1
“Are You a Saint?”:
The United Church of Canada
and Jean Vanier

Tender: a small boat connecting a larger ship to the land: a connector, a liaison.

“If you don’t worship him, you don’t know him.” Read that twice. This adulation of Jean Vanier is surely one of the most astonishing statements ever published in the United Church Observer. It comes from the December 1972 issue introducing an edited version of Vanier’s address to General Council, a large national gathering of the highest “court” of decision-making in the United Church of Canada. It continues, “To know Jean Vanier himself you can read his book Eruption to Hope, or his poignant poetry in Tears of Silence. You can observe him on TV – Canada has had at least three national programs about him. Or you can meet him, as the commissioners to General Council did this summer, when he talked with them for two and a half hours.” Then, as though embarrassed by its own starry-eyed enthusiasm, it adds an amusingly down-to-earth physical description: “His shabby jacket hangs loosely, like the folds of an ill-fitting skin, on his gaunt, stooped, 6’4” frame. In his chair up front, he sits hunched, hands in his lap, staring down his great hooked nose at the floor like a meditative but amiable buzzard.” Yet this unusual introduction concludes by insisting that Vanier’s expression of saintliness is available to everyone: “in the glow of his words and his life, you forget everything except that this man is a saint, calling us to be the same.”1

1972: JEAN VANIER AT THE 25TH GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE UNITED CHURCH OF CANADA IN SASKATOON

Many years after Jean Vanier addressed the 25th General Council of the United Church in Saskatoon on 19 August 1972, no one is entirely sure why the general secretary of the United Church George Morrison invited Vanier. Sr Sue Mosteller, who was part of L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill and coordinating Vanier’s schedule, remembers that Vanier and Morrison had been in touch often, but does not recall why.2

Changes in style and hierarchy were afoot in the United Church at the time, however. United Church minister Bruce McLeod, who was elected moderator at that General Council, highlights efforts by Morrison to change the centralized nature of United Church leadership, moving from a top-down model to something “more circles than ladders.”3 George Morrison had joined the General Council office (United Church head office) around 1970, bringing what McLeod recalls as “a different style, more soft-edged. He didn’t care if he had a little room for his office without a proper desk.” A former vice-president of IBM in the US, Morrison had entered ministry later in life, winning the Gold Medal at Emmanuel College. He provided leadership for a new kind of United Church General Council meeting, seating delegates at round tables rather than in pews. And he invited Jean Vanier. “George had it in his mind that this was something we needed at this strategic time in the United Church, to have a presence like Jean with us,” says McLeod.

By the time Vanier addressed the 451 members of General Council in 1972, many United Church members were already aware of his work. Jean Vanier was known in Canada as the son of Pauline Vanier and the late Georges Vanier, one of Canada’s most beloved and respected governors general. In 1964, Jean Vanier had founded L’Arche in France, creating a new model of making home together with people with intellectual disabilities. It was a radical idea in the era before community living or group homes. The first Canadian L’Arche community was begun in Richmond Hill by Anglicans Steve and Ann Newroth in 1969, bridging the Protestant–Roman Catholic divide.4 He had been interviewed on CBC several times, beginning in 1965 while his father was still governor general. Vanier’s book exploring his father’s spiritual life, titled In Weakness, Strength, was published in 1969. His 1967 address to a parliamentary prayer breakfast shortly after his father’s death would have been attended by United Church members on Parliament Hill such as Prime Minister Lester Pearson. The text of that talk, along with an address to Major Superiors of Roman Catholic Religious Orders in 1969 and to the Empire Club of Canada in 1971, was published as Eruption to Hope in 1971. United Church members remember hearing him speak at cities across Canada when he returned from France each year to give public lectures.

There was probably another layer to Vanier’s invitation to General Council in 1972. Phyllis Airhart, United Church historian, guesses that his invitation might have been because he was French-Canadian.5 Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, the 1968 creation of the Parti Québécois, and the 1970 “October Crisis” had challenged the United Church to find ways to be a united and uniting church in Quebec. In 1971, General Council had created a special commission on French-English relations.6 Jean Vanier would have looked like an ideal choice: descended from generations of the de Salaberry and Vanier families, his Quebec credentials were impeccable. He was the son of Canada’s first French-Canadian governor general, and had served in the British and Canadian navies. He held together French and English cultures through his particular history.7

Still, it seems no one was prepared for the experience of Vanier’s address to the 25th General Council. More than forty years later, Bruce McLeod’s face lights up as he remembers that day. Clearly his first meeting with Vanier in Saskatoon is still, as he says, “very vivid.” At forty-three, he was the same age as Vanier. He was also minister of Bloor Street United Church in Toronto and the newly elected moderator of the United Church of Canada. McLeod had not expected to be elected, and was asking himself “What am I doing?” as he rushed out to buy a necktie. He was to introduce Vanier, so they sat together at lunch before Vanier’s talk. McLeod recalls that he tried to get to know Vanier, “and at the end of lunch he knew all about me and I didn’t know anything more about him than when we had begun. He drew out my whole life and held it in his hands as we had lunch together, the kindest, most beautiful – it wasn’t patronizing at all – like you’d hold a bird in your hand, he was holding me there, who had just been elected moderator.”

Perhaps no one remembers McLeod’s introduction, but everyone who was there remembers Vanier’s talk. United Church minister Beverley Milton and writer Ralph Milton had spent the previous decade in the Philippines and New York, so had no expectations or particular sense of who Vanier was. They do not remember any notable excitement in advance among the people at General Council that Vanier would be speaking. But both recall the talk itself in detail.8 As Beverley Milton describes:

What I remember was sitting in break-time in between speakers, and he’s not in sight yet, and everybody else is gossiping about what’s going on and out of the corner of my eye I saw this fellow coming down the aisle, not really dressed for the conference, and looking kind of seedy, and my God, he went up and he got on the platform and everything went absolutely quiet. He had a way of getting attention. It wasn’t what he wore – it didn’t matter what he wore! When he opened his mouth, we didn’t move, and it was at least two hours or more, and we didn’t move at all. We listened, and we became part of what he was trying to say. I think it’s his presence. Who he was, and what he was, was in his whole demeanor.

