JEAN VANIER/ ABOUT THE IMPERFECT
In some ways all of us live our lives
against the backdrop of history, societal, and cultural change. If
everything we observe changes, then we humans change too. If species
evolve, then humans can't escape the same evolutionary pressures that
Charles Darwin began to explore on his expedition aboard the Beagle.
He was able to document changes
in species variations, arriving at the conclusions he did about each
variation being a step in the progression of change among the
individuals of given species. But did each variation represent a
pinnacle of development or did each step precede the next change?
Wasn't every change imperfect in its expression, leading to yet
another change?
Most, if not all,
of these little essays related to meditation/mindfulness will be
about identity. They will highlight some aspect of what it is to live
an individual life interwoven into the fabric of a larger piece of
cloth. They will be about individuals against a ground that describes
different aspects of what it is to be a human being. Charles Darwin
moves silently amidst the shadows in the scenarios we will explore.
In this essay, our protagonist is Jean Vanier (1928-2019), one whose
bulk of adulthood was devoted to the obviously imperfect (aren't all
of us imperfect in many ways?) among us. Jean was born into a life of
privilege and drift. He joined the British Royal Navy during the
Second World War and eventually served in the Royal Canadian Navy. He
said that he enjoyed being in the navy, as it gave his life structure
and he liked the challenges it presented to a sailor/soldier. In the
course of his service, he received some survivors of Nazi
concentration camps and he was touched by their destitute condition.
He left the navy and entered a contemplative community and achieved
doctoral degree in philosophy through the Catholic Church.
Unsatisfied, he visited several institutions for the mentally
disabled and responded to the appalling conditions of the men he saw
there by inviting two of them to live with him. This was the
beginning of L'Arche (the Ark) that has grown to 154 communities in
38 countries, all of them serving mentally and physically challenged
people.
In his early years,
Jean was dealing with a widespread stereotype of a disabled person as
being flawed and in some respects disposable. At least, many of the
disabled were secreted away in institutions in which they were
treated as potentially dangerous animals. They were left to age and
die in places where human connections and healthful conditions were
mostly absent. Families were pulled apart by these people thought to
be imperfect and irretrievably broken and better left forgotten and
out of sight. Vanier's life was a testament to what became a
dedication to the welfare of the forgotten and lonely, society's
castoffs. By taking in disabled people, he also lived a model of how
it might be to integrate the disabled into a community of love and
care in which each individual was embraced for specific gifts of
character and personality. Not only was he modeling what it was to be
a loving human being in service to “the other,” he was bringing
into the light those who had populated the background and
underscoring their humanity, pointing out in his own way that there
is perfect imperfection in all of us and only its manifestations
differ.
I
think Vanier was demonstrating with his own life many aspects of
moral and compassionate conduct that we face in our times. He was
solidly grounded in practical ways that were important in dealing
with individuals with many physical and emotional needs. He no doubt
discovered important expedient means that allowed him to meet the
needs of his residents. We can guess that he met substantial
community resistance and had to deal with permits and clearances,
local and state regulations. He had to enlist people with an
orientation like his own to assist with the care of individuals who
could do only limited things for themselves. But, not just in spