Notes

PREFACE

1 Davis, “Many Faces, One Humanity,” 24.

2 See chapter 1 for discussion of Flemington’s film about Vanier, the interview of Vanier in the United Church Sunday school textbook, and Vanier’s address to United Church General Council in 1972.

3 Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation, 255–6.

INTRODUCTION

1 Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 23.

2 Quotation from a personal conversation with Lois Wilson, recorded in Toronto on 18 April 2011. All further quotations from Wilson are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. If I were to use Lois Wilson’s full title, I would refer to “the Very Rev. the Hon. Dr. Lois M. Wilson, CC.” Taking Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation as my model, I am not including all the appropriate designations, instead identifying people in the simplest terms – for example, “United Church minister Lois Wilson” or “former moderator Lois Wilson.”

3 United Church of Canada, “The Comprehensive Review Task Group Report: United in God’s Work,” 694.

4 Ibid., 725.

5 Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd revised edition, 118.

6 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 608.

7 Ibid., 606–7.

8 Schweitzer, The United Church of Canada, 12. Phyllis Airhart’s A Church with the Soul of a Nation also provides a detailed history of the process leading to the creation of the United Church of Canada. The phrase “united and uniting church” remains central in the United Church today: see for example United Church of Canada, “Welcome to the United Church of Canada.” 

9 Jean Vanier also founded two global movements called “Faith and Light” and “Faith and Sharing.” Since 1969, Faith and Sharing has been offering “retreats and days of Christian spiritual renewal to everybody according to Jean Vanier’s spirituality” (Faith and Sharing Federation, home page). Faith and Light describes itself as “communities made up of persons with an intellectual disability, their families and friends, particularly young friends, who meet together on a regular basis in a Christian spirit, to share friendship, pray together, fiesta and celebrate life” (Faith and Light, home page). It began with Jean Vanier and Marie-Hélène Mathieu’s desire to help people with an intellectual disability and their families “find their place within the Church and society” (ibid., “About Us: History”). They initiated a 1971 pilgrimage to Lourdes for 12,000 pilgrims from fifteen countries, 4,000 of whom were persons with an intellectual disability. Jean Vanier offers a vivid account of this sacred and festive event in Our Life Together, 142–3.

10 Vanier joined the British then Canadian navies at age thirteen, leaving in 1951 to explore peacemaking and his spiritual life. He joined a unique postwar community of international students and teachers near Paris called L’Eau Vive for several years and remained friends with its founder, Père (Father) Thomas Philippe. In 1963, Père Thomas introduced Vanier to people with intellectual disabilities, then helped him begin L’Arche, and remained its priest until shortly before his death in 1993. A 2014–15 canonical enquiry found that during his years in L’Arche, Père Thomas sexually abused adult women without disabilities who came to him for spiritual accompaniment. L’Arche International immediately asked every community to review its ­policies around sexual abuse. Several women abused by Père Thomas shared their experiences publicly at www.avref.fr, in sections about L’Arche and la Congrégation Saint-Jean. One testimony recounts trying to alert leaders about the abuse years ago, but the experiences were not taken seriously. The victims as well as many people in L’Arche have struggled with various stages of grief – denial, anger, and depression – while trying to understand. Vanier addressed it in public letters in 2015 and 2016, as well as in his 2017 book of autobiographical reflections: see L’Arche International, “Regarding Père Thomas Philippe,” and Vanier, A Cry Is Heard, 72–3. I consider how these revelations affect the founding story of L’Arche Trosly and explore the appeal and danger of idealizing and mythologizing founders in the introduction to Sharing Life: Stories of L’Arche Founders and in “Jean Vanier: An Icon Not an Idol.” New questions emerged after a French documentary by Marie-Pierre Raimbault, Elizabeth Drévillon, and Eric Quentin titled Religieuses abusées, l’autre scandale de l’Église was broadcast on 5 March 2019 on the widely viewed Franco-German television channel Arte. How does a founding story integrate ongoing revelations about sexuality, sexual abuse, and power? L’Arche continues to work on the meaning of its history and evolving founding story. In June 2019, L’Arche International commissioned “an external organization to conduct a thorough and independent inquiry that will allow us to better understand our history, refine our work to prevent abuse and improve our own current policies and practices.” The results of that inquiry are expected later in 2019. Of related interest, Canadian scholar Tracy J. Trothen researches responses to pedophilia in Canadian churches, and many of her points about shame, silence, and the power imbalance between clergy and a child hold true for relationships between adults as well. See Trothen, Shattering the Illusion, 156–7n5. She sets out the development of the United Church’s approach to sexual abuse, including relevant statements, policies, and practices (ibid., 43–72).

11 Association Jean Vanier and L’Arche Canada, The Beginnings of L’Arche, 33.

12 Whitney-Brown, introduction to Sharing Life.

13 Swinton, introduction to Living Gently in a Violent World, 17.

14 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Research Report: Housing for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities, 29.

15 For United Church of Canada history, see Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation; Flatt, After Evangelicalism; Mediema, For Canada’s Sake; Schweitzer, ed., The United Church of Canada.

In theology and ethics, see Trothen, Linking Sexuality and Gender; Mukasa and Kawuki, Belonging. For statistical analysis, see Wilkins-Laflamme, “Normalizing Denominational Statistics with Demographic Data.” For explorations of United Church identity as intercultural, see, for example, Cho, “‘We Are Not Alone’”: however, in discussing an inclusive church, Cho does not mention people with disabilities. Best, Will Our Church Disappear? asks bluntly, “Will our church survive?” See also Milton, This United Church of Ours for a personal description of the United Church: his 2008 third edition did not mention disability or intercultural priorities. I have not read the 2017 fourth edition, but the Study Guide available online does not include the words disability or intercultural.

16 United Church Observer, “About the Observer.”

17 The lack of L’Arche archives is changing: University of St Michael’s College in Toronto now holds records of early L’Arche Daybreak years, as well as Faith and Sharing archives and the Henri Nouwen archives. Beginning in 2017, L’Arche International has begun to consolidate scattered archival material in a state-run local archive near Trosly-Breuil in Oise, France. Jean Vanier’s own papers are being ­collected separately by the Jean Vanier Association in France. Other countries may soon begin their own L’Arche archival collections.

18 This is only a very partial list of what is readily available in English, and more appears every month. In anthropology: see Angrosino, “L’Arche: The Phenomenology of Christian Counterculturalism”; Cushing,“(Story-) Telling It Like It Is.” In sociology: see Currie, “Becoming: Stories of L’Arche Children”; Cushing and Lewis, “Negotiating Mutuality and Agency in Care-Giving Relationships with Women with Intellectual Disabilities”; Kelly, “The Role of Mandates/Philosophies in Shaping Interactions between Disabled People and Their Support Providers.” In psychology: see Bazinet, “Communal Journeys”; Coles, “‘Gentled Into Being’”; Dueck, Muchemi, and Ng, “Indigenous Psychotherapies and Religion.” In theology: see Comensoli, “Descending the Ladder”; Ford, “An Interpersonal Wisdom”; Greig, “The Slow Journey towards Beatitude”; Harshaw, God Beyond Words; Hauerwas and Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World; Hryuniuk, Theology, Disability, and Spiritual Transformation; Little, “Welcoming the Stranger”; Morris, “Transforming Able-Bodied Normativity”; Smith, “Rituals of Knowing”; Swinton, Becoming Friends of Time; Thérèse Vanier, One Bread, One Body; Young, ed., Encounter with Mystery. In philosophy: see Richard Kearney, Anatheism; Kearney and Zimmermans, eds., Reimaging the Sacred; Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream”; McCrary, “Re-Envisioning Independence and Community.” In political studies: see Hauerwas, “Seeing Peace.” In cultural studies: see Tim Kearney, A Prophetic Cry. In Ethics: see Frank, “Sheldon Wolin, Jean Vanier and the Present Age”; Greig, Reconsidering Intellectual Disability; Kornas-Biela, “Jean Vanier and L’Arche as a Witness of Merciful Love”; Reimer, Living L’Arche. In social work: see Walsh, “Jean Vanier.” In disability studies: see Burghardt, “Brokenness / Transformation”; Watson and Kumar, “Sport, Theology, and the Special Olympics.” In history: see Clark, Enough Room for Joy; Spink, The Miracle, the Message, the Story; Whitney-Brown, Introduction to Jean Vanier, Essential Writings; Whitney-Brown, Sharing Life. In geography: see Lemon and Lemon, “Community-based Cooperative Ventures for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities.” In biography: see Cowley, One Woman’s Journey; Higgins, Jean Vanier; Nouwen, Adam; Shearer, Thérèse Vanier; Spink, Dance with Me?; Thérèse Vanier, Nick – Man of the Heart. Interesting work in economics is close to publication: Elena Lasida, professor of Sustainable Development at the Institut Catholique has been studying L’Arche communities as economic models – see Lasida, “The Economic Impact of L’Arche.” At the Canadian Economics Association’s 51st Annual Conference in 2017, co-authors Welling, Engineer, and Janet Whitney-Brown presented “Choosing Life Together.” The abstract begins, “This paper presents a simple theoretical comparison of caring for the intellectually disabled in ‘full communities’ of diverse people versus using the increasingly standard ‘person-centred’ care offered by social services. Our model is based on L’Arche, which brings together individuals who are intellectually disabled and assistants.” In social policy: see Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Research Report: Housing for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities. For poetry: see Hillhouse, Family; O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets (Jean Vanier appears in the last canto of the fifth quintet.) For memoir: see Berken, Walking on a Rolling Deck; Buser, Flowers from the Ark; Carrère, Epilogue to The Kingdom; Clarke, L’Arche Journal; Mosteller, Body Broken, Body Blessed; Nouwen, The Road to Daybreak; Porter, Accidental Friends. For fiction: see Reinders, The Second Calling. For drama: L’Arche Daybreak celebrated twenty-five years by commissioning a play by Robert Morgan and David Craig called One Heart at a Time. It was performed in 1994 with a cast of sixty members of the L’Arche Daybreak community at the Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto and the Markham Theatre in Markham. More recently, a Globe and Mail review of the staged version of Ian Brown’s The Boy in the Moon mentions a scene where the Ian Brown character meets Jean Vanier – see Nestruck, “Review: The Boy in the Moon is a tragedy about inclusivity’s limits.” In 2019, L’Arche Daybreak commissioned a play by Stephanie Sandberg to celebrate fifty years of L’Arche Daybreak. Scholarship can also be found in French and many other languages, as well as student projects at every level – undergraduate, masters, doctoral, and post-doctoral. Vanier is often quoted in passing in many other contexts: for example, epigraphs from Jean Vanier’s writings begin two articles in the April 2018 issue of Canadian Family Physician.

19 L’Arche International published the magazine Letters of L’Arche from 1971 until 2014. Many interviews with Jean Vanier and others have been filmed and published, for example: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Man Alive with Jean Vanier and Mother Teresa”; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Man Alive: Jean Vanier”; Vanier, “Becoming Human,” Pamela Wallin Show; Vanier, “Interview with Jean Vanier.” A partial list of Vanier’s own voluminous writings in philosophy, theology, memoir, and anthropology can be found at Vanier, “Bibliography.” Since 1964, Vanier has written circular letters sent to L’Arche communities, friends, and supporters. A collection of these letters from 1964–94 were edited by John Sumarah and published in three volumes as Vanier, A Network of Friends. Selected letters were published in 2007 as Vanier, Our Life Together. Letters after 2007 can sometimes be found on L’Arche websites. There have been many documentary films about L’Arche. For example, in 2018, Jean Vanier, Le Sacrement de la Tendresse (shown at the United Nations on 18 October 2018); in 2017, Summer in the Forest; in 2014, Vanier, Love and Belonging; and near the beginnings of L’Arche in 1967, Flemington, narrator and director, If You’re Not There, You’re Missed.