More than four decades later, Ralph Milton still sounds awed:

I’m a guy who has spent a lifetime working on communications, and how people present themselves, so I’m very aware of how people conduct themselves when they are in public. This man violated every rule I know of in terms of public speaking. First of all, he sat down, he was sitting, he did not stand. He was sitting! And he wore a suit that looked as if he had bought it at the thrift shop and it didn’t fit very well. He was not animated: his voice was quiet. He just quietly told stories about his experiences at L’Arche – stories about his interaction and the spirit that he saw in these people. I remember him talking about giving a bath to a man who had no communication whatever, he could not even move his own body, and he was giving this man a bath and it was as if he were giving a bath to the Christ. This man was Christ to him. And the way he talked about it, these stories were so real to him and so personal that there was absolutely no way you could do anything except believe that this man had been blessed – this man of huge intellect who came from a well-known family, the Vaniers – this man was giving his life to people who couldn’t give anything back it seemed, and yet were giving him everything.

Ralph Milton continues, trying to tease out what exactly happened that day: “That for me was a kind of deep, deep wisdom that I would really covet and really wished I could somehow have. As Bev said, he held that audience totally – you could have heard a pin drop – just by the strength and the power of his spirit there. You could evaluate it: he did everything wrong, and yet it was totally right.” As Ralph and Bev Milton recount their initial impressions of Vanier, one sees that a strong part of the attraction was in how he surprised and even overturned initial expectations: his shabby attire yet commanding presence, his seated delivery yet riveting stories, his quiet voice yet the strength of his spirit, his huge intellect given to people with intellectual disabilities. That everything was “wrong yet totally right” was paradoxically fundamental to Vanier’s allure.

A key argument of this book is that experiences of inversion, where expectations are overturned, can be simultaneously upsetting and exciting, challenging and inspiring. To grasp the implications of this, we need first to understand how high/low hierarchies pervade our social perceptions. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, literary theorists Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue that western cultures are structured by largely unexamined hierarchies of value in four areas: “The high/low opposition in each of our four symbolic domains – psychic forms, the human body, geographical space and social order – is a fundamental basis to mechanisms of ordering and sense-making in European cultures.”9 We can find this dynamic at work in all four “symbolic domains” in the Miltons’ accounts of Vanier’s talk. At the “high” end, Vanier’s academic intellect and spiritual insights (psychic form) at the important 25th General Council (geographical space) contrast with his “low” unassuming demeanor (human body) and his life with marginalized people (social order). This kind of inversion is part of the core appeal of the gospels. It underlies Vanier’s vision for community and society and has gripped the imaginations of people in the United Church, especially those with direct experience in L’Arche.

By all accounts, Jean Vanier blew into the lives of the United Church leadership like the wind of the spirit, and the love was mutual. In a public letter to his friends and communities, dated 25 August 1972, Vanier called the encounter “one of the most moving that I have ever experienced”:

I departed [from Cleveland] Saturday and when I arrived in Saskatoon, I had a meal with the “moderator” and a few other people from the United Church. They welcomed me with such goodness and openness. I spoke with the United Church assembly for an hour and a quarter and then there were questions. I spoke about the poor and wounded people in Cleveland, about people who close themselves off from misery, and about Jesus who comes to heal us and free us from our egoisms. Their attentive listening was such a strong sign of grace and of their thirst for the Holy Spirit. At the end the “moderator” asked me to say the prayer. All held hands as we prayed together. There was great peace and silence at this very moving moment. I felt so poor and little before their thirst and their cry to be instruments of the Holy Spirit. I wanted no more than to disappear to let Jesus appear. I had such a desire for unity; maybe Jesus will arrange that my next retreat include Anglicans, Catholics and members of the United Church. It would be beautiful if we could begin to pray together to beg the Holy Spirit to come and unite us all. This encounter is perhaps one of the most moving that I have ever experienced. We must pray even more for unity.10

What touched Vanier so profoundly? He identifies the openness, “thirst,” and “cry” of participants to be instruments of the Holy Spirit, as well as the entire orientation of the United Church toward unity.

What did Vanier say in his talk? He states in his letter that he spoke about how Jesus comes to “free us from our egoisms.” The excerpts in the December 1972 United Church Observer show that he invited the United Church General Council delegates to recognize that “wounded people live in insecurity,” then to shift from their heads into their hearts through a series of movements from high to low: “No wonder that those who live in insecurity turn to God. No wonder Paul says, ‘God has chosen the weak to confound the strong; God has chosen the foolish to confound the wise; God has chosen the despised to confound those who think they are favoured’ … and also to tell those outside prisons that they too are in a prison, a prison of culture, a prison of a priori’s and prejudices, a prison of fear which stops us meeting wounded people, because we’re frightened.”11 Vanier reverses assumptions about social connections: “Sometimes people say, ‘I’ll never go back to India because you see people dying in the streets.’ Even if it were true, why aren’t they saying, ‘Because there are people dying in the streets, I must go there’?”12

He delightedly upends assumptions about authority: “The other day, I heard from a group of specialized educators for the mentally retarded. They said, ‘Can we come and visit you? We’re very interested in the sexual problems of the handicapped.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s good, because we’re very interested here in the sexual problems of educators; so we can have a nice sharing session.’”13 Even in humour, his point is clear: “To specialize in people can be a flight from listening to people.”14 Vanier reframes the request from the specialized educators for access to intimate details of the lives of his community members.15 I don’t want Vanier’s story to be misunderstood: he cultivated close and trusting relationships with the many professionals who supported the community, and by 1972 many L’Arche communities were already engaged actively in policy development.16 He is not rejecting professional interest or expertise. Rather, he is offering an amused and unexpected suggestion of mutuality that reveals some of the unnamed power dynamics and assumptions. He reiterates his underlying point: “Don’t look at the file first, look at the person! Listen, listen, listen!”17

An essential aspect of this way of relating is the unexpected reversal of expected roles and status. To Vanier, this kind of reversal is foundational in the Christian tradition and key to understanding Jesus: “But Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies. Bless those that hate you.’ This Jesus is a madman – he is continually telling us to do the impossible … To become these carriers of peace – this is the message, the very simple message of Jesus. Frequently we complicate it. But he is a strange man, this Jesus who kneels and washes the feet of the twelve. He does these follies because he loves.”18

