Jean Vanier: The Broken and the Oppressed

May 7, 2019
Jean Vanier
Jean Vanier

On November 6, 1988, the Catholic philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian Jean Vanier delivered Harvard Divinity School’s inaugural Harold M. Wit Lecture on Living a Spiritual Life in a Contemporary Age. His topic for the first of two talks was “The Broken and the Oppressed.”

Vanier’s lectures became the basis for one of his best loved books, From Brokenness to Community. Following are some excerpts from his address, reprinted from the Harvard Gazette.

****

Sometimes I feel all this is very paradoxical—even a little bit absurd. I left my community [in Trosly-Breuil, France] yesterday. Very simple people, very beautiful people. Some can’t talk. Some can. Some talk too much! Practically none of them can write or read. And here I come to speak at Harvard to say that these people have given me life. And somewhere, I believe, they can give life to the world… maybe bring peace and salvation.... There’s so much pain everywhere, so much suffering, so much inequality. People are hiding behind the barriers of culture and wealth while other people are starving. We’re amassing armaments. We want to kill each other....

And here I’ve come to say that in this strange and wounded world, this little man who is rejected, put aside… can become a source of life....

I was 13 when I joined the British Navy during the war. All my adolescent years were taken up in a world of efficiency and the controlling and commanding of people. I was a technician of destruction. My last ship was an aircraft carrier. Then I felt called by Jesus to take another path along the road of peace.... I did a doctorate in philosophy, started teaching at the University of Toronto, and then had the very good fortune of meeting people with handicaps. I discovered the immense pain that was there....

So I took from an asylum two men, and we began to live together. I didn’t expect to start up communities.

When we talk of the poor or announcing the good news, [the Christian Gospel] to the poor, we are not here to idealize the poor. The poor are angry, the poor are in pain, they’re in depression, and they’re in revolt. So we are in no idealistic little dream world of saying nice things about Jesus to nice little people...

As you know today, in richer countries, maybe the hospital and asylum situations are possibly cleaner. But men and women who are crying out for home, for love, have been put into big situations which are not home....

[In] my experience [of] living with men and women with handicaps, a man can be blind, he can be deaf, he can have brain damage. But that isn’t the greatest pain. The I greatest pain is rejection. That is the pain of our people—to feel that nobody wants you ”like that.” To feel that you are a burden. To feel that in some ways you are seen as ugly, as dirty, and as having no value. That is the pain of the heart, and our people have had broken hearts...

[As I began to live with Raphael and Philippe (the men Vanier took from the asylum)], I was very moved by the cry for communion, the cry for love that flowed from their very loneliness and inner pain. You have all experienced that if you have gone into institutions, suddenly to be surrounded by men and women saying, "Do you want to be my friend?”—somewhere saying, "Do you love me? Am I important for you? Am I of value?”....

My experience has been very much that when we welcome somebody in this world even of 'psychosis and depression… gradually as they discover that they are wanted… we see resurrection. We see a radical transformation, from the tense body—the anger—to the gradual peacefulness that comes in the face and throughout the whole body.... As people discover that they are loved, the will to live emerges...

[Communion] is not to do things for but to be with, to discover that we belong together, that we love each other. Communion is something about accepting a person as they are—with their handicaps, with their wound, with their anger, with their inner pain, with their beauty... To love someone is not, first of all, to do things for them. To love someone is to reveal to them that they are beautiful....

To be in communion with someone is also to just walk-with them.... To walk with people in pain is not easy—not to have solutions, not to have the answers. For a lot of people in pain, there are no answers. There’s… just pain. What that person needs is somebody to walk with them—not saying, "Forget about it.” They won’t. The pain is too deep... It’s going to take » a long time for that pain to disappear. It may never disappear.

Communion is not fusion. Fusion is confusion. Communion is: you are you, and I am I. I have my identity, and you have your identity. I must be myself and you must be yourself, and we will grow....

In the navy,... I was taught how to command people. To be in communion with people did not come to me naturally.... I had also been taught to climb the ladder: promotion…  to win prizes. This is part of our civilization. We must win the prize. We’ve lost community, but we’ve won prizes...

“I had to change quite radically, because when you’ve been taught right from an early age to win and to be better than others, to be an elite—and [you] suddenly discover you’re being called by Jesus to go down the ladder and to live with uncultured people, there’s… a warfare inside of one.

As I began to walk with people like Raphael, I began to see all the hardness of my heart... It’s maybe easier to be above [people] or below them than to be in communion. To be in communion is somewhere to be vulnerable. It is to open up the heart... To walk with somebody who is in anguish and pain and to feel helpless—that is what compassion is about. But I found that that was sometimes unbearable...

And then I began at certain moments to discover things I had no inkling of: that inside of me, there were also immense forces of darkness and of hate. I had to come to terms with this: to live or be with people with severe handicaps and at some particular moments, through fatigue or whatever, to see rising up inside of one forces of hate, where I could see that I could hurt people who are weak. That, I suppose, is what pained me the most: to discover somewhere who I am....

Do we really want to know who we are and to discover all the garbage inside of us? Or shall I just continue to pretend that I’m OK and throw myself into activities where I can forget the garbage—[into] projects where I can prove that I am better than you are?