20 The many L’Arche-inspired scholarly papers, essays, books, and artistic projects attest to the way in which peoples’ imaginations are gripped by disability, community, and life on the margins of society. Sociologist and critical theorist Margrit Shildrick describes the relatively new interdisciplinary field of Critical Disability Studies: “When conventional disability studies encounters cultural theory, it generates what is now usually referred to as critical disability studies (CDS). Unlike the social model, which focuses on the structural inequalities of Western societies that are seen to produce disability, or at least cement it, CDS is a diverse entity that encompasses both material and discursive underpinnings, the psychocultural imaginary as much as law and social policy, and the phenomenology of the individual embodied subject as well as any identification with a sociological category.” She adds that CDS “moves away from the more familiar focus on rights, entitlements, and autonomy to encompass a complex analytic approach that goes well beyond mere description of how it is to be disabled” (Shildrick, “Border Crossings,” 137). Theologian Jill Harshaw recognizes that she needs to be in dialogue with social sciences (Harshaw, God beyond Words, 38–9), but it is less obvious to social scientists why they would want to be in dialogue with theologians. Many of these Vanier-inspired studies attempt to bridge this gap. I would add a caution, however. Much of the scholarship using Vanier and L’Arche focuses primarily on inspirational articulations of L’Arche. While not false, those are certainly only part of the lived reality. It is worth asking why so many people want to write about L’Arche while L’Arche communities in many countries struggle to find enough assistants who want to share life with people with intellectual disabilities in L’Arche.

21 Personal conversation with John Swinton, recorded in Toronto, 16 July 2013. All further quotations from Swinton are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

22 Vanier interviewed in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Jean Vanier Opens First L’Arche House.”

23 Association Jean Vanier and L’Arche Canada, The Beginnings of L’Arche, 106.

24 Quotation from a personal conversation with Jean Vanier, recorded at L’Arche in Trosly-Breuil, France, March 2017.

25 Vanier, “Jean Vanier’s Speech to L’Arche in France, May 2, 2014.”

26 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 605. See also: United Church of Canada, “Intercultural Ministries: Living into Transformation,” 312–14, 524–33; United Church of Canada, “GCE 3 Intercultural Ministries,” 137–8, and United Church of Canada, “TICIF Ecclesiology Report,” 431–47.

27 “L’Arche Identity and Mission.” The statement currently can be found on the websites of many individual communities, regions ,and countries such as the UK. Oddly, I cannot find it on either the L’Arche International or L’Arche Canada websites.

28 Vanier, Becoming Human, 163.

29 Quotation from a personal conversation with Maggie Enwright, recorded in Duncan, BC, on 5 December 2011. All further quotations from Enwright are from this conversation, unless otherwise indicated.

30 Zournazi and Vanier, “On Communion,” 120.

31 The controversial “Ashley Treatment” in the United States was a surgical and hormonal treatment designed to halt permanently Ashley’s physical maturity at the level of a child. See Greig, Reconsidering Intellectual Disability for a thoughtful discussion and critique of this.

32 It is often noted that intellectual disability does not necessarily handicap someone’s spiritual life or ability to love. See Whitney-Brown, “The Club”: “The members of our club, all born more than 60 years ago, labeled ‘mentally handicapped,’ have full, rich lives to integrate. These seniors are veterans of every twentieth-century theory of ‘care,’ yet somehow have emerged into their senior years with generous, gracious, attentive and hilarious spirits, no more handicapped than most others of their generation in their capacity to give and receive love, discern what is really important and be themselves. You have to honour people like that” (15).

33 Vanier, Our Life Together, 541–2.

34 Zournazi and Vanier, 119–20.

35 A small caveat is in order here. The words pleasure, inversion, and tenderness all carry sexual connotations. While that is not my particular focus, neither do I wish to pretend that sexuality is not important to any individual or community. Freud used “inversion” to refer to homosexuality, though that use is mainly archaic now. I do not use the word inversion in that way, although readers unfamiliar with the United Church of Canada might be interested that in 1988 the United Church was the first Christian denomination in Canada to pass Church policy that sexual orientation is not a barrier to ordained or diaconal ministry. As a Canadian church rather than a worldwide communion, the United Church of Canada does not have to negotiate decisions with churches in other cultural contexts around the world, and thus has had the freedom to address questions of sexuality directly, with varying success (see Trothen, Linking Sexuality and Gender). The initial 1988 commitment has expanded into a wider commitment to becoming a genuinely intercultural church, recognizing all LGBTQ2 orientations as part of an ever-expanding commitment to diversity and transformation that includes people with disabilities, racialized members of the United Church, and others whose stories have historically been overlooked.

My use of the word inversion in this book is from cultural theorists, in the way that Mikhail Bakhtin uses it to discuss carnival, implying a dynamic that is more complex and interdependent than a simple reversal, analogous to the way that the United Church’s intercultural direction is more than simple inclusion. The word tender is similarly complex. Tenderness and pleasure are key to all human touch and are thus connected to sexuality. Vanier notes, “Now, tenderness frequently the way it’s looked at today can be a sort of opening to a sexual relationship. But it’s much more than that. I believe, I dare believe, that tenderness is a gift of the spirit” (Zournazi and Vanier, 119).

36 Vanier, Our Journey Home, xii–xiii.

37 Ibid.

38 From the sermon given by Doug Graves on 22 June 2014 at the Thanksgiving service at South Burnaby United Church, celebrating the fortieth Anniversary of L’Arche Greater Vancouver and fifty years of L’Arche International: http://www.larchevancouver.org/other_docs/doug_graves_sermon.pdf.

CHAPTER ONE

1 T. [Taylor], Introduction to “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 22. This United Church Observer article begins with this brief column of adulatory remarks signed “J.T.” – presumably James A. Taylor, managing editor of the magazine. This introduction is followed by two and a half pages of excerpts from Vanier’s address to General Council. The “amiable buzzard” phrase used in introducing Vanier was so striking that Roy Bonisteel quoted it to introduce Jean Vanier in a CBC Man Alive episode in 1973. Curiously, the previous article in this issue is titled “So You’ll Never Be a Saint” by George Johnston, a professor of New Testament at McGill University. His use of saint is in contrast to ordinary people, however.

2 This account draws on a personal conversation with Sue Mosteller, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 8 February 2013. All subsequent quotations from Mosteller are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

3 Quotation from a personal conversation with Bruce McLeod, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 12 April 2011. All further quotations from McLeod are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

4 Phyllis Airhart in A Church with the Soul of a Nation explores the strong emphasis in the early United Church that it should become significant enough to counter the religious, cultural, and political weight of the growing Roman Catholic Church in Canada. Mark Noll in “O Canada” reviews Airhart’s book (and others) and sums up: “Phyllis Airhart’s careful documentation suggests that the United Church of Canada may have been the most significant example of liberal evangelicalism in the Protestant world from its founding in 1925 until the late 1950s. Almost all of its early leaders held firmly to traditional evangelical commitments like … an undifferentiated denunciation of Roman Catholicism” (n.p.). By 1972, that seems not to be an issue. Roman Catholic observers were also present at the 1972 25th General Council. Joan Wyatt in “The 1970s” explains, “The new rapprochement between Protestants and Roman Catholics that resulted from Vatican II helped provide energy and enthusiasm that supported the emergence of several bilateral dialogues. One begun then was the still-continuing Roman Catholic-United Church dialogue” (127).

5 Airhart, personal conversation, Toronto, Ontario, 18 April 2011.

6 Wyatt, “The 1970s,” 119, and Schweitzer, “The Changing Social Imaginary of the United Church of Canada,” 296–52.

7 For several accounts of Vanier’s life, see Vanier, Our Life Together; Vanier, A Cry is Heard; Spink, The Miracle, the Message, the Story; and Whitney-Brown, introduction to Jean Vanier, Essential Writings.

8 Quotations from a personal conversation with Beverley Milton and Ralph Milton, recorded in Victoria, BC, 19 January 2014. All further quotations from Beverley or Ralph Milton are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

9 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 3.

10 Vanier, A Network of Friends, Vol I: 1964–1973, 161–2. This letter and other letters quoted in this chapter are not included in Vanier, Our Life Together.

11 Vanier, “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 24.

12 Ibid., 23.

13 Ibid., 24.

14 Ibid.

15 More than twenty years later, theologian Nancy Eiesland in The Disabled God comments on “patterns of social power in which able-bodied people assume an exceptional access to the bodies of people with disabilities” (93).

16 Vanier understood and believed that social research could improve policy for his community, and kept up to date in current thinking about people with disabilities. He used every possible professional connection and advice to build L’Arche, establishing close relationships with government bureaucrats, social workers, psychiatrists, academics, and policy-makers. Steve Newroth as Community Leader at L’Arche Daybreak developed early connections with the Ontario government and the National Institute of Mental Retardation, participating in their research and policy development for people with intellectual disabilities. See Wolfensberger, A Selective Overview of Jean Vanier and the Movement of L’Arche.

17 Vanier, “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 24.

18 Ibid., 48.

19 Ibid., 24.

20 Ibid., 25.

21 This was reported by Doug Graves, who tried to find a copy of the cassettes for me by asking everyone he knew whether they still had a copy. We could not locate any. See Doug Graves’s story in chapter 3.

22 Wyatt, “The 1970s,” 129

23 Vanier, A Network of Friends, Vol I: 1964–1973, 153.

24 Ibid., 154.

25 Ibid., 156.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 158.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.,161.

30 For example, James Hanrahan records, “In Toronto, during the fall, winter and spring of 1969–70, a number of people who had made one of the Faith and Sharing retreats organized by Jean Vanier, gathered each Friday evening at St. Augustine’s Seminary for follow-up sessions of Scripture study and sharing. The combination of this with the influence of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship provided the rather unlikely background for the emergence of two charismatic groups in 1970” (Hanrahan, “The Nature and History of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Canada,” 316).

31 Vanier, “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 24.

32 Ibid., 25.

33 Forrest, “Look of the Month, a Family Council in Saskatoon,” 13. “It seemed to me we were finally off our long self-critical binge,” added Forrest (13). Further, he observed that the whole basis of choosing a moderator shifted from hierarchical reputation to the immediate connection with commissioners, as each nominee for moderator was interviewed and all the delegates voted with that immediate lived experience in mind.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 United Church Observer, “General Council 1972,” 14.

38 Forrest, “Look of the Month, a Family Council in Saskatoon,” 13.

39 Ibid.

40 United Church Observer, “General Council 1972,” 14.

41 Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, 549.

42 For further description of the United Church’s New Curriculum, see Airhart A Church with the Soul of a Nation, 170–2, 200–2, 220; Beardsall “‘And Whether Pigs Have Wings,’” 107–9; and Flatt, After Evangelicalism (much of Flatt’s book is devoted to an assessment of the New Curriculum).