Vanier directly addresses the question of economic and class privilege, gently encouraging people to pay attention to their hearts and to take small steps: “it’s not so important to share one’s goods. We know full well we can give all we have to the poor, and still not have charity. What is important is to share your eyes, your hands, your tenderness. Look at people, and say ‘I love you.’ Look at the handicapped and the prisoners. Once you’ve met them and love has grown between you, then you can start dispossessing. You don’t dispossess before love.”19 The first questions, he implies, are not about denying or getting rid of a privileged social position, but looking for ways to use that privilege in the service of others: “It isn’t a problem of whether you keep this house, or this car; it’s whom you take in this car, and how you use it! Whom do you bring into your home? It’s not whether it’s this refrigerator or that, but what you do with the food inside it. Frequently we ask ourselves the wrong questions.”20 In other words, the important questions are not theoretical but rather choices made in response to relationships. Once mutual relationships begin, then something new and unexpected can happen. Many people bought and copied the tape of Vanier’s talk, but none can be found now because, they say, they wore out the cassette tape listening to it so often.21 His insights moved his specific United Church audience, hungry as they were to live the call of God in society.22

The significance of Vanier’s talk to the United Church General Council expands when it is read in the context of his activities in August 1972. Vanier arrived in Saskatoon after an intense time of speaking and leading retreats. In an 11 August letter from Quebec at the end of a retreat he admits, “In some ways it was quite a heavy week.”23 Sleeping in an old prison with homeless youth, Vanier had caught a cold. He led a retreat over several days for around 700 people. He visited a psychiatric hospital, then a hostel where men without work lived, often after being released from prison. But Vanier doesn’t describe that evening as bleak: “It was a good evening. We sang, danced and played games. I spoke to them about Jesus the poor one, and about some of my experiences in the prisons. I told them about the men I had met who had been deeply wounded by hardships.”24 From Vanier’s perspective, singing, dancing, and playing games together are not separate from deep hurt, but rather grow out of the painful realities of life.

He continued on to Cleveland for a week-long event titled “Let’s Celebrate Jesus.” In a letter on 17 August, Vanier describes the leaders from seven “disadvantaged neighbourhoods” where “happenings” would take place throughout the week. The leadership group included “fifty people, some infirm, some elderly, a few priests, religious and black pastors. What united us all was our desire to announce and celebrate the name of Jesus.”25 As part of the event, Vanier visited several local prisons as well as homes for elderly people. He preached on the streets: “It was the first time that I had the joy of speaking outside in front of a crowd of people passing in the street … to people who are very little and very wounded, who do not even dare to enter a church.”26 When Vanier met with smaller groups, they would “share and pray together. It was good to share our weaknesses and our hope in Jesus.”27 In the evenings, large “Let’s Celebrate Jesus” festivals attended by up to a thousand people were held in the local parks of poor areas. One began with a street procession of people from ten different churches. Another was especially dramatic: while Vanier was speaking, there was a nearby car accident as a thunderstorm began. Vanier recalls, “One of the priests went to administer the sacrament of the sick. There was lightning followed by ambulance and fire engine sirens.”28 That evening ended with one of the attending police officers joining in the singing, praying, and dancing. At one of the last festivals, Vanier recounts with interest, “Many had drunk too much. One of them got up on the stage and spoke of his sufferings and he ended with, ‘but I love God.’ The parish priest said it was the first time that he saw in that neighbourhood of crime and drugs, a celebration for Jesus, the announcing of the Good News. It was a week of cooperation between men and women of different churches who wanted to say ‘thank you’ to Jesus. Often the pastors were little people, with small congregations in poverty-stricken neighbourhoods.”29 From there, Vanier flew directly to Saskatoon, where he ate lunch with Bruce McLeod and addressed the 25th General Council.

It might help to think of Vanier as a tender, the small boat that connects a larger boat, such as an Ark, to the land and to other vessels. Through his talks, the privileged and respected son of Canada’s most beloved governor general connected the United Church not only to L’Arche, but also to people marginalized by poverty, disability, racial discrimination, violence, and imprisonment, as well as linking to French culture, the Roman Catholic Church, evangelical Christians of all denominations, the charismatic movement, and the Jesus people who delighted him in Cleveland and elsewhere.30 Vanier suggests that bridging social divides is not easy: “It is so difficult to bridge the gap. For myself, it is difficult. All my needs of security, all the values of my society, all my education – and then I discover that maybe the spirit of God is very different from the culture of our time.”31 Furthermore, Vanier asserts that bridging takes time: “It’s a slow process … becoming a bridge between these two cultures of those who have too much and those who have too little.”32

Ralph Milton muses that Vanier’s talk at General Council “certainly made a difference to me in the way I relate to people who have a handicap of some sort – or relate to anybody else, a recognition of my own handicaps, and recognizing that everybody has their own handicap, and there is a Christ in everyone that you meet.” This theme will run throughout all that follows: the deepest gift of L’Arche for the United Church is not a set of ideas, practical tips, or philosophical insights, but that L’Arche models a surprising way of being, inverting assumptions even about who is handicapped and where Jesus is embodied. For Vanier, these are not just ideas or tendencies, but experiences grounded in relationships. Perhaps these encounters are memorable because, in the imagery that Vanier uses in his letter, they offer a way of both awakening a thirst and responding to a cry.

United Church Observer editor A.C. Forrest sounds elated reporting on the 1972 General Council, noting that he attended every General Council since 1948 but “This was the best!”33 He highlights “the long Sunday afternoon with Jean Vanier.”34 Forrest then describes a series of inversions, noting the full participation of delegates previously lower in status such as women, youth, and newcomers: “There were difficult years of Women’s Lib. This year the women, comprising about a third of the commissioners, seemed to take their place just like other liberated people without struggle, or without tokenism. Four-fifths of the Council was new. Youngsters who ten years ago would never have been considered were there as commissioners with their long hair, guitars and numerous speeches at the microphone.”35 Not only did those in previously low positions rise up, but the high-level commissioners lay low: “I have never been at a Council where so many able men said so little and listened so much.”36 The new moderator overturned previous convention by presiding “in his shirt sleeves instead of the heavy moderatorial robes. He avoided having everybody stand up for him by sneaking in early and starting the sessions by playing the piano for a few songs.”37 McLeod invited the four hundred commissioners not to sit passively but all to come forward and converge at the front to hold hands at communion. A shortage of bread turned into an abundance for all. Forrest notes that the Roman Catholic observers pointed out that “the 25th General Council ‘was a family at work and prayer.’”38 Forrest and the Observer’s enthusiastic summaries of General Council suggests that one of the reasons that the United Church appreciated Jean Vanier’s inversions was because they paralleled the United Church’s own similar inversions that were bringing new life and vision, and not just in Saskatoon. Forrest sees the exciting Council meetings as “a sign of the new direction already taken” by United Church congregations across Canada.39 Remarkably, the Observer describes the new Moderator embodying a literal inversion by “standing on his head in yoga class” and then asks, “Standing on his head? Well, you get a different view of things that way. If McLeod as Moderator stands the United Church on its head a few times in the next two years, it will be a salutary shaking up.”40

