that somebody appreciates them.
“Most people are caught up in guilt – there’s a whole element of anger against self, broken self-image, the guilt of existence. So in listening to people you’re going through a barrier of self-disgust. My life in L’Arche has taught me that everybody is beautiful. Everybody. So to love people is to reveal to them that they are more beautiful than they dare believe.” Is anybody beyond this love? “People say, ‘How can we love terrorists?’ But most terrorists have been deeply wounded, or humiliated, living in lands where people reject their cultures. We must pray for them.”
I first came to Trosly as an assistant more than 20 years ago, and I have visited once or twice a year since then. Last month, I fulfilled a long-held wish to join a week-long retreat on the Gospel of St John, led in English by Vanier. There were 40 of us, from all over the English-speaking world, and on the first evening, tired and tetchy from London, I found myself making harsh, involuntary judgements about my fellow retreatants. This man seemed pleased with himself; that woman talked too much. Then, as the week unfolded – two talks a day from Vanier, plenty of rest, hours of silence – I began to see them in a new light.
“Most men live lives of quiet desperation,” Henry Thoreau wrote. But I wonder whether it’s truer to say that most men, most people, live lives of quiet heroism. Almost everyone on the retreat – from the woman abused as a child, to the man bringing up twin teenage boys with Down’s syndrome and ADHD – told a story of extraordinary courage. And all of us felt, as the week went on, a great letting-down of barriers and lightening of the spirit. How, I asked Vanier, could we hang on to this back in the “real” world?
“We all have a need, very fundamental, to prove that we are someone. But gradually we have to let the ego descend and the spirit rise up. It’s a long road. Buddha says that the man who conquers 1 million men in battle is less of a conqueror than the man who conquers his ego. And we need, through prayer, to be attentive to the ‘little voice’ that Newman speaks about – the voice with which God speaks to every human heart. Can we hear the voice, or are we too busy – addicted to doing things? We need to be disciplined.”
Vanier grew up with an extraordinary model of discipline. His father, Georges Vanier, who was Governor General of Canada – and whom Lord Mountbatten described as “the greatest Canadian of his time” – set aside half an hour each day for silent prayer, and attended daily Mass. And Jean himself, for all his gentleness and good humour, is formidably tidy with his time. In all the years I’ve known him, he’s never once been late for a meeting. During the retreat, he arrived a little early for each talk, and at the end of every day, after darkness had fallen, he slipped into the small candlelit chapel next to his house to end his day in front of the Blessed Sacrament.
But prayer is best twinned with action. As we settled into our retreat, Jean invited us gently to reflect on three questions: Where are the poor in my life? Who are the poor to me? And how am I a consoler for the weak and the suffering? Each one of us, he urged, can make a difference – “even if only in the way we look at people. When you pass someone begging in the street, for example, it’s not a question of ‘Do you give him euros?’ so much as ‘Do you really look at him as a human being?’ When you begin to let people who are ‘no good’ into your life, you are transformed.”
By opening ourselves to others’ pain, Jean suggested, we would be drawn into the mystery that suffering and joy are symbiotic. “Visitors are often surprised at the joy they sense in L’Arche,” he has written. “It surprises me too because I know how much suffering some people in our communities are carrying. I wonder then if all joy doesn’t somehow spring from suffering and sacrifice.”
 None of us on the retreat was conventionally poor. But there are regular retreats in Trosly for which Jean welcomes 40-odd homeless people from Paris, and – most moving of all, according to Rick Hatem, one of the assistants – retreats for gay couples. I wonder whether Jean’s thinking about homosexuality has altered over the years. Not on laws, he answers, but on individuals. “I’ve listened to people, deeply wonderful people, and to hear them talking of their pain: rejected by the family, laughed at at school! I went into a prison recently where there were a lot of tough guys – you can imagine – and then one guy whom you saw immediately was fragile and closer to the feminine. And you just know what he has suffered … So what we can do is to listen to people, and hear what they’ve lived, and then begin to understand. And not to judge. Never judge.”
Jean will turn 90 next year. He reckons he’s “OK ’til I’m 94/95”. Though the day must come when he can no longer visit prisons or give retreats, he is not afraid of it: “I know that every loss brings a gain.” But what about old people who do not share his equanimity? During the retreat, the BBC carried a news item about a man with motor neurone disease, Noel Conway, challenging the UK ban on assisted dying. What would Jean say to people in great pain who want help in ending their lives? “I don’t know what I’d say. But perhaps somewhere they haven’t really been helped. All I know is that in my experience in L’Arche – and I can only talk from experience – people who are terribly depressed and in great pain are transformed when they know they are really loved.”
And what about people – like my mother, who died in April – who grow frightened towards the end? What happens to us when we die? Jean is wonderfully clear. “When you die, you fall asleep. And you wake up, and there’s a very gentle peace. You feel well. And then you discover the face of God coming through that ‘wellness’. Of course, we are outside time, so it’s not sequential. Seeing Jesus’ face, we suddenly have a feeling of having hurt him – we realise we could have done much better, we’ve done wrong. We are not being judged, we judge ourselves. But then comes the realisation that we are loved just as we are, in our darkness. So there’s a meeting with God, who loves us in our poverty – and this we can hardly believe. That meeting brings an immense desire to be closer. That desire becomes a place of desire – I think of Purgatory as “the place of desire” – and it’s painful. When you have desire and not the object of desire, it’s very painful. But then the desire augments, and consequently the pain augments, until there is a moment of explosion, and then we’re in communion with God.”
And hell?
“I can’t speak about hell, but wasn’t it John Paul II who said that, even if hell exists, it may be empty?”
The retreat flashed by. Over the final lunch, we chatted about the wisdom and insights we hoped to carry home. Looking across the room at Jean, listening and laughing, I thought of something he had said earlier in the week: “When we die, it’s not a question of what we’ve done, but of how we’ve loved.”
Maggie Fergusson is the literary director of the Royal Society of Literature.