43 The full bibliographic information for the first printing, that does not contain Vanier, is: Morgan, Frank H. God Speaks through People. Toronto: The United Church Publishing House, 1964, first printing. The full bibliographic information for the third printing, that does include Vanier, is: Morgan, Frank H. God Speaks through People. Toronto: The United Church Publishing House, 1967, third printing. I cannot find a copy of the second printing, so I do not know if Jean Vanier is in it nor the size of that print run. The addition of Jean Vanier to the United Church New Curriculum so soon after the founding of L’Arche an ocean away might have been due to Frank Prescott Fidler. He was involved in the New Curriculum as Associate Secretary of the Board of Christian Education at General Council office from 1949 to 1969, and was also a founding member of the executive of the board of the Vanier Institute of the Family in 1965, so would have known Jean Vanier’s parents and heard about their son’s latest adventure. Alternatively, the interview with Jean Vanier may have been the initiative of the author of God Speaks through People, Frank Morgan, who arrived at Ottawa’s MacKay United Church, located near Rideau Hall, in 1956. When Morgan moved to Trinity United Church in Kitchener in 1964, shortly after completing the first edition of God Speaks through People, he reminisced happily about having tea with Madame Pauline Vanier, according to Barbara Whitney who was a member of Trinity United Church at the time. Morgan would have been attentive to Jean Vanier’s new L’Arche community in France.

44 Morgan, God Speaks through People, third printing, 225.

45 Ibid., 226. This page also indicates that church school classes could hear Vanier’s voice on a tape of the interview that was included as part of the teaching material. The tape is not held in the United Church archives.

46 Ibid., 232.

47 Ibid.

48 Throughout the interview, Vanier refers to the adult men with intellectual disabilities with whom he lives as “boys.” Through much of the 1960s, Vanier and others referred to adult men with intellectual disabilities as “boys,” perhaps because of their dependent status.

49 Ibid., 231.

50 Ibid.

51 White, Carnival, Hysteria, Writing, 134.

52 Ibid.

53 Morgan, God Speaks through People, third printing, 231–2.

54 It seems like a very United Church kind of question, in keeping with stereotypes of the United Church as a well-heeled social club. Airhart notes, “What critics denounced as a social club, suburban parishioners saw as putting down new roots,” and quotes a 1964 United Church Observer editorial by Al Forrest: “They want to find or create a community and rear their children in the fear of God and the knowledge of Christ among believers – nice, decent believers” (Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation, 249).

55 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 4–5. Critical disability theorist Margrit Shildrick identifies the same dynamic, linking a repulsed fascination with both disability and monsters:

By openly engaging with such representations, we may, at the very least, hope to counter the negativity associated with differential embodiment, but that is not enough. Whether the images we research are historical or current, overtly fantastic or ostensibly accurate representations of reality, the twin pull of repulsion and fascination is not just an abstract consideration, but is realised in us all. None of us is innocent. Nonetheless, while we may teeter on the brink of a voyeurism that in its lack of (self)-recognition would reduce the focus of our gaze to merely an object of desire for the absent or forbidden, a more reflexive engagement will provoke just those questions that I want to ask of the ambivalent nature of the encounter with the monstrous. Again: what exactly is it that we are looking for? (Shildrick, “Visual Rhetorics and the Seductions of the Monstrous,” 169)

56 Morgan, God Speaks through People, third printing, 227.

57 Ibid., 233.

58 Ibid., 229.

59 Ibid., 233.

60 Morgan, God Speaks through People, third printing, 229.

61 Ibid., 230.

62 Vanier, Eruption to Hope, 1.

63 Flemington, “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed.”

64 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 5.

65 Ibid., 5–6.

66 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 33.

67 Ibid., 34.

68 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Man Alive with Jean Vanier and Mother Teresa.”

69 Morgan, God Speaks through People, third printing, 239–41.

70 Quotation from a personal conversation with Gordon How, recorded in Vancouver, BC, 9 May 2011. All further quotations from How are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. Inviting a Roman Catholic speaker to address the World Council of Churches in Vancouver in 1983 was an intentional ecumenical gesture, since the Roman Catholic Church has never been a member of the World Council of Churches, and was not part of the Canadian Council of Churches. See the Canadian Council of Churches website: “An application for membership by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops was approved in May 1997. The Conference had held associate membership since 1985. In 1993 the Vatican issued a directory encouraging participation in ecumenism” (“History,” The Canadian Council of Churches).

71 For How’s more detailed account of the United Church’s involvement in the founding of the L’Arche community in Vancouver, see chapter 2.

72 Quotation from a personal conversation with Lois Wilson, recorded in Toronto on 18 April 2011. All further quotations from Wilson are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. Wilson’s respect for how Vanier spoke ‘for those who had no voice’ raises interesting questions about why people with intellectual disabilities so often “have no voice.” The interviewer in God Speaks through People responds to Vanier’s assertion that people like his “boys” are so rejected that they “have no voice. They cannot speak” with a bewildered, “Are they all mute?” (229). The question of who can speak for another and under what circumstances is explored further in chapters 3 and 4. See also theologian Kawuki Mukasa’s discussion of critical theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous question, “Can the subaltern speak?” Mukasa, Belonging, 187–93.

73 Vanier, A Network of Friends, vol. 2, 1974 –1983, 304.

74 T. [Taylor], Introduction to “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 22.

75 Quotation from a personal conversation with Gary Paterson, recorded in Victoria, BC, 19 January 2014. All further quotations from Paterson are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

76 Personal conversation with Harold Coward in Victoria BC, 27 November 2013. Theologian John Swinton used the same phrase, “thin place,” to describe Vanier in a personal conversation, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 16 July 2013. All further quotations from Swinton are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. See also Vancouver Sun columnist Douglas Todd writing about Vanier on 5 March 2001 under the title “Jean Vanier, who some call a living saint, comes with a message of hope: Young people can find spiritual liberation.” Todd reprinted the same column in 2015 with a short introduction, titling it “New Templeton Prize winner Jean Vanier: ‘Don’t call me a saint.’” See also UK magazine Premier Christianity, June 2015 where Justin Brierley declares that “Jean Vanier is probably the closest person to a ‘living saint’ that I’ve ever met” (Brierly, “Profile: Jean Vanier”).

77 Quotation from personal conversations with Jean Vanier, recorded in Trosly-Breuil, France, 24 February – 4 March 2017. All further quotations from Vanier are from these conversations, unless otherwise noted.

78 Calling all of God’s people to be saints is not just a Protestant interpretation of saints. In 1966, Pope Paul VI welcomed Jean Vanier and his fellow L’Arche pilgrims to the Vatican and said to them, “God calls all of you, in spite of your difficulties, to be saints, and He reserves a special role for you in His Church” (Vanier, Our Life Together, 29).

79 See United Church of Canada, “Twenty Articles of Doctrine (1925).”

80 Personal email from Lois Wilson. In contrast, “saint” is used to refer to someone so holy as to be beyond ordinary believers in George Johnston’s December 1972 United Church Observer article immediately preceding Vanier’s: “So You’ll Never Be a Saint … but Here’s How to Be a Christian, 24 Hours a Day.” Similarly, see Schweitzer ­contrasting saints and sinners in “The Changing Social Imaginary of The United Church of Canada.” Wolfensburger, in “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” notes: “Among the ten or so historically prominent perceptions and interpretations of the retarded, one of the more benign ones has been that of the retarded as ‘holy innocents’ who are incapable of the judgment necessary to commit a sin, and who are therefore living saints assured of heaven … I found no such idealized distortion among the workers of L’Arche” (Wolfensburger, “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” 10). He also notes, however, with some amazement, that through L’Arche he has gained “an entirely new and different insight into the potential spirituality of the retarded person … who can live a spiritual life of much greater intensity and directness than I had thought.” Even in deeply troubled individuals, “this spirituality provides a remarkable depth, serenity and internal joy – such as one encounters occasionally in saintly individuals, but that I cannot recall having encountered before in the retarded. I admit with considerable pain that this may be my fault” (11).

81 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 611.

82 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 229.

83 Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 23.

84 Ibid.

85 Vanier, Made for Happiness, 43–4.

86 Ibid., 42. Vanier cautions though that “we should not make the mistake, however of thinking that pleasure is the end, for the end is the act itself. Rather pleasure is given when the end is fully attained, as a bonus or consequential end” (Made for Happiness, 44–5). As Vanier asserts, “pleasure completes or crowns the act” (ibid., 44).

87 Flemington, “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed.”

88 Vanier, Made for Happiness, 65.

89 Ibid., 70.

90 Vanier, Be Not Afraid, 80.

91 Vanier, Community and Growth: Our Pilgrimage Together, 202–3.

92 The original French is as follows: “Alors, quel est le secret qui permet à L’Arche d’exister encoure? Je vais te le dire: c’est le plaisir … Aucun assistant ne reste ici par devoir, parce qu’ «il le faut». Aucun n’y reste pour faire une «bonne action». Nous sommes confrontés à une probléme, dans notre société: nul ne croit que le plaisir à l’Arche est possible. Les gens pensent que, pour rester à l’Arche, il faut être une sorte de héros, un saint. Mais ce n’est pas vrais: on reste à l’Arche parce ce que cela nous plais” (Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 23). The French “parce que cela nous plait” conveys a strong connotation of “plaisir” or “pleasure.” The phrase could also be variously translated as “because we like it,” or “because we enjoy it,” or even as a longtime L’Arche translator suggested, “because it’s fun.”

CHAPTER TWO

1 T. [Taylor], “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 22.

2 Thousands of United Church members have been part of L’Arche as core members and their families, assistants and employees, board members, pastors and retreat leaders, in Canada and around the world. With seemingly endless possibilities, this chapter includes only a few strands of the many stories generated through decades of relationships in L’Arche Canada’s nearly 200 homes, workshops, and day programs in twenty-nine communities. Readers will find less focus on core members in this chapter, and more on the relationships between United Church and L’Arche leadership and structures.

3 Vanier, A Network of Friends, vol. 1, 1964–1973, 162.

4 Vanier often acknowledges the crucial support of those who pray for L’Arche. For example, see Vanier, An Ark for the Poor, 26; and Whitney-Brown, Introduction to Jean Vanier: Essential Writings, 31.

5 Bock, In Search of a Responsible World Society, 233.

6 Vanier, A Network of Friends, vol. 1, 1964–1973, 162.

7 Vanier, Our Life Together, 125.

8 Faith and Sharing Retreats began in 1968 with a retreat preached by Jean Vanier at an Augustinian retreat house near Toronto called Marylake. The Bishop’s choice of Vanier was controversial: it was the first time a layperson had been invited to lead a Roman Catholic retreat in Canada. By a curious coincidence, this took place in the same summer that Dr Robert McClure was elected the first lay moderator of the United Church, so in the summer of 1968, both McClure and Vanier offered unprecedented lay leadership in their respective denominations. At that first Faith and Sharing Retreat, Vanier invited the diverse range of people to spend eight days meeting God in scripture, in the eucharist, in silence, and in small groups where they shared and prayed together. Faith and Sharing became a movement of annual retreats focused on living the Beatitudes: “There is a two-fold movement in Faith and Sharing: an inward movement towards God hidden in each person’s vulnerability and an outward movement towards our brothers and sisters especially those who are more poor and in need” (Clarke, “The Grace of Faith and Sharing”). The cornerstone is twice-daily faith-sharing, when retreatants meet in small groups to share ­personally about their lives and faith, listening to each other without judgment, with open ears and hearts (Faith and Sharing website). If this were the structure of the Cedar Glen retreat as well, then McLeod’s and Smith’s discomfort with Vanier’s Jesus language would have been exacerbated by the expectation that they would frequently speak about their faith in their small groups. Lists of participants for some retreats can be found in the Faith and Sharing archives at St Michael’s College, Toronto. Faith and Sharing retreats still continue across North America: see the Afterword in this book.