Mark A. Noll has suggested that in Canada, the changes brought about by modernity “have worked through the communal, top-down structures of traditional Canadian religion.”41 Because the United Church was still fairly hierarchical in the way that Noll points out, the leadership of Bruce McLeod and other key national leaders impacted every level of the church. McLeod thinks that the many connections with Vanier through the early 1970s changed him, and thus changed the United Church, stating, “I think the influence [of Vanier] on the United Church has been osmosis, not a formal influence. Maybe it is just in my life, but I have been very affected by Jean Vanier.” For example, McLeod believes that one area where Vanier’s theology influenced the United Church was in his language of “wounded people, and we’re all wounded and there are some people whose wounds are more visible than others. But we’re all wounded people, and all have gifts, and need to be respected.” This seeped into United Church ethos. McLeod reflects, “I think it’s beautiful. It’s not just the United Church, but churches in general are perhaps more open to diversity in many ways today, including people who are visibly wounded – they are welcome and celebrated as part of the family circle, no surprise anymore as it was at one time.”

1967: THE NEW CURRICULUM

By the 1972 General Council, tens of thousands of United Church youth might have read about Jean Vanier in their church school book, part of the “New Curriculum” Christian education program.42 A variety of United Church authors wrote books for all age groups, and by the mid-1960s the newly printed hardcover books were being purchased by tens of thousands of families across Canada. The first edition of Frank H. Morgan’s Intermediate Student Reading Book God Speaks Through People was published in 1964 with a run of 50,000 copies. Chapter 12 of the original version was titled, “It Happens Today: The Story of Two Modern Christians,” and included short biographies of the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, and Dr Mary Verghese, who were both alive at the time the book was published. By the third printing of 42,000 copies in 1967, chapter 12 had been replaced with “Fox Hole Christian: The Story of Robert McClure” followed by chapter 13: “The Ark: The Story of Jean Vanier.”43

The chapter about Vanier begins by inviting its twelve- to fourteen-year-old readers to “pretend that you are a newspaper reporter” and consider how would they interview someone like Jean Vanier.44 A short biography of Vanier follows, then this description: “You will notice that he speaks with a musical, liquid French accent. There is much laughter in his voice.”45 The questions posed to Vanier in God Speaks through People are initially unexpected and even jarring. For example, the interviewer inquires: “A friend of mine had a brother who was a mongoloid, and he told lies all the time. How can you run a house full of them if they don’t tell the truth?”46 You can hear the “laughter in his voice” in Vanier’s response to the question about whether “mongoloids” lie: “Oh, that is funny! Mongoloid children tell stories and lies all the time. We normal ones are on the wrong wavelength. We are too serious. The mongoloid plays a game. He never tells the truth. But if he likes you he lets you into the game and tells lies to you. You only play games like these with people you love.”47

As in his talk to General Council, Vanier upends expectations here. He does not rebuke the interviewer for an insensitive question or correct his generalization of “mongoloids.” Rather, he counters by generalizing normal people, claiming that “we” are too serious, and thus “on the wrong wavelength.” Vanier had already implied this earlier in the interview:48

Q. Don’t you get depressed, working with these mentally retarded boys all the time?

A. No, I get more depressed working with normal people.

Q. Why?

A. Normal people are so serious, but with my boys it is Marx Brothers sort of stuff all the time.49

There are several things to notice here. Vanier begins the interview by acknowledging the suffering often inflicted on people with intellectual disabilities. He describes the dehumanizing asylums in which many “mentally retarded” people are forced to live. He insists that “just maintaining people alive and putting them in long dormitories without love and affection is not progress.”50 But now he emphasizes fun, delighting in the entertaining quality of their shared lives together. Decades before disability rights advocates began writing about the tyranny of the normal, but perhaps in line with 1960s counter-cultural challenges to normal, Vanier confides that he prefers life with people who have been marginalized because it is surprising, unexpected, more fun, less “serious.”

Literary scholar Allon White writes, “The social reproduction of seriousness is a fundamental – perhaps the fundamental – hegemonic manoeuvre. Once the high language has attained the commanding position of being able to specify what is and is not to be taken seriously, its control over the language of its society is virtually assured. Bakhtin calls this manoeuvre ‘the lie of pathos,’ which designates the insidious identification of ‘important matters’ with an idealism centred upon tragedy.”51 The interviewer assumes that Vanier’s life with people with intellectual disabilities must be depressing, engaged with the tragedy of pathetic lives. Vanier refuses those underlying assumptions. In doing so, he also redefines what is to be taken seriously. He takes seriously the people he lives with, but that does not mean that their lives together are grim. White shows that important topics are conflated with the serious in contrast to the pleasurable: “There is an ambiguity at the heart of seriousness which all high language takes advantage of: the serious is at once that which excludes pleasurable laughter and that which is felt to be important. In fact of course there is no intrinsic link at all between these two things. Many solemn occasions and activities are utterly trivial, just as many ‘laughable’ incidents are important.”52 Vanier cheerfully subverts the serious question of the interviewer, offering an alternative glimpse of social relationships full of hilarity, like the Marx Brothers. His answer is simultaneously amusing and important.

In critiquing the social norm of seriousness, Vanier neither ignores nor minimizes the emotional pain of the men in his community. He continues the interview by commending the straightforward emotional communication of his “boys”:

A. There is even something nice about the way they get angry.

Q. Is there anything nice about getting angry?

A. My boys get angry in a nice sort of way. When they get angry they just break a window and it’s over and done with. When normal people get angry they don’t break windows; they tell stories about you and break down your reputation. When my boys get angry, they go ‘BANG!’ and it’s all over with.53

The astonished interviewer asks, “Is there anything nice about getting angry?”54 Vanier’s answer suggests that he listens for the communication in the act of violently breaking a window. He allows for anger as he allows for “lying,” as ways of communicating.

