Learning to Speak Christian - Stanley Hauerwas

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to put the question. For the God they worship is not some abstraction but rather a reality known though participation in a community across time and space. What I suspect Gaita misses is the role that friendship plays in lives like that of Mother Teresa and the nun he so admires. In particular, Mother Teresa and the nun Gaita admired were not afraid to be befriended by those they served. To suggest why friendship is so important for the development of such goodness I want to introduce another life that exhibits the kind of love Gaita thinks so defining of goodness.31 The name of that life is Jean Vanier.

      Jean Vanier on Being Befriended by the Disabled

      Jean Vanier is the founder of the movement known as L’Arche. L’Arche is now a reality around the world in which people who are called mentally handicapped live with those who are not. A L’Arche home is first and foremost just that, a home. The core members of the home are the mentally handicapped. Those who are not mentally handicapped are called assistants. Assistants do not live in the home to care for the mentally handicapped. Rather they are there to learn to be with the core members in the hope that they can learn to be friends.

      In a lecture at Harvard entitled “Through Their Wounds We Are Healed,” Vanier told the story of how he, the son of a prominent family in Quebec, came to live with the mentally disabled. This is his story:

      I was thirteen when I joined the British navy during World War II. My adolescent years were taken up in the world of efficiency, controlling and commanding others. I was a technician of destruction. My last ship was the Canadian aircraft carrier, “The Magnificent.” However, after a few years, I felt called by Jesus to take another path, the path of peace. I left the navy and did a doctorate in philosophy in Paris. I started teaching philosophy at the University of Toronto. Then through a priest-friend, I had the good fortune of meeting people with mental disabilities.

      In 1964 I took from an asylum two men, Raphael and Philip, and we began to live together. I did not know I was founding the first of many L’Arche communities. I simply felt called to live with these two men who had suffered rejection and a lot of inner pain and perhaps with a few others like them. When I had begun living with them, I soon started to discover the immense pain in their hearts. When we talk of the poor, or of announcing the good news to the poor, we should never idealize the poor. Poor people are hurt; they are in pain. They can be very angry, in revolt or in depression.32

      Vanier wrote his dissertation at the Catholic Institute of Paris on Aristotle. He would later write a quite favorable book on Aristotle’s ethics but he was quite critical of Aristotle’s understanding of his characterization that friendship was possible only between equals.33 He was critical of Aristotle’s account of friendship because Aristotle failed to provide the resources necessary to account for what Vanier felt living with the mentally disabled had given him. Limited though they may be, unable to read or write, moving slowly or clumsily, many unable to speak, walk, or eat on their own, according to Vanier they have been an incredible gift to him. For if you are open to them, if you welcome them, “they give us life and lead us to Jesus and the good news.”34

      Vanier reports that when he began to live with Raphael and Philip he discovered their deep cry for communion. From their loneliness and pain they cried for love and friendship. Such a cry is often present when we visit people in institutions. Through the look in their eyes the men and women say to us, “Will you be my friend? Am I important to you? Do I have any value?” Some may be hiding away in a corner, hiding behind bars of self-hatred, still others banging their heads on the wall, but they are crying for love, friendship, and communion.35

      According to Vanier, when these people are welcomed from their world of anguish, brokenness, and depression, when they gradually discover they are loved, they are transformed. Their tense and angry bodies become relaxed and peaceful. Such discoveries Vanier says have helped him understand what it means to live in communion with someone. “Communion means accepting people just as they are, with their limits and inner pain, but also with their gifts and their beauty and their capacity to grow: to see the beauty inside of all the pain. To love someone is not first of all to do things for them, but to reveal to them their beauty and value, to say to them through our attitude: ‘You are beautiful. You are important. I trust you. You can trust yourself.’”36

      Vanier confesses that communion did not come easily to him. Taught from an early age to be first, it is not easy to be asked by Jesus to share you life with those who have little culture. Only as he began to live with Raphael and Philip did he discover the hardness in his heart. They were crying out for friendship and Vanier did not know how to respond because of the forces in him that, as he put it, “would pull him up the ladder.” Yet he tells us that over the years, the people with whom he lives in L’Arche have been teaching and healing him.

      That he has been undergoing such training leads Vanier to observe that the people who come to L’Arche because they want to serve the poor are only able to stay once they discover that they are the poor. They must discover that Jesus came to bring good news to the poor not those who serve the poor. According to Vanier if you are called to live with wounded people you must discover that God is present in the poverty and wounds of their hearts. He continues:

      God is not present in their capacity to heal but rather in their need to be healed. We can only truly love people who are different, we can only discover that difference is a treasure and not a threat, if in some way our hearts are becoming enfolded in the heart of the Father, if somewhere God is putting into our broken hearts that love that is in God’s own heart for each and every human being. For God is truly in love with people, and with every individual human being. This healing power in us will not come from our capacities and our riches, but in and through our poverty. We are called to discover that God can bring peace, compassion and love through our wounds.37

      Vanier reports that he is always moved when he reads the Gospels by how Jesus lives and acts, how he enters into relationships with each person he encounters. He asks, “Will you come with me? I love you. Will you enter into communion with me?” But his invitation to follow him is an invitation that forces us to make a choice. If you choose to follow him it means a refusal to go in a different direction. If you choose to follow Jesus you will receive the gift of love and communion, but at the same time you will discover you must say “no” to the ways of the world and accept loss.38

      Gaita wonders at the compassion Mother Teresa displays because it is without a trace of condescension. He is quite right, moreover, that to be free of condescension is remarkable because as Weil insists we do despise the afflicted though we are seldom conscious we do so. We despise them I think because, as Vanier suggests, we fear them. We fear and hate them for revealing our own weaknesses, our powerlessness, to “make them strong.” Some are even led to think in the face of our helplessness it would be better that such people not exist. Compassion, particularly when it takes the form of altruism, can become murderous.39

      Showings

      “The wonder,” that is, the wonder Gaita suggests Mother Teresa should elicit in us, is not to be directed at her but rather is the “wonder that human life could be as her love reveals it.”40 Jean Vanier would not wish that we “wonder” or react with awe in response to his life. Any wonder would rightly be in response to the humanity revealed through those who have befriended him. He and his friends reveal our humanity, a goodness, that we could not have known possible without their “showing.”

      Jesus did not answer the young man’s question concerning what deed he must do to inherit eternal life. Instead he commanded him to sell his possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow him. To learn to follow Jesus is the training necessary to become a human being.41 To be a human being is not a natural condition, but requires training. The kind of training required, moreover, has everything to do with death. To follow Jesus is to go with him to Jerusalem where he will be crucified. To follow Jesus, therefore, is to undergo a training that refuses to let death, even death at the hands of enemies, determine the shape of our living.

      To learn to live without protection is to learn to live without possessions. To be dispossessed, however, cannot be willed. To try to be dispossessed is to be possessed by the will

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