9 Quotations from a conversation with Louise Cummings, Doug Graves, and Dan Kirkegaard recorded in Tsawwassen, BC, 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Cummings are from this conversation.

10 Massey, For Space, 130–1.

11 Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd revised edition, 200.

12 A related aspect in the complex simultaneity of stories of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada involves complicated relationships between Christian denominations as well as formal ecumenical initiatives. The Roman Catholic Church was full of change, hope, and fresh initiatives following Vatican II, while the United Church and Anglicans were finding common ground while moving towards church union. A fascinating and telling example of the ecumenical spirit of the age can be seen in how the United Church participated together with other churches in Expo 67, negotiating various contradictions and compromises as they tried to create an interdenominational Christian Pavilion (see Miedema, For Canada’s Sake, 137–60). Miedema asserts of this period that “the broad interpretation of Christianity in public life may have masked Canada’s religious divisions as much as it overcame them” (21), quoting Governor General Georges Vanier claiming that he intentionally spoke of non-specific shared “spiritual values” because “those could mean different things to different people” and he wanted “to speak to all Canadians” (216n45). Jean Vanier’s father Georges Vanier was Canada’s first Roman Catholic governor general. Other less organized spiritual signs of the times were the Jesus people and the charismatic movement in Canada. These were ecumenical in the sense of crossing denominational lines, and there are documented connections between Jean Vanier’s Faith and Sharing retreats and the Canadian charismatic movement. L’Arche has always emphasized that it is not a church, and its members are encouraged to join their local worshipping communities. For a broader discussion of ecumenism and L’Arche see Thérèse Vanier, One Bread, One Body.

13 For example, see Goodhand, Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists. In 1973, the first five women’s shelters were opened by five separate groups of women in five different Canadian cities. In the same year, four new L’Arche communities also opened. Communal intentional ­living experiments could also be found across Canada: see for example Liz Marshall’s documentary film Midian Farm, exploring a “back-to-the-land social experiment created by a community of urban baby-boomers from Toronto” from 1971–77 that was “part of the youth counter-culture movement during a period of social and political re-imagining” (Marshall, Midian Farm).

14 Wyatt, “The 1970s,” 126.

15 World Council of Churches, “The Unity of the Church and the Handicapped in Society,” 191.

16 See World Council of Churches, “WCC Work on Persons with Disabilities History”

17 Quoted in United Church of Canada, “Open and Accessible,” 174. The 1977 United Church resolution on “The Handicapped and the Wholeness of the Family of God” is cited by this 2012 report as an important early precedent in the growth of awareness about people with disabilities in the United Church.

18 Vanier, Signs of the Times, 1.

19 Ibid., 1–2.

20 Ibid., 3. In Our Life Together, Vanier also credits other “community movements that, like L’Arche, were both countercultural … and yet very much of their time, of a time when people were searching, willing to see where the Spirit of God could lead and concerned with the pain of others” (61). He specifically names the Little Sisters of Jesus in Montreal based on the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers Movement, Catherine Doherty’s Friendship House, and Marthe Robin’s Foyer de Charité (62–3), as well as the influence on L’Arche prayer of Brother Roger and the Taizé community (190).

21 Brown and Vanier, “‘Your Questions Come, I Sense, from Your Loneliness.’”

22 Ibid.

23 Steve Newroth tells the story of founding L’Arche in Canada in Whitney-Brown, Sharing Life. For clarity, Newroth used as a singular last name will always refer in this chapter to Steve Newroth. Ann Newroth will be refered to by both her first and last names.

24 The Orange Society in Ontario has held strongly pro-Protestant annual marches for more than a century. “Orange Societies, in one form or another, have been in existence in various parts of the world since 1688, when Prince William of Orange came to England, at the request of a coalition of parties, to defend “the liberties of Englishmen and the Protestant Religion. These societies were organized so that people of like mind might join together to support and maintain those principles” (Grand Orange Lodge of Canada, “Our Historical Beginnings”).

25 Personal email with Steve Newroth. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotations from Newroth, and the account of L’Arche Daybreak’s founding and early days, are from personal emails..

26 Steve Newroth recounts, “On one occasion a high-level Catholic priest volunteered to concelebrate with an Anglican priest. It was a great mass and we all felt very good about it. There were no repercussions. But it happened only once.”

27 This paragraph and all further quotations are based on a personal ­conversation with Bob (Robert) Smith, Vancouver, BC, 9 May 2011.

28 Quotation and the account of Shorten’s connection with L’Arche Daybreak come from a personal conversation with Robert Shorten by telephone, Victoria, BC, 27 September 2015.

29 Did being part of L’Arche mean “ecumenical” inclusion into the dominant Roman Catholic ethos? Part of what is interesting about the painful exclusion of Protestants is the way in which those moments are similar to experiences of people with intellectual disabilities who were excluded from wider Canadian culture, often not out of malice but insensitivity. Decades later, debate around the meaning of “inclusion” continues in many contexts, not just in terms of Christian denominations. L’Arche posted a booklet titled “Beyond Inclusion” on its website around a decade ago. From the 1930s on, the United Church was officially committed to “inclusive Christian community.” I don’t know who was in mind for that inclusion. It might have been a radical gesture at the time, even though now the whole idea of inclusion is problematic if it leaves what Massey would call the power-geometries of the space unaddressed. Of course, as many have wryly observed, inclusion is better than exclusion. Kristeva recommends replacing “inclusion” with “interaction” (Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 224).

30 Psychoanalyst Ann Shearer recalls an international conference in 1972 where speakers praised the revolutionary possibilities of normalization, until Vanier “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.” See Shearer, “Jean Vanier: A Personal Tribute.” See also the critique of normalization in Moore, “Making No Apologies for Our Differences,” 6–7.

31 Wolfensberger, ed., A Selective Overview of Jean Vanier and the Movement of L’Arche.

32 Roeher, “Preface.” A Selective Overview of Jean Vanier and the Movement of L’Arche, i.

33 Newroth, “Daybreak, Jean Vanier and L’Arche,” 3.

34 Ibid, 7.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid, 9.

37 Ibid.

38 Wolfensberger, “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” 11–12.

39 Ibid, 11.

40 Ibid, 12. It seems Wolfensberger was referring to others, however. Looking back, Steve Newroth comments, “I certainly don’t remember Wolf ever dancing. He was so much in his head it is hard to think of him having such emotion as King David.”

41 Ibid, 12.

42 Ibid.

43 In “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” Wolfensburger does flag two potential problems. First, “once a person has realized that he can learn and gain by the presence of the retarded … then one will be tempted to keep the retarded in their state of retardation” (16). Second, will L’Arche be able to maintain its “initial exuberance and identity” when “the overpowering charismatic influence of the person of Jean Vanier … is no longer on the scene?” (16). He notes that “later leaders might blindly perpetuate the forms of the system, but not the dynamism of its founder” (17). These cautions remain relevant, though he perhaps underestimates the crucial leadership of the core members in establishing and maintaining the exuberance, identity, and dynamism of L’Arche.

44 Quotation from a personal conversation with Sue Mosteller, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 8 February 2013. All further quotations from Mosteller are from this conversation.

45 Quotation from a personal conversation with Bruce McLeod, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 12 April 2011. All further quotations from McLeod are from this conversation.

46 Vanier, Our Life Together, 151. Consider also Sue Mosteller’s further reflections on the relationship between L’Arche and the United Church, and the importance of retreats: “that had people from different backgrounds and traditions than just Catholics. Through those things we grew close to the United Church because of our connection at Avoca and with George Morrison … Out of that grew this real connection with the United Church in Richmond Hill which has had a lot of ups and downs over the years but which has been an incredibly rich gift.”

47 A section title in Shepherd, “Church of the Margins,” insists: “Resist the urge to unify” (142). Shepherd uses the work of postcolonial theologian Kwok Pui-lan who warns that an overemphasis on unity can move towards uniformity. Pui-lan affirms the Church image of one body with many members. Fortunately then, most members of L’Arche are stubbornly themselves, experts in resisting any kind of unity that reduces diversity (as Lois Wilson observes). The unity that Vanier prays for is to be united in love for God and in commitment to each other as God’s people, not some kind of impossible uniformity.

48 See Newroth’s chapter on the founding of L’Arche Daybreak in Whitney-Brown, Sharing Life.

49 Quotations from a conversation with Doug Graves, Louise Cummings, and Dan Kirkegaard recorded in Tsawwassen, BC, 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Graves are from this conversation.

50 In keeping with the stance of quiet, often anonymous support of worthwhile projects, the United Church does not have a central authority structure like the churches with bishops. Graves added with amusement, “We had a meeting with Jean Vanier at the International Church Leaders group, and he was talking about his vision for the role of the international church. He said, ‘I want you to encourage your folk’ – he doesn’t know Protestants, and what am I supposed to do, put out an announcement? There was a Church of Scotland minister who looked at me the same way when he made that comment.”

51 Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation, 295.

52 Taylor, A Secular Age, 171–2. Taylor expands his explanation in a way that could sound like something tendered, offered, and received, something requested and provided:

The relation between practices and the background understanding behind them is therefore not one-sided. If the understanding makes the practice possible, it is also true that it is the practice which largely carries the understanding. At any time, we can speak of the ‘repertory’ of collective actions at the disposal of a given group of society. These are the common actions which we know how to undertake … The discriminations we have to make to carry these off, knowing whom to speak to and when and how, carry an implicit ‘map’ of social space, of what kinds of people we can associate with in what ways in what circumstances (Taylor, A Secular Age, 173).

This raises the question: to what degree are people on the margins of society, particularly people with intellectual disabilities, excluded from this kind of social imaginary? Again, as Newroth says about the Roman Catholic exclusion of Protestants, this may not necessarily be out of malice but thoughtlessness, insensitivity, and obliviousness. Taylor continues:

This implicit grasp of social space is unlike a theoretical description of this space, distinguishing different kinds of people and the norms connected to them. The understanding implicit in practice stands to social theory the way that my ability to get around a familiar environment stands to a (literal) map of this area. I am very well able to orient myself without ever having adopted the standpoint of overview which the map offers me. And similarly, for most of human history, and for most of social life, we function through the grasp we have on the common repertory, without benefit of a theoretical overview (Ibid.).