One can feel in the interviewer a discomfort bordering on repulsion, and at the same time, an attraction: “Don’t you get depressed, working with these mentally retarded boys all the time?” and “Is there anything nice about getting angry?” Such simultaneous uneasiness yet curiosity about people who are designated as socially “low” is a contradiction inherent in the high/low structuring that Stallybrass and White delineate. They note how “The primary site of contradiction, the site of conflicting desires and mutually incompatible representation, is undoubtedly the ‘low.’ Again and again we find a striking ambivalence to the representations of the lower strata (of the body, of literature, of society, of place) in which they are both reviled and desired. Repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the debasing ‘low’ conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with a desire for this Other.”55 Does the interviewer unconsciously long to lie and spontaneously break a window? Or at least identify with the book’s adolescent readers, who might secretly wish they were free to express themselves in these ways? Part of what Vanier teases at by allowing that, yes, his boys do lie often and even break windows in anger is that they have a kind of freedom from social norms of behaviour, and from the serious self-regulation of so-called normal people who can hardly bear even to think of such actions.

In response to the question, “Did your religion have anything to do with your founding of this modern ark?” Vanier replies, “Most certainly,” then tries to communicate his yearning to “understand” the mystery of Christianity through becoming “lowly.” He ponders, “Christianity is a mystery, you cannot understand it all. To fathom the mystery of Christianity you must become poor in spirit. You must become lowly and humble. How can Christ live in us if we are too attached to owning things? I thought a place like the Ark would help me understand. Yes, my religion had a lot to do with it.”56 As in his address to General Council several years later, Vanier looks to embody Jesus by a choice to live with and align himself with the socially low.

Throughout the interview in God Speaks through People, which is aimed at intermediate youth, Vanier tries to bring abstract or overly general high-level questions back to the reality of his particular life and relationships with specific people. He describes individuals, how they spend their days, and what they most enjoy. He responds to the interviewer’s more general questions with encouragement to see each person as real and significant:

Q. But if they never tell the truth, if they act like the Marx Brothers all the time, how can you help them?

A. First, you must treat these boys as real people … You must discover their needs, and this is true not only of the mentally retarded, it is true of all people in trouble.57

Vanier insists earlier in the interview, “We must give of ourselves, even a smile, simply because beggars, or my ‘boys,’ are children of God.”58 He concludes, “The important thing is to try to put ourselves in their place and ask, what do they want?”59 Interestingly, that is probably why the interviewer asks such awkward questions: to think like a twelve- to fourteen-year-old with very limited experience of people with intellectual disabilities. The interviewer comments, “Don’t you find it hard to look at a mongoloid child and not stare at him? I find it hard to be natural with one of them.”60 And later, “I never got to know one. I just feel uncomfortable when I am with one.”61 Vanier consistently asserted both the marginalized position of his community and his own pleasure in his companions. In a 1969 lecture to the Vanier Institute of the Family at the University of Montreal, for example, Vanier identified himself as one who “has the joy of living in a milieu a little outside of society, in contact with those who are called ‘marginal people.’”62

“IF YOU’RE NOT THERE, YOU’RE MISSED”

Vanier’s place in the United Church’s New Curriculum was noted by United Church member Peter Flemington in “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed,” his 1967 film interview with Vanier in Trosly-Breuil. Perhaps this is the first time in English that Vanier is recorded responding to the question of whether he is a saint. He laughs, then gives a serious answer:

PF: [narrative voiceover] I mentioned jokingly that Canada’s largest Protestant denomination now featured his life story as part of its church school curriculum. Did that make him feel like a kind of latter-day saint?

JV [laughs]: Yeah, well, sanctity is shown after, eh? And there’s a word in the gospels, ‘Méfiez-vous – Beware you who are considered prophets in your own time’ – I forget, I have it in French not in English – the idea being that the ones who are considered prophets and saints during their life, those are not normally the ones that are the real saints. You’ll find that the real saints here are not the ones who are directing the house, but it’s some of the boys. I’m here because I’m happy here, and because I like it. The boys are happy also. But I find that the boys, in their capacity to what they have, make more efforts to goodness than the majority of the assistants and maybe all the assistants. And sanctity is always a question of correlation to capacity and realization. You have so much capacity matching so much realization – well, this is perfection.63

Vanier insists that all human beings are called to goodness, to the “saintliness” of living up to each one’s capacities, whatever those are. Vanier suggests that while the “boys” of his community would seem peripheral in society’s eyes, their ability to realize whatever capacity they may have for goodness makes them more saintly and in that sense more central than society would expect. Stallybrass and White note, “A recurrent pattern emerges: the top attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover … that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other.”64 This results in “a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level. It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central (like long hair in the 1960s). The low-Other is despised and denied at the level of political organization and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture.”65 In other words, the socially peripheral “boys,” rejected and excluded, become symbolically central.

Furthermore, Vanier shifts the frame here so that the people with intellectual disabilities are the active protagonists of the story. Literary scholar Northrop Frye, who was ordained into the United Church in 1936 before his literary career, follows Aristotle in setting out the different elevations of characters in literature. In The Anatomy of Criticism Frye explains, “Fictions, therefore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.”66 Some characters are superior to the reader and society not just in degree but actually in kind, including mythical beings or literature of saints as their power of action is above most humans. The “hero” can also be at the lowest level of elevation, which implies a freedom from conventional norms: “If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.”67 In responding to Flemington’s question, Vanier presents the “boys” as the central characters, heroes of the story. He elevates his companions with intellectual disabilities to the level of saints based on their power of action, the correlation between their capacity and how they realize (make real, actualize) that capacity, however limited.

There is an important series of connections here. Remember Vanier’s happy frankness in his interview in God Speaks through People about the people he lives with. Now in this Flemington interview, he finds them saint-like because they are fulfilling their capacities. In each interview, he is not articulating, “Oh they are so nice and gentle if you get to know them – quite saintly!” He is resisting both interviewers’ dependence on that stereotype of the “boys” as “Other,” refusing as well the stereotypes that “they” are so sad, or depressing, or sweet, or frightening. Vanier presents not only a series of unexpected reversals of low and high, but on a larger scale positions his housemates as saints, not because they are perfect, but rather because of their capacity for action, their active choices for goodness.

Vanier gives another response to the saint question in January 1972, this time for interviewer Patrick Watson in a CBC Man Alive show with Mother Teresa:

PW: This has to be asked. In the eyes of many people, both of you are beginning to be spoken of in terms that approach saintliness. There are people who are coming somewhere close to the borders of worshipping, not God through Mother Teresa, but Mother Teresa.

MT: That you use the word sanctity, that makes no difference. What we are in the eyes of God is what matters: how we accept, how we are at his disposal, God uses us as he wants.