53 Schweitzer, “The Changing Social Imaginary of the United Church of Canada,” 282.

54 A list of L’Arche communities around the world up to 2011, each with their date of foundation, can be found in Vanier, An Ark for the Poor, 154–60. Another tale of Newroth recounts that, as the person responsible for following up with all of the new communities in Canada and the US, he became increasingly frustrated with Jean Vanier’s relaxed way of encouraging the launch of new communities wherever he went, because it left Newroth with the hard work of helping the good-hearted but often naive founders figure out logistics such as establishing a board of directors, conforming to government regulations, registering with appropriate authorities, and so on. Finally in frustration he blurted out, “Jean, you have to stop going around having babies and not taking responsibility for them!” L’Arche soon added more leadership to support “baby” communities and a process for becoming a L’Arche community. But many still hold nostalgia for the wild optimism and energy of the early 1970s.

55 Vanier, A Network of Friends, vol. 2, 1974–1983, 90–1.

56 Quotations from a personal conversation with Gordon How, recorded in Vancouver, BC, 9 May 2011. All further quotations from How are from this conversation.

57 L’Arche Shiloah was the original name for the Vancouver community. Later it was changed to L’Arche Greater Vancouver.

58 Personal email from Judith Leckie. All further quotations from Leckie are from personal emails.

59 Ibid.

60 Vanier, Our Life Together, 158–9.

61 Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” 154–5.

62 Ibid.

63 Quotation from a conversation with Eileen Glass recorded in Cowichan Bay, BC, 30 May 2013.

64 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Trangression, 27.

65 Jeff and Debra Moore’s account, and all quotations from them, come from personal emails, unless otherwise noted.

66 The phrase “cuckoo’s nest” at that time referred to the 1975 movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The movie, a fictional story of the power imbalances between patients and nursing staff in a mental hospital, won five major academy awards.

67 Moore, “Making No Apologies for Our Differences,” 6. Jeff Moore continues:

I had to get out of a deeply ingrained mind-set that had me constantly correcting and directing Keith, sometimes only in thought, but too often in deed. It became clear to me that normalization as it was commonly interpreted, was not doing justice to Keith, other people in his position, or me. The approach suggests that we cannot accept him the way he is and that he will only be accepted to the degree that he becomes ‘normal,’ which of course by our definitions he will never be … Normalization ends up rationalizing and excusing the exclusion and segregation of people rather than challenging it (ibid).

68 Ibid., 7.

69 Personal conversations with Gordon and Edith Haliburton, by telephone in June 2015. All further quotations from the Haliburtons are from these conversations.

70 The United Church’s 1997 document “Mending the World: An Ecumenical Vision for Healing and Reconciliation” resulted from this ten-year process. Earlier, at the United Church’s 34th General Council in 1992, the Interchurch Interfaith Committee presented a study document titled Toward a Renewed Understanding of Ecumenism. One of its key concepts was that “the world is in serious trouble; the churches should join with peoples of good will to work together for the cause of peace, justice and the healing of God’s creation” (quoted in United Church of Canada, “Mending the World,” 2).

71 A biography of the Moores by Acadia University professor Dr John Sumarah was published in 1989, titled On Becoming Community. See page 57 about support from their United Church.

72 I am thinking further about Massey’s theory concerning spaces “where a larger proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local” (Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” 154–5). Does her description raise the possibility of less positive relations? For example, the Moores’ experience suggested that the choices of L’Arche members in the meeting were undermined because the process was mysteriously tied to instructions from other levels of leadership. As a literary scholar, I could note the obvious literary genre of secret Roman Catholic machinations, perhaps tangled in both directions with the combination of revulsion and fascination suggested in chapter 1. Does a related theme emerge of frustration with outside agency/control – whether from the Roman Catholic church (Wolfville), or from L’Arche itself (see Enwright’s account at the end of this chapter about difficulties with L’Arche Comox Valley over core members coming to her United Church)? Those are frustrations with decisions made outside of the local context, of “extroverted” outside relations and layered agency impinging on autonomy. It is a frustration L’Arche core members know well, as Peter Rotterman at Daybreak once commiserated with me, “It’s hard when other people make decisions about your life.” These stories are again in keeping with the early L’Arche retreat experience of Cummings at Naramata, where in a United Church space, the dominant culture remained Roman Catholic, with the United Church members marginalized. In that way, experiences of inclusion/exclusion, agency/marginalization for people with intellectual disabilities have a curious echo at points in United Church experience with L’Arche. But there is an interesting reversal in the early 2000s in Winnipeg when Dennis Butcher is chosen as director, and the exclusive and explicit Roman Catholic identity of the community consciously changes and gradually expands to accept his leadership and an ecumenical vision (see further in this chapter).

73 United Church of Canada, “Mending the World,” 6. In 2018, Mary Jo Leddy could not recall ever speaking of an “ecumenical eclipse.”

74 Ibid., 7.

75 Legge, “Building Inclusive Communities of Life,” 296.

76 Porter, personal email. See stories of baptisms in chapter 4.

77 The Nouwen archive at the University of St Michael’s College in Toronto holds records of many invitations and connections.

78 Mosteller admits that for her personally, as a vowed sister of St Joseph, Nouwen’s way of reimagining traditional Roman Catholic practices was unsettling, even though Mosteller had lived for more than fifteen years in the ecumenical L’Arche Daybreak community. She recalls, “For me, as a Catholic in such a box of ‘I know what is right and I know that we’re right and I know that nobody else is right and that everybody should do it my way,’ this just cracked the walls. The walls just started to tumble and I didn’t know what to do. I loved what Henri was doing, but I just said, ‘Is it right? I mean, can you do this? Is this possible?’”

79 Lloyd Kerman’s story is told in chapter 3.

80 Quotation from a personal conversation with Keith Reynolds, recorded in Victoria, BC, 22 January 2012. All further quotations from Keith Reynolds are from this conversation.

81 Nouwen and Turner were acquainted already: in 1987, Nouwen had written the foreword to Turner’s book, Outside Looking In.

82 Excerpts from Nouwen’s letter to Turner, dated 1 April 1991, and his letter to Daybreak Council are quoted with the permission of the Henri Nouwen Legacy Trust. The letters are held in the Henri J. M. Nouwen Archives and Research Collection, University of St Michael’s College, Toronto, Ontario.

83 Shepherd, “Church of the Margins” 148.

84 Ibid.

85 Story from a personal conversation with Dennis Butcher, recorded in Winnipeg, Manitoba on 29 October 2015. All quotations from Butcher are from this conversation.

86 The Gimli retreat was in 1973, and offered about 10 per cent of spaces for United Church members. The Gimli retreat led directly to the founding of L’Arche in Winnipeg.

87 Rollason, “Café Paves the Way,” A29.

88 Story from a conversation with Dan Kirkegaard, Doug Graves, and Louise Cummings, recorded in Tsawwassen, BC, 9 May 2011. All quotations from Kirkegaard are from this conversation.

89 World Council of Churches, “A Church of All and for All,” 11, section 57.

90 Ibid., 16–17, section 87.

91 Story and quotations from a personal conversation with Lynn Godfrey, recorded in Hamilton, Ontario, 10 April 2010. All quotations from Godfrey are from this conversation.

92 Godfrey also says this about assistants:

The assistants are wonderful, and they bring life and keep us young, and they are also young! And there are all kinds of challenges with young people. This newer generation has special challenges engrained into our individualistic, self-righteous society that makes it hard to really ‘get’ community. We have quite a mixture of assistants: Roman Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, we’ve had two Jewish assistants. It’s a very mixed group. We have a good connection with Redeemer College, which was founded by the Dutch Reform church.

They send people on placements. We also get co-op placements from Waterloo and Guelph. German and Israelis have come on their alternative to military service. That’s been good for us.

93 United Church Observer, “The United Church Has a Special Role in 1973,” 10.

94 Ibid., 12.

95 Quotation from a personal conversation with Maggie Enwright, recorded in Duncan, BC, 5 December 2011. All further quotations from Enwright are from this conversation.

96 Nouwen, Adam, God’s Beloved, 30 and 126. See also Little, “Welcoming the Stranger,” 104.

97 Quoted in Shepherd, “Church of the Margins,” 145.

98 Vanier, A Cry is Heard, 119.

99 This account comes from a telephone conversation with Donna Tourneur on 27 September 2018.

100 This account comes from a telephone conversation with Jenn Power on 4 October 2018.

101 Effective 1 January 2019, the United Church of Canada reorganized itself: presbyteries and conferences had their final meetings in 2018 before being replaced by regional councils.

CHAPTER THREE

1 Kearney, On Stories, 6–7.

2 Swinton, Mowat, and Baines, “Whose Story Am I?,” 6.

3 Morris, “Transforming Able-Bodied Normativity,” 242.

4 White, introduction to Voices and Visions, vii.

5 Hutchinson quoted in Trothen, Linking Sexuality and Gender, 41.

6 Quotation from a personal conversation with Beverley Milton and Ralph Milton, recorded in Victoria, BC, 19 January 2014. All further quotations from Beverley or Ralph Milton are from this conversation.

7 Quotation from a personal conversation with Keith Reynolds, recorded in Victoria, BC, 22 January 2012. All further quotations from Reynolds are from this conversation.

8 Cushing, “(Story-)Telling It Like It Is: How Narratives Teach at L’Arche,” 165.

9 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream: Disability Revisited,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 225. Kristeva also thanks Vanier for helping her son find a home in Paris with the L’Arche partner Association Simon de Cyrene (229).

10 Ibid., 225.

11 Ibid., 227. See chapter 4 for further discussion of how Kristeva analyzes the way in which non-disabled people and society react to the disabled person not only as a sign of mortality but as the fearful figure of a wound that agitates their own primal psychic wound.

12 The United Church website states: “A New Creed is a brief and well-loved affirmation of faith used widely in our worship (1968; rev. 1980, 1995). The 20 Articles of Doctrine; A Statement of Faith, 1940; A New Creed; and A Song of Faith are recognized as standards subordinate to the primacy of scripture in the doctrine section of the Basis of Union. (See The Manual, pages 11–28)” (United Church of Canada, “A New Creed”).

13 Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 154. Ricoeur is especially writing about the duty to remember the millions of people who died in the Holocaust. Among those millions were hundreds of thousands of ­people with intellectual and physical disabilities who were deemed “unworthy of living.” Ricoeur’s central point also applies to wider questions of remembrance and whose stories are, as Cushing puts it, “narrative-worthy.”

14 Burghardt, Broken, 172.

15 Peter Rotterman told this story each time he and I spoke to school groups together in 1997.

16 Arbuckle, Laughing with God, 136.

17 Ibid.

18 Cushing, “(Story-)Telling It Like It Is: How Narratives Teach at L’Arche,” 166.

19 Todd, “A Eulogy for Thelus – 15 October, 2014, by her friend Anne Todd.”

20 Quotation from a personal conversation with Linda Butler and Warren McDougall, recorded in Richmond Hill, Ontario, 14 April 2011. All further quotations from Butler or McDougall are from this conversation.

21 Eulogy for Thelus George provided by Alan Cook in a personal email.

22 Madeline Burghardt, “Brokenness/Transformation,” n.p.

23 Ibid.

24 Wolfensberger, “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” 16. United Church minister Doug Graves makes a similar point in chapter 4.

25 Vanier, “The Vision of Jesus: Living Peaceably in a Wounded World,” 63–4.

26 For example, writer Anne Lamott read on a radio show the story of the infant son of friends, “a baby born so damaged that he died at five months old” (Bird by Bird, 189). His parents appreciated it, and Lamott explains that “even though their son will always be alive in their hearts … – and maybe this is the only way we really have anyone – there is still something to be said for painting portraits of the people we have loved, for trying to express those moments that seem so inexpressibly beautiful, the ones that change and deepen us” (192).