JV: I’d like to say two things: one is that on the Sunday before Jesus died, everybody was crying ‘Hosanna to the Son of David,’ and on the Friday, everybody was crying ‘Crucify him, crucify him.’ The second thing I’d like to say is that we have to see the motivation in the words of people, the dangers in the words of people when they say somebody is a saint – they mean ‘I am not called to this. It’s all right for you, but not for me’ – that you do not need to do the same thing. I’d say this is the danger of these words. It’s a complete negation of what we are both trying to say, that we are all called to this, and to the degree that you put someone on a pinnacle, you’re saying, ‘you can do this but I can’t.’ What we’re saying is that the spirit of God is calling us all to do this.68

Again, Vanier insists on the action of all humans, resisting any category that lets people delegate holiness to someone else. He reiterates that all people are called to actively seek goodness.

New Curriculum author Frank Morgan also affirms that even children are called to actively choose lives of goodness. All editions of God Speaks through People conclude with a chapter titled “What Are You Going to Do About It? The Story of You,” written by Morgan. He comments, “The men featured in this book are only a few of the hundreds in the Bible who responded to God.” He then points out some of the differences between the world in which Jesus lived and the 1964 world of the young readers: “Jesus lived in a world where men could kill each other, but they could not do much damage to God’s earth. We live in a world where men have discovered the secret of nuclear power and can disintegrate God’s earth.” Amid these challenges of the mid-twentieth century, Morgan assures his young readers that they have the capacity for action: “To keep men from disintegrating God’s earth, God still needs people who will respond to him. He needs people who will learn what kind of God he is, and then show what they have learned to others.” He encourages his readers that “You can get to know him through Jesus.” Morgan sets out the attraction of actively engaging in God’s work: “Think of those who did respond … They did not have an easy life, but they had a thrilling one. God has a task for you. What are you going to do about it?”69 Morgan does not urge adolescent readers to action on their own, but in response to God, whom they can get to know through Jesus. Their action is grounded in a relationship to the divine. Morgan assumes that people who are often marginalized, in this case young people, can be creative, relational, and responsive.

1983: WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES ASSEMBLY IN VANCOUVER

The 6th Assembly of the World Council of Churches took place in Vancouver in the summer of 1983. The event welcomed 4,000 delegates, accredited visitors, staff, and media from around the world to the University of British Columbia. For seventeen days, they worked together in five official languages. The United Church of Canada was a founding member of the World Council of Churches in 1948, and many United Church members held key roles in preparing for the 1983 assembly. For two years, United Church minister Gordon How worked as the local organizer for the opening celebration, planned to take place in the 15,000-seat Pacific Coliseum with a choir of 1,000 and a welcome from the governor general, along with readers, liturgical dancers, and special staging. The event would be televised nationally by the CBC. How describes it as “a grand public event by the Canadian churches to welcome the gathered world church at the start of its once-every-seven-years Assembly.”70 The planning committee agreed early to ask Jean Vanier to be the main speaker.

How had encountered Vanier twice before. The first was very early in How’s career, when he was a commissioner to the 1972 General Council in Saskatoon. The second time he met Jean Vanier was at Shiloah, the Vancouver L’Arche community.71 He was on the local L’Arche board and Vanier visited soon after Shiloah opened. How recalls, “There were a couple dozen of us, residents, associates and board members sitting on the floor eating pizza with Jean as he inspired us all with his stories and presence.” Notice Vanier’s continued social inversion here, as people of all abilities and status enjoyed dinner sitting together on the floor.

In late 1981, Vanier promptly responded to How’s letter of invitation to speak at the 1983 event, saying, “Come find me in Trosly, and we’ll spend a couple of days talking about this event in Vancouver. I need some time with you in advance to find out what you want.” So in the summer of 1982, when How was in Geneva at a World Council of Churches Central Committee meeting, he travelled by train to Compiegne, France. There, he relates:

An engaging colleague of Jean’s picked me up in her little two-cylinder Citroen and, after buying bread for L’Arche, she drove me through the French countryside to Trosly-Breuil. I was welcomed by his mother Madame Vanier and stayed in her guest room. The next day Vanier and I spent about three hours together, sitting in his little room on orange crates. He made tea and put honey in it and I just didn’t know where I was – it was an incredible experience and conversation. We talked about what he would say in his talk the next year. The visit was made more complete for me as I attended their evening Mass and joined with them at dinner.

Vanier arrived in Vancouver in July, 1983, the day before the World Council of Churches event. How remembers:

He surprised me by asking ‘Gordon, would you please come out to L’Arche this evening for an hour or so? I want to talk with you about tomorrow’s event.’ I hoped that there wasn’t a major problem. When I arrived, he showed me into his room, and as he sat at one end of the bed he read through and rehearsed his 25-minute speech for the next day. As I listened, I was wondering to myself, ‘How did I get to be the person sitting here? This is a wonderful and profound presentation.’ When he finished, he turned to me and asked, ‘Is that alright, will it do?’ I felt like saying ‘You expect me to critique you?’ Of course, I told him was it was perfect. The next day, I picked him up as arranged and we gathered with the World Council of Churches dignitaries. The celebration began with a full house. The choir sang with great joy and energy, the dancers were colourful, the readers perfect and the welcome by the governor general sincere though a little longer than expected. Just before it was time for Vanier to speak, he gave me his wristwatch, saying that he didn’t want people to see him looking at it. I wasn’t concerned because the day before the length of his rehearsal presentation was perfect. He said he would watch the time on the huge wall clock at one end of the arena. He spoke brilliantly about his work and what is important for us all in caring for and speaking for those who are wounded or not heard. It was wonderful and all present were with him for every word. But unlike the day before he went on and on for much longer. I learned later that the CBC were greatly troubled with this because their national coverage of a major sporting event that immediately followed had to be delayed! Why did he speak so much longer than planned and tested? When he returned to his seat, he asked, ‘How did I do?’ I said, ‘It was brilliant! Everyone was with you for every word.’ And then I said ‘Why was it a little longer than your rehearsal?’ And he answered the mystery, telling me that the ‘staging curtains blocked my view of the wall clock and I didn’t have my watch to check the time!’ So I returned his watch and we had a good laugh about it, but I’m sure the CBC never forgave us for going overtime and ruining the start of their football game.

Lois M. Wilson was the first female moderator of the United Church, and in 1983 was an incoming president of the World Council of Churches. She met Jean Vanier for the first time as she welcomed him to the stage: “Here was this very tall man towering over me as I struggled on tiptoe to greet him and welcome him to the platform. It was wonderful. He spoke ‘for those who had no voice.’ It was a round stage and he pivoted around and spoke for what seemed to me about forty-five minutes. It was magnificent.”72

Jean Vanier himself described the same event in a letter dated 27 August 1983:

I was also touched by the invitation to give the homily at the official opening of the World Council of Churches meeting. I was a bit frightened as I was asked to give it in the Coliseum of Vancouver in front of fifteen thousand people. I had written a text but I could not use any notes finally. So I went to the podium putting all my trust in Jesus and offering everything to Him for the unity of Christians, and Jesus truly helped me. I spoke about creating community with the poor. The mother of an eight year old girl told me later that her little girl said at the end of the homily: ‘Mommy, while he was speaking my heart was burning. Was your heart burning too?’ That little eight year-old confirmed and encouraged me.73

Here again Vanier resists being assimilated into a story of success or sainthood. In his public letter, he announces his vulnerability, saying that he was “a bit frightened.” There is a paradox in this very tall, famous person admitting that he feels weak and is dependent on Jesus. In his account, his confirmation comes not from important people, but from someone very little. At the same time, his social standing was sufficiently high that even CBC did not dare cut to the football game.

“CALLING US TO BE THE SAME”

The December 1972 United Church Observer introduction to Vanier’s address to General Council concluded, “in the glow of his words and his life, you forget everything except that this man is a saint, calling us to be the same.”74 In 2014, former moderator Gary Paterson also spontaneously used the word saint in describing Vanier as someone willing to let go of his high position, both in terms of height and prestige:

I have a memory of hearing Jean Vanier at Vancouver School of Theology decades ago. I was deeply moved. I had no idea he was so tall and stooped, the compassion that he radiated. I was also struck by someone who willingly surrenders privilege. I see that’s a temptation that many of us face – we have a lot of privilege globally, and he did as part of the Vanier family and he just chose to let some of it go … I have this thing, that Protestants should develop a larger panoply of saints … And I think Vanier is one of those – you have a sense of Spirit radiating from him.75

Religious studies professor and United Church member Dr Harold Coward taught a course about gurus in different religious traditions and included Vanier, “not as a guru, more what the Celts would call a ‘thin place.’”76

Bruce McLeod reflects, “I just feel Jean Vanier has had a quiet and pervasive influence in the United Church of Canada over more than four decades. Nothing dramatic, and people might not recognize the connection.” Having seen how it began, McLeod believes it has changed the United Church. Like Paterson, he notes the symbolic significance of Vanier’s height as someone high choosing to become lower,

even how he listens, how he bends down, how he smiles … We’ve all read his books and related to his stories about his community of L’Arche in France. These are wonderful stories that remind us of the communal aspect of Christianity from the beginning – the sharing of food and all varieties of people. Those stories of Jean and L’Arche ring the bell, and you say, ‘That’s it! That’s who we are and ought to be’ and it resonates with us. What is it in L’Arche that people run to? I think it’s that resonating. They recognize this is who we ought to be – what all those words about Christianity really mean, when a community emerges that is really trying to live that out with all its ups and downs, without trying to impress outsiders.

In a February 2017 conversation with Jean Vanier, I invited him to comment yet again on this word “saint.” He immediately began with Jesus, explaining that if you talk about Jesus because you are going to church, “it doesn’t mean very much. But if you talk about Jesus as a relationship, people think you’re a saint, because they would like a relationship like that.”77 Vanier continued:

Dorothy Day had the same problem. She said, ‘Don’t write me off like that.’ What does it mean? If you are trying to live the gospels, then you’re a saint. This is how it is in the letters of Paul: he is writing to the saints. But then there is a problem in the Catholic Church – a saint, you put them up on the altar. The reality of Paul is the saints are those who are trying to live the gospels. But then it became something else. Mother Teresa has ceased to be Mother Teresa since she became a saint. Before, you were following Mother Teresa and you would do things like she did. Then she is beatified, and it brings confusion. There is a difference with Mother Teresa after she was beatified. Before, she was entirely ecumenical, or inter-religious, and she even tried to welcome Hindu and Muslim women who wanted to create Hindu and Muslim Sisters of Charity working with the poor. Mother Teresa: you could follow her. But Saint Teresa is now a Saint of the Catholic Church – it’s this word saint, which initially meant those who were living the gospels.

Vanier went on to note the difference between Catholics and Protestants: “When the United Church people call me a saint, it means he is living the gospels. In the Catholic Church, it means she is now on a pedestal.”78

Vanier is right about the United Church. This meaning of saint is intrinsic to the 1925 “United Church of Canada Twenty Articles of Doctrine” that laid the foundation of Canada’s new church: “We acknowledge one Holy Catholic Church, the innumerable company of saints of every age and nation, who being united by the Holy Spirit to Christ their Head are one body in Him and have communion with their Lord and with one another. Further, we receive it as the will of Christ that His Church on earth should exist as a visible and sacred brotherhood … for the upbuilding of the saints, and for the universal propagation of the Gospel.”79

Lois Wilson considers Vanier a saint: “In the 80’s, I kept running into Jean Vanier in radio stations across Canada where we had both been doing interviews. On one occasion in Winnipeg, the radio announcer told me that after my interview, he was going to interview Jean Vanier. ‘Oh,’ I exclaimed, ‘he is a saint!’ I ran into Jean on my way out of the station and in a brief exchange, told him what I had said about him. Then I disappeared before he could respond. But I was right I think.” I asked Wilson what saint meant in that context. She replied:

Our tradition stems from the Methodist idea of a saint as one who is close to God, who is ‘in Christ or in where Christ dwells.’ That is why I called Vanier a saint. The Protestant understanding is from interpretation of scripture, particularly from Paul’s frequent use of the word ‘saints’ to whom he directs his letters: 1 Corinthians 12 ‘called to be saints’; Romans 1:7 ‘to all God’s saints beloved in Rome’; Philipians 4:21 ‘Greet every saint in Jesus Christ’; Hebrews 3:24 ‘Salute all the saints.’ So all confessing Christians are called to be saints – to put on Christ. I wrote a book about people I knew who have ‘put on Christ,’ titled I Want to Be in That Number: Cool Saints I Have Known.80