27 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 607.

28 All quotations in this paragraph from Cushing, “(Story-)Telling It Like It Is,” 161–3.

29 Cummings holds decades of memories and reflection on L’Arche. She brought Lynn Godfrey into L’Arche. She helped orient Ian Macdonald into his L’Arche ministry. Doug Graves speaks highly of her. She has led retreats across Canada for L’Arche. She has been hugely influential in connecting L’Arche and the United Church since 1973.

30 Quotations from a conversation with Louise Cummings, Doug Graves, and Dan Kirkegaard recorded in Vancouver, BC, 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Cummings are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

31 Cummings, “A Lively Parable,” 17.

32 Quotation from a personal conversation with Mary Bastedo, recorded in Richmond Hill, Ontario, 6 February 2013. All further quotations from Bastedo are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

33 Burrows, Hope Lives Here names Mary Bastedo on page 121.

34 Arbuckle, Laughing with God, 137.

35 Mosteller, Body Broken, Body Blessed, 24. See also pages 19–28 for a more complete story of Lloyd Kerman’s life in L’Arche, as well as a photo of Kerman and Michael Arnett.

36 Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 123.

37 Cushing is quoted in Scrivener, “50 Years On,” n.p.

38 Arbuckle, Laughing with God, 137.

39 Quotations from a conversation with Doug Graves, Louise Cummings, and Dan Kirkegaard recorded in Vancouver, BC, 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Graves are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

40 “Creating God, We Give You Thanks,” Hymn 292, in United Church of Canada, Voices United, 292.

41 Community pastors had been part of L’Arche from the beginning. Vanier details the specific role of spiritual guides, the “priest or ordained minister” in Community and Growth, 2nd revised ed., 240–8. In Canada, Henri Nouwen was pastor of L’Arche Daybreak for a decade, creating a pastoral team for ministry to the community. After Nouwen’s death, Daybreak’s pastor was a layperson.

42 Quotations from a conversation with Dan Kirkegaard, Louise Cummings, and Doug Graves recorded in Vancouver, BC, 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Kirkegaard are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

43 Swinton, Mowat, and Baines, “Whose Story Am I?,” 6.

44 Harshaw, God Beyond Words, 18.

45 Quotation from a personal conversation with Ian Macdonald, recorded in Victoria, BC, 23 January 2012. All further quotations from Macdonald are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

46 In an interview, Jean Vanier uses a similar image to suggest a path to renewed life: “And then the prophetic cry of the deviant group becomes a cause of change, and a cause of salvation. Because resistance to change is a form of death. People will eventually suffocate themselves inside of their culture, inside of their riches. Whereas the deviant, or those who appear rather as deviant and marginal, are crying for openness, crying for change. In a way what they are saying is: break down your barriers, come out from behind your walls, because behind your walls you are going to die” (Vanier, “The Prophetic Cry,” 80). Perhaps this is a good image for a church that has been contemplating its imminent death for many decades now, because it is encouraging: the work on reconciliation and the intercultural efforts of the United Church are precisely trying to listen and respond to the kind of prophetic cry that Vanier identifies. If his intuition is correct, these United Church initiatives are life-giving as well as community-building.

47 United Church of Canada, “Leadership from the Margins.”

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Vanier, “The Vision of Jesus,” 75.

51 Swinton, Mowat, and Baines, “Whose Story Am I?,” 7.

52 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 88.

53 Ibid., 94. Bakhtin continues that laughter “liberates from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years; fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power. It unveils the material bodily principle in its true meaning. Laughter opened men’s eyes on that which is new, on the future” (ibid.).

54 Ibid. Bakhtin continues with this interesting observation about the relationship between carnival laughter, seriousness, and fear:

It was understood that fear never lurks behind laughter (which does not build stakes) and that hypocrisy and lies never laugh but wear a serious mask. Laughter created no dogmas and could not become authoritarian; it did not convey fear but a feeling of strength. It was linked with the procreating act, with birth, renewal, fertility, abundance. Laughter was also related to food and drink and people’s earthly immortality, and finally it was related to the future of things to come and was to clear the way for them. Seriousness was therefore elementally distrusted and trust was placed in festive laughter. (95)

55 See the discussion of Vanier and Aristotle’s understanding of pleasure in chapter 1.

56 Vanier, Community and Growth: Our Pilgrimage Together, 207–8.

57 Quotation from a personal conversation with Gary Patterson, recorded in Victoria, BC, 19 January 2014. All further quotations from Patterson are from this conversation.

58 Quotation from a personal conversation with Lynn Godfrey, recorded at L’Arche Hamilton, 10 April 2010. All further quotations from Godfrey are from this conversation.

59 Vanier, “The Fragility of L’Arche and the Friendship of God,” 37.

60 Excerpts from Whitney-Brown, “The Club,” 13–14.

61 Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd revised ed., 317.

62 Ibid., 172.

63 Bill’s turkey joke is told in the preface to this book.

64 Vanier, Made for Happiness, 184–7.

65 Vanier quoted in Whitney-Brown, introduction to Jean Vanier, Essential Writings, 50.

66 Vanier, Becoming Human, 99.

67 Swinton, Mowat, and Baines, “Whose Story Am I?,” 16.

68 Both Swinton and Greig discuss ways that people with intellectual disabilities can help others slow down: see chapter 4.

69 Macdonald, “My Journey.”

70 Kenneth Ian Macdonald, 28 March 1945 – 6 March 2016. Douglas B. Graves, 13 Dec 1944 – 23 March 2016.

71 Macdonald family, “K. Ian Macdonald Official Obituary.”

CHAPTER FOUR

1 Vanier, “Remarks of Jean Vanier upon Receiving the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award,” 2.

2 Quotation from a personal conversation with John Swinton, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 16 July 2013. All further quotations from Swinton are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

3 Richard Kearney, On Stories, 3.

4 Erevelles, “Signs of Reason,” 58.

5 For example, see Fineman, The Autonomy Myth, and Scully, “Disability and Vulnerability,” 212–21.

6 The stories of Doug Graves, Ian MacDonald, Lloyd Kerman, and Thelus George were told in chapter 3.

7 Vanier, personal email to me on 5 December 2011.

8 Tataryn and Truchan-Tataryn, Discovering Trinity in Disability, 114.

9 Ibid, 115.

10 Quotation from a personal conversation with Linda Butler and Warren McDougall, recorded in Richmond Hill, Ontario, 14 April 2011. All further quotations from Butler or McDougall are from this conversation.

11 This story and these quotations are from a telephone conversation with Joan Vogel on 18 November 2018.

12 United Church of Canada, “Prayers.”

13 United Church of Canada, “Leadership from the Margins.”

14 Shogren, et al., “Causal Agency Theory,” 61.

15 Ibid., 62.

16 Ibid., 55.

17 Scully, “Disability and Vulnerability” argues that every person depends on shared social supports, infrastructure, and resources (214–17).

18 Moore, “Making No Apologies for Our Differences,” 5.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 7.

21 Ibid., 7–8.

22 Ibid., 8. Keith and Jeff Moore’s strong relationship as fellow members of their L’Arche community provides a conducive milieu for Keith’s abilities to flourish. However, even when the milieu is less nurturing, people with intellectual disabilities can prove to be much more resilient agents than their caregivers may suspect. Professor of psychology Mark Rapley in The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability analyzes data of interactions in group homes between staff and people with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities. He discerns in these interactions an unexpectedly proficient capacity of people with intellectual disabilities to manage these interactions: “What is immediately visible in the interactions examined here, then, is the sophisticated management, in interaction, by people defined by their ‘incompetence,’ of issues of power, membership and its entitlements, and their status as competent human beings. The negotiation of this co-membership with staff – who can frequently be seen to work to withhold it – is managed in a variety of ways and … these ways are often subtle, sophisticated and, ironically invisible to ‘normal’ interlocutors” (143). Rapley’s research and analysis testify to the capacities of people with intellectual disabilities to engage interactions for their own best interests. That such capacities are not always recognized can make them secret agents in a society that tends to occlude them.

23 Vanier, “The Prophetic Cry,” 80.

24 This person chose to be identified as LY in this text.

25 Cushing and Lewis, “Negotiating Mutuality and Agency in Care-Giving Relationships with Women with Intellectual Disabilities,” 187.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 United Church of Canada. “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 607–8.

31 Eiesland, The Disabled God, 26.

32 Ibid., 98–105.

33 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 228.

34 Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement, 7. For Betcher’s thinking on disability see especially “Introduction: Telling It Slant,” in Spirit and the Politics of Disablement, 1–24.

35 Greig, Reconsidering Intellectual Disability, 106. For Greig’s discussion of being a legitimate “voice for the voiceless” see 104–6. See also Reinders, “Understanding Humanity and Disability,” 42 and 45–7.

36 Newroth, “Daybreak, Jean Vanier, and L’Arche,” 8.

37 Ibid.

38 Vanier, A Network of Friends, vol. 1, 1964–1973, 151.

39 Ibid., 152.

40 Quotation from a personal conversation with Lois Wilson, recorded at Emmanuel College, Toronto, Ontario, 18 April 2011. All further quotations from Wilson are from this conversation.

41 Erevelles, “Signs of Reason,” 58.

42 Quotation from a personal conversation with Lynn Godfrey, recorded in Hamilton, Ontario, 10 April 2010. All further quotations from Godfrey are from this conversation.

43 In my research, many United Church people told stories about their pleasure in being welcomed in L’Arche, specifically by people with disabilities. Lois Wilson emphasized the remarkable gift of welcome that she enjoyed whenever she visited L’Arche. The point is also made by Maggie Enwright (introduction), Gary Paterson (chapter 3), Linda Butler (chapter 4, below) and others. Stories of this kind of welcome are intriguingly counter-cultural. Maria Garvey, the founder of L’Arche in Belfast, now leads workshops for people in leadership in a range of fields including politics and business, and she attests to the transformative power and value of feeling unconditionally welcomed just for being, not because of accomplishments or usefulness. Obviously, I do not wish to perpetuate a reductive stereotype that every person with intellectual disabilities is always welcoming, but I also don’t want to devalue or underestimate the significance of these many profound stories of welcome.

44 For extensive discussions of carnival in general see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 1–26, 171–90, and Bahktin, Rabelais and His World, 1–58, 254–6.

45 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10.

46 Ibid.

47 Quotation from a personal conversation with Ian Macdonald, recorded in Victoria, BC, on 23 January 2012. All further quotations from Macdonald are from this conversation unless otherwise identified.

48 Charles Taylor, “Transcendent Humanist in a Secular Age,” 85–6.

49 Babcock, The Reversible World, 29. Babcock provides a thorough literary, anthropological, and cultural analysis of how symbolic inversion functions and how it upturns and destabilizes the ostensible permanence of social ordering (13–36 and 95–116).