By 2015, the United Church’s purpose in “the upbuilding of the saints” had expanded consciously and explicitly to affirm people with disabilities among those saints. The “Theologies of Disabilities Report” to the 2015 42nd General Council emphatically states that people with disabilities fully participate in the image of God. The report asserts:

Disability is part of the natural limits and conditions of creation, neither a flaw nor a blessing but one of the diverse ways of being an embodied creature. For the image of God is not as a set of capabilities that can be listed and measured according to standards of exchange value, such that their absence makes someone less human; rather, it is a sign of intrinsic goodness and preciousness that is vulnerable and expressed differently in each person. If all are created in God’s image, we might welcome one another with the intent of honouring the unique and different way that image is borne out in each of us, including disability and/or ­mental illness.81

THE PLEASURE OF THE SAINTS

Julia Kristeva is a well-known psychotherapist, philosopher, feminist intellectual, and disability activist who lives in France. She is also the mother of an adult son with multiple disabilities who lives in the community of L’Arche partner Association Simon de Cyrene.82 Between June 2009 and August 2010, she and Jean Vanier exchanged an intriguing series of letters, published as a book in 2011 titled Leur regard perce nos ombres. In a letter dated 15 July 2009, Vanier acknowledges to Kristeva that L’Arche is fragile: “Many people would not want to live with people with disabilities. Will L’Arche exist in ten years?” Then he writes something unexpected: “What is the secret that allows L’Arche to exist still? I’ll tell you: pleasure!”83

To understand “pleasure” it is helpful to remember that Vanier did his doctoral studies on Aristotle, writing his thesis on happiness in Aristotle’s philosophy. When Vanier claims pleasure as the key feature that will keep people in L’Arche long term, he is thinking of pleasure in an Aristotelian sense. Just before discussing pleasure in his 15 July 2009 letter to Kristeva, Vanier points to Aristotle, indicating that he agrees with Aristotle that pleasure and joy both refer to the same reality.84 Pleasure, according to Aristotle, is not simply an enjoyable aspect of a thing like the lingering taste of a good meal. Rather, pleasure comes from activity.

Vanier’s 1962 doctoral thesis shaped his 2001 book Made for Happiness: Discovering the Meaning of Life with Aristotle. In this book, Vanier says that “The aim of Aristotelian ethics is to help human beings choose the activity from which they will derive the greatest pleasure or joy, and thus become as happy as possible by divorcing themselves from activities that give them more superficial and temporary pleasure but prevent them from progressing towards the finest activities and pleasures.”85 For Aristotle, Vanier explains, “That is to say that pleasure is born of, or springs from, perfection of the activity.”86 Remember that in the 1967 interview with Peter Flemington, Vanier insists, “You have so much capacity matching so much realization – well, this is perfection.”87 The activity that Vanier considers perfection is not only individual action, but social. In 2001, Vanier suggests that for Aristotle, the most perfect and thus pleasurable activity is friendship, and “what drives the dynamic of friendship is living together.”88 He elaborates: “It is a life lived in communion, that is nourished by shared actions with a view to great and noble things.”89

Vanier’s main criticism of Aristotle is that his vision is static, while Vanier’s experience of friendship in community is fluid and ever-evolving as people and relationships change and mature. In his 1975 book Be Not Afraid, Vanier described three stages of growing into community, symbolically calling them months although he notes that a “month” could be ten years. Along the way, he nonchalantly deconstructs then reconstructs alternative binary divisions:

People who have lived alone normally find their first month in community a great joy. Everyone around them seems to be a saint; everyone seems so happy. Then in the second month, everyone is a devil. Everyone has mixed motives for whatever he does. Everyone is something of a hypocrite. Everyone is so greedy that he takes just the piece of meat I had my eye on. They talk when I want to be silent and when I want to talk they cut me off with their long silent looks. It’s a conspiracy. In the third month, they are neither saints nor devils. They are people who have come together to strive and to love. They are neither perfect nor imperfect, but like everyone else a mixture of the two. They are people who are growing, and that means the good is in the growth and the bad is what prevents growth.90

It might be asked how Vanier can claim the central importance of pleasure when there is clearly so much suffering in the lives of people with disabilities and those who love them. Vanier had begun his letter by identifying “the cry” that he heard in Kristeva’s previous letter, connecting that with the cry that he hears in the wider world that builds walls between people. It is in this context of interpersonal and political pain and estrangement that he announces pleasure as the secret that allows L’Arche to survive. Even when people’s fear, sorrow, and abject aspects break through, the love with which people receive and support those difficult dimensions of each other is an activity of solidarity with its own consequent and profound pleasure. Thus the joys, celebrations, and spontaneous hilarity of L’Arche grow out of the pleasure of shared life, which encompasses the pain that is also shared. Sheer fun is part of the “joie-de-vivre” and pleasure that sustains community. At the end of the 1970s, after fifteen years of L’Arche, Vanier gathered his reflections on his community experience in Community and Growth: Our Pilgrimage Together. Rather than presenting suffering and celebration as antitheses, Vanier claims them as surprising complements that he sees together often in L’Arche. He reflects, “I wonder then if all joy doesn’t somehow spring from suffering and sacrifice” and remarks on how people in moments of celebration often “shed the burden of daily life and … live a moment of freedom in which their hearts simply bound for joy.”91

Vanier continues to reflect on the nature of the pleasure of L’Arche in his 2009 letter to Kristeva, again deconstructing the perception that L’Arche is serious or tragic, only for the heroic or saintly: “People come and stay because they are happy and have pleasure. No assistant will stay because it is required, or only because it is a good thing to do. We have a problem in our society: no one believes that the pleasure of L’Arche is possible. They think people in l’Arche are heroes or saints. But that’s not true. We stay at L’Arche because it gives us pleasure.”92

Bruce McLeod tries to explain the attraction, the pleasure of Vanier’s vision from 1972 when he first heard him and over the years since then. As McLeod puts it:

Many ‘spirits’ are trying to grab our attention. But here seems to be something that comes from a pure stream. It’s like a clear glass of water, and you run to it like a thirsty deer. It’s the attractive things that we are instinctively drawn to. What are these exactly? Openness to God not as an idea but a presence in your life; the inclusive nature of Vanier’s reaction to other people; non-judgmental, inclusive community; the commitment to the visibly wounded in order to recognize our own wounds; to be open to the world with no barriers, open to other faiths.

McLeod adds that Vanier’s vision is accessible to everyone: “These kinds of emphases are just exactly what will revitalize the church or any community.”