50 Ibid., 29.

51 Macdonald, Living Waters, 18.

52 See Doug Graves’s account in chapter 3 of how his experience in L’Arche influences his process for decision-making with his United Church congregation. John Swinton explores what he calls “the gift of slowness” in Becoming Friends of Time (72–5). See also Jason Reimer-Greig, “The Slow Journey towards Beatitude.” Jean Vanier has noted that “retard” is a beautiful term in music, changing the pacing by slowing the tempo. I live in Cowichan Bay, North America’s first “cittaslow” or “slow city”: social movements such as cittaslow or the slow food movement reveal the desire of many for the pleasures of slower, simpler lives. Perhaps it is time for a slow people movement.

53 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10.

54 Quotation from a personal conversation with Gary Paterson, recorded at Victoria, BC, on 19 June 2014. All further quotations from Paterson are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.

55 Hall, “For Allon White,” 291.

56 Ibid.

57 Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses, 170–71.

58 Quoted in the introduction. Quotation from a personal conversation with Jean Vanier, recorded at L’Arche in Trosly-Breuil, France, March 2017.

59 Vanier, Befriending the Stanger, 41.

60 Vanier, Becoming Human, 39.

61 Vanier, “The Vision of Jesus,” 74.

62 See Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Jean Vanier Opens First L’Arche House.” This interview of Vanier in 1964 was broadcast in early 1965. See also, for example: in 1967, Flemington, narrator and director, “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed”; in 1969, Vanier, In Weakness, Strength, 18–26; in 1971, Vanier, Eruption to Hope, 39–50; in 1988, Vanier, The Broken Body, 1–113; in 1997, Vanier, Our Journey Home, vii–xvi and 3–79; in 2008, Vanier, Jean Vanier: Essential Writings, 121–51; in 2013, Vanier, Sign of the Times, 52–72 and 94–124.

63 World Council of Churches, “A Church of All and for All,” 6 (section 28). This is also quoted in United Church of Canada, “Open and Accessible,” 179.

64 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 609. For a complex and nuanced exploration of the concept of vulnerability, see Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, eds., Vulnerability. The word “vulnerable” is important to Jean Vanier as well: see, for example, Images of Love, Words of Hope, 12–18. Its Latin root “vulnus” means “wound” and Vanier often reflects on how each person lives with being wounded. For example, see Community and Growth, 2nd revised ed., 35–7.

65 Vanier, Jean Vanier: Essential Writings, 100–1.

66 Vanier, Our Journey Home, xii–xiii.

67 Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd revised ed.,125.

68 Ibid. Vanier continues by naming the unique agency of someone who can intervene to provoke laughter and lighten the heavy mood. Vanier himself has often taken this role in community: “So another person, either consciously, or unconsciously under the inspiration of the Spirit must absorb the aggression. They may do it by playing the fool. Then the aggression is gradually transformed and the crackle of tension is dissipated in the light of laughter” (Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd revised ed., 125).

69 Vanier, Our Journey Home, xii–xiii.

70 Brooks, “Now Is the Time to Talk about the Power of Touch,” A27.

71 Morris, “Transforming Able-Bodied Normativity,” 241–2.

72 Vanier, Befriending the Stranger, 64.

73 Vanier, Our Journey Home, 76.

74 Ibid.

75 Julia Kristeva was introduced in chapters 1 and 3. She engaged Vanier in an exchange of letters in 2009–10. In subsequent articles, Kristeva delves into the nature of disability based not only upon philosophical inquiry and psychological insights, but also upon her direct experience as the mother of an adult son with intellectual disabilities, and her work as a disability rights activist and president of the French government’s National Council on Disability. See Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, and Kristeva, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and … Vulnerability.” For analysis and critique of Kristeva’s thinking on disability see: Bunch, “Julia Kristeva, Disability, and the Singularity of Vulnerability”; Dohmen, “Disability as Abject”; and Grue, “Rhetorics of difference.”

76 Kristeva, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and … Vulnerability,” 251.

77 Ibid.

78 See Kristeva’s 1982 book, Powers of Horror. For discussion of Kristeva on abjection, see: Burghardt, “Common Frailty, Constructed Oppression,” 561–2, and Dohmen, “Disability as Abject.”

79 Kristeva, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and … Vulnerability,” 251.

80 Vanier, Our Life Together, 343.

81 Ibid.

82 Vanier, “The Vision of Jesus,” 67.

83 Quotation from a personal conversation with Maggie Enwright, recorded in Duncan, BC, on 5 December 2011. All further quotations from Enwright are from this conversation.

84 Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 187. Reynolds provides further theological explanation: “Living with impairments is a way, like other ways, of being human that it is fully capable in most instances of giving and receiving love, and thus capable of living life’s creative possibilities under the image of a God who loves, draws near, and suffers with” (187). Later in his book, Reynolds considers weakness in relation to God, taking up Paul’s scriptural affirmation that “God’s power is made complete and perfected in weakness” (210) from which it follows that “as God embraces human weakness and inability in Christ, we are empowered to welcome weakness in others as God’s beloved” (210). Finally he adds, “And conversely it is by encountering weakness in another that we come to discover it in ourselves as God’s beloved” (210). Reynolds’s thinking here is close to Vanier’s understanding.

85 Vanier, Becoming Human, 45.

86 Vanier is clear about identifying the social sufferings inflicted on people with intellectual disabilities. See, for example, Vanier, Becoming Human, 45–6 and 76–8 and Vanier, Our Journey Home, xii–xiii, and 5–6.

87 United Church of Canada, “Open and Accessible,” 176. In addition, United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” elaborates further: “The social model of disability, an alternative to the medical model, defines disability not as what a person can or cannot do, but how people with disabilities are treated by society. To have a disability is to experience prejudice and exclusion, called ableism. If disability is understood as socially constructed, then the barriers ­society sets up become an issue of justice” (605).

88 Vanier, “Jean Vanier in Conversation with Pamela Wallin.” This is a transcript of Vanier, “Becoming Human,” Pamela Wallin Show.

89 Vanier, “Transforming our Hearts.” This text is Vanier’s remarks for the Templeton Prize News Conference. See also Vanier, “Jean Vanier Templeton Talk,” which is the text of his address for the Templeton Prize ceremony. His actual address included further spontaneous reflections, which you can view in the filmed ceremony: Vanier, “2015 Templeton Prize Ceremony for Jean Vanier at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Full Version.”

90 Cushing is quoted in Scrivener, “50 Years on L’Arche Harnessing the Power of ‘With.’” See also Vanier, “2015 Templeton Prize Ceremony for Jean Vanier at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Full Version.” In this video, people with disabilities literally “bring something to the table,” as Cushing puts it. The formal and staid Templeton Prize 2015 ceremony at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, erupts with a dynamic tableau around a table at the front of the church, where ­people with disabilities, Jean Vanier, and other friends join in symbolic feasting, lively music, and dancing.

91 Cushing quoted in Scrivener, “50 Years on L’Arche Harnessing the Power of ‘With.’”

92 Vanier, Community and Growth. 2nd revised ed., 263.

93 Quotation from a personal conversation with Doug Graves, Louise Cummings, and Dan Kirkegaard, recorded at Tsawaasen, BC, on 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Graves are from this conversation.

94 Vanier, “Interview with Jean Vanier,” 12.

95 Jones, “Church is for Everybody,” 25.

96 Ibid.

97 Scully identifies a similar problem in discussing vulnerability: “One of the difficulties of theorizing vulnerability, then, is that some people are thinking in terms of vulnerability as ontological, an unavoidable part of the fabric of all human life, while others are using it in a more limited sense to describe a state that relates to only some people, or in only some contexts, and that, in principle at least, can be avoided. Each of these understandings pushes some features of vulnerability to the fore while necessarily obscuring others” (Scully, “Disability and Vulnerability,” 206).

98 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 227.

99 Ibid. The World Council of Churches 2003, “A Church of All and for All – An Interim Statement” also critiques the notion of defining disability in terms of weakness. It asks: “Is disability really something that shows the weaknesses in human life? Is that in itself a limiting and oppressive interpretation? Do we not have to take another, more radical step? Is disability really something that is limiting? Is the language of disability as a ‘loss’ an adequate one at all, despite it being a stage of the journey undertaken by persons with disabilities themselves? Is a language of plurality not more adequate? To live with a disability is to live with other abilities and limitations that others do not have?” (5).

100 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 227.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

103 Ibid.

104 Ibid., 224, 228, 223.

105 Ibid., 228. Kristeva’s orientation as both a philosopher and a disability activist is seen in her beginning from a human rights principle that “the respect of rights requires firstly and before anything else the recognition and the respect for the singular person” (223).

106 Vanier, “Interview with Jean Vanier.”

107 Burghardt, “Brokenness / Transformation,” np.

108 Ibid.

109 Ibid. Burghardt draws upon both disability studies critiques and her own experience as a L’Arche assistant. While she commends L’Arche for its counter-cultural values and focus on relationships, she also points to “criticisms directed at L’Arche which suggest that its discourse concerning people with disabilities has potentially oppressive connotations, and that its primarily insular nature has resulted in a lack of noticeable engagement with broader political concerns.” See my chapter 3 for Burghardt’s analysis of how telling stories about people with disabilities can end up objectifying them in a way that undercuts their own personhood and singularity.

110 Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 23–6.

111 Vanier, Signs of the Times, 57.

112 Vanier, Becoming Human, 98.

113 Vanier, Jean Vanier: Essential Writings, 109. In addition, see Vanier, The Poor at the Heart of L’Arche, 17. See also Whitney-Brown, introduction to Sharing Life.

114 Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 35.

115 Vanier, Made for Happiness, 44. Vanier goes on to state that “we should not make the mistake, however of thinking that pleasure is the end, for the end is the act itself. Rather, pleasure is given when the end is fully attained, as a bonus or consequential end” (ibid., 44–5). For discussion of Aristotle and Vanier’s understanding of pleasure see ibid., 37–75. See also Vanier, Signs of the Times, 57–9, which includes some critique of Aristotle as defining the human person as a rational being rather than a being centred in the heart. In addition, see my chapter 1 for more discussion of Vanier’s thinking on pleasure.

116 Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 35.

117 Ibid., 36–7. Kristeva seems to be less focused on sexual abuse, and more on the way in which unconscious desires on the part of caregivers can eclipse the singularity and agency of the vulnerable person. But her straightforward challenges about boundaries and contradictory desires resonate in our present historical moment when churches and L’Arche communities are all living with a heightened awareness of the potential for abuse and its debilitating effect on trust and agency. The United Church’s 2015 “Theologies of Disabilities Report” recommends “the movement from feeling threatened to feeling trust needs to occur within communities of faith” (United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 609). Both the United Church of Canada and all L’Arche communities around the world have recently strengthened education, safeguards, and policies around sexual abuse.

118 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 609.

119 Quotation from a personal conversation with Dennis Butcher, recorded in Winnipeg, 29 October 2015. All further quotations from Butcher are from this conversation.

120 United Church of Canada, “Open and Accessible,” 181.

121 Finding ways to welcome the diverse gifts of people of many abilities not only fosters community, but also fulfills the Church at large. Defining the Church as “the mutual exchange of gifts given by the power of the Spirit,” theologian Thomas Reynolds points out that “such gifts reside in all people, precisely amidst various disabilities and alleged limitations” (Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 245–6).

122 In “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and … Vulnerability,” Kristeva goes on to champion vulnerability, another value in which she and Vanier and the churches all have contiguous interest. An important ongoing project for Kristeva is the articulation of a new humanism. She declares, “By adding a fourth term (vulnerability) to the humanism inherited from the Enlightenment (liberty, equality, and fraternity), analytical listening inflects these three toward a concern for sharing, in which and thanks to which desire and its twin, suffering, make their way toward a constant renewal of the self, the other, and connection” (Kristeva, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and … Vulnerability,” 264). She is suggesting that vulnerability completes the classic Enlightenment societal values of liberty, equality, and fraternity and collectively orients them towards sharing and renewal. This suggests a political dimension of vulnerability as a communal value like fraternity, liberty, and equality. See this whole article for Kristeva’s discussion of vulnerability as integral to human identity. Kristeva poses the fundamental question: “Coming from different horizons, a question is emerging: how do we inscribe in the concept of the human itself – and therefore in philosophy and political practice – the constitutive part of the destructivity, vulnerability, and imbalance that are integral parts of the identity of the human race and, singularly, of the speaking subject?” (264).

123 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 227.

124 Ibid., 228.

125 Ibid., 229.

126 Vanier, “Remarks of Jean Vanier upon Receiving the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award,” 2.

127 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 209.

128 Vanier, Signs of the Times, 57.

129 Ibid., 58. Kristeva and Vanier’s different perspectives on pleasure result in her focusing on the complexities and contradictions of initial interior drives, while Vanier discovers pleasure in the fulfillment of activity that is going well. They both begin with affirming the crucial importance of self-knowledge, but then Kristeva looks to pleasure as rooted in interior desires that draw you into yourself, while Vanier sees pleasure as essentially an enticement to get over yourself.

130 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” 229.

131 Ibid. Kristeva connects the film Untouchables and Vanier not only because of a shared vision, but also because the film was produced with the support of the Association Simon de Cyrene, which since 2005 has been in partnership with L’Arche in France. See Association Simon de Cyrene, “Des liens étroits avec l’Arche.” Association Simon de Cyrene is primarily directed towards making homes in which “able-bodied people live alongside others who have been severely disabled by an accident” with the intention that the shared “houses cultivate fraternal, open, realistic and sympathetic relationships” (Association Simon de Cyrene Foundation, “Places to Live Together”).

132 Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” 457.

133 Shildrick, “Border Crossings,” 143.

134 Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” 457.

135 Ibid., 463.

136 The power of the Spirit Movers to touch hearts and erase social distinction was also seen at World Youth Day celebrations in 2002 in Toronto when they danced for Pope John Paul II and thousands of young people. Zenit: The World Seen from Rome, a daily Catholic online news source, remarked on the dancers’ capacity to touch the frail Pope, noting how “John Paul II was moved by the sight of L’Arche’s young men [sic] on Thursday, when the ‘Spirit Movers,’ an artistic group of the mentally handicapped [sic], performed a choreography” (“L’Arche Founder Tells Youths to “Learn from the Weak”).

137 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 97.

138 Eales, “(Dis)quiet in the Peanut Gallery,” 152.

139 Ibid.

140 Ibid.

141 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10.

142 Babcock, The Reversible World, 14.

143 Shildrick “Border Crossings,” 142.

144 Quotation from a personal conversation with Carl MacMillan, recorded in Richmond Hill, Ontario, on 14 April 2011. All further quotations from MacMillan are from this conversation.

145 This account is deliberately left anonymous.

146 Charles Taylor, “Transcendent Humanist in a Secular Age,” 86.

147 The core member in this account is deliberately left anonymous.

148 Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 103.

149 Quotation from a personal conversation with Louise Cummings, Doug Graves, and Dan Kirkegaard, recorded in Tsawwassen, BC, on 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Cummings are from this conversation.

150 Quotation from an interview with Mary Hillhouse by Alex Richmond in Vancouver, BC, on 23 November 2017. All further ­quotations from Hillhouse are from this interview.

151 Hillhouse, Family.

152 United Church of Canada, “Mending the World,” 7.

153 “The Gardening” was written in April 2012 and included in Hillhouse’s book, Family. The transcript of Hillhouse’s 2017 interview by Alex Richmond for this book included the text of “The Gardening.”

154 Reinders, “Understanding Humanity and Disability,” 37.

155 Ibid., 48.

156 From a related perspective, professors Myroslaw Tataryn and Maria Truchan-Tataryn also claim the full value of people with profound intellectual disabilities in God’s creation (Tataryn and Truchan-Tataryn, Discovering Trinity in Disability, 114). To Reinders’s assertion that there is no purpose for the human external to its being as God’s creature, they would add the mystery of full spiritual belonging.

157 Flemington, “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed.”

158 Vanier, Be Not Afraid, 80.

159 Vanier, Images of Love, Words of Hope, 57.

160 Vanier, Becoming Human, 135.

AFTERWORD

1 I am using “singular” in the way Kristeva commends, affirming every person as unique and irreplaceable. See chapter 4.

2 See Dorrell, “Experiences of Racism Break into the Open.” This description of the Final Decision Session concludes, “The Moderator, the Right Rev. Jordan Cantwell, thanked all those who offered their stories, saying, … ‘You have given us a gift; we as a church need to understand how to open up that gift fully. We’re not going to get there tonight or tomorrow.’ Before returning to business, the Moderator suggested that commissioners take the time to let this rare gift soak in rather than rushing to finish up with the closing proposals and moving on to closing worship and the installation of the new Moderator. This small step on the road to transformation may have been a true kairos moment for the church.”

3 Elliott, “General Council Special Report,” 35.

4 There are many backstories of intentional times of sharing and storytelling at GC43. The workshop “Disability and the Church: Re-Imagining Being Together,” held on Saturday 21 July 2018, was described as “addressing efforts to widen the scope of participation in the church, particularly to more fully include people with disabilities (including visible and invisible disabilities).” Colin Phillips, a lecturer in the school of social work at Ryerson University in Toronto with a doctorate in policy studies, made history as the first person who uses a wheelchair and communicates via a word board to be nominated for moderator of the United Church. “While my disability is integral to who I am, it does not define me or my call. I know this will challenge, maybe even anger, some in the church, but I’m hoping it will deepen our understanding of inclusion,” he said (United Church Observer, July–August 2018). The opening ceremony culminated in a procession from the “woods” into our “village” (the plenary space) where worship was led by thirty-year old United Church minister Miriam Spies of Hamilton Conference, the UCC representative to the World Council of Churches, who preached from her wheelchair: “I worry that we are quick to say, ‘Oh yes, Jesus, we’ll feed them,’ but then don’t accept the gifts the ‘hungry,’ those on the margins, bring to the feast. I worry that we say we seek right relations with Indigenous peoples yet try to water down our responsibilities. I worry that we use people to show how diverse we are but then ignore their struggles of daily service.” She added, “we forget that we are not alone. We forget that we have gifts to offer, but we don’t have everything and we need companions on this pilgrimage” (Spies, “You Feed Them!” Sermon for 43rd General Council Opening Worship). Instructions to commissioners urged “Watch for ASL interpreters making this worship accessible, enriching us with a language new to many of us.” United Church minister and intercultural observer Sharon Ballantyne spoke about using intercultural lenses to “aim for equity, live out commitments, question biases, challenge assumptions, notice who is missing and value all voices” (Monday 23 July 8:30 a.m. Livestream, beginning at 1:45:50. In her role as intercultural observer, Ballantyne later offers further comments on Tuesday 24 July, 8:30 a.m. session, 2:02 ff.) During the same morning session on Monday 23 July, Tracy Odell of Knob Hill United Church in Scarborough, Ontario, one of the presenters of the “Disability and the Church: Re-Imagining Being Together” workshop, posted an observation that “Currently GCE12 includes only sexual orientation and gender identities, racial and gender justice, and right relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Missing: people with disabilities.” Concerns about unthinking assumptions, privilege, and marginalization were also expressed by people from rural congregations, who found the proposals for restructuring the Church often were made with urban rather than rural communities in mind.

5 Peacock, Philip, “Are You Ready to Be Discombobulated.”

6 United Church of Canada, “GC43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Decision Session 5 – 11:00 am,” 46:00–51:00 of livestream.

7 All of the Final Decision Session can be viewed online at United Church of Canada, “GC43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm.” Douglas Walfall’s remarks are from 37:30–55:00 of the livestream.

8 United Church of Canada, “GC43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm,” beginning at 1:20:30 of livestream.

9 Ibid., beginning at 1:21:37 of livestream.

10 All testimonies of people who chose to speak to the motion of asking for forgiveness can be viewed at United Church of Canada, “GC43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm,” from 118:28–3:24:40 of livestream.

11 While this session explicitly asked White people to step away from the microphones and give the floor to their “racialized relations,” the final contributor was a White man, Colin Phillips, who spoke about marginalization and exclusion from the perspective of his physical disability. By the end of the session, it was clear that dismantling structures of exclusion and injustice will be long journeys that require a radical openness to unknown future possibilities. As Margit Shildrick asserts:

I am committed to the view that broadly postmodernist alternatives both more effectively analyse and deconstruct the structures that maintain those amazing normativities, and mobilise new and more creatively positive ways of thinking and feeling about difference. What many critics find intolerable is that the question of what comes next is deliberately left open … There is, in short, no programme or plan of action, no right or wrong way of proceeding, but rather so compelling a critique of the exclusionary structures of modernism that have suppressed the subjectivity and sexuality of disabled people that a call for radical transformation is the only adequate response (Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality, 170–1).

For Shildrick, as for those who intervened at GC43 to share their experience of racialization and disability, “the first stage is to think differently. What follows on from that cannot be determined in advance” (176).

12 Vanier quoted in T., “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 25.

13 Rumi, The Essential Rumi, 193–4.

14 Vanier, Life’s Great Questions, 137.

15 Vanier, Our Life Together, 459.

16 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 607.

17 Quotation from a personal conversation with Ian Macdonald, recorded in Victoria, 23 January 2012. All further quotations from Macdonald are from this conversation.

18 United Church of Canada, “GC43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm,” beginning at 2:16:00 of livestream. All of Lansdowne’s contribution is in 2:10:40–2:19:44 of the livestream.

19 Ibid., 2:16:58–2:18:16.

20 Brown and Vanier, “‘Your Questions Come, I Sense, from Your Loneliness.’”

21 Rumi, The Essential Rumi, 193.

22 John 12:1–11.

23 Faith and Sharing retreats are described in chapter 2, note 7.

24 This could not have happened without people embodying diverse life experiences. As Linda Butler notes in chapter 4, she couldn’t tell her Richmond Hill United Church congregation to dance, but the members of L’Arche could.

25 Mathias is quoted in Vanier, Our Life Together, 541–2. Many writers explore the relationship between brokenness and blessing: three books that use Vanier and L’Arche are Nouwen, Life of the Beloved; Mosteller, Body Broken, Body Blessed; and Young, Brokenness and Blessing: Towards a Biblical Spirituality.

26 United Church of Canada, “GC43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm,” 2:16:04–33 of livestream.

27 Davis, “Many Faces, One Humanity,” 24, quoted in prologue.

28 Vanier quoted in T., “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 25. For a thoughtful reflection on current similarities between Vanier’s vision and the United Church’s Mission and Service, see McGonegal, “Stories of Sacred Community.” See also McGonegal, “On Vanier, Voice, and Disability.”

29 United Church of Canada, “GC43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm,” 2:39:46–2:45:00 of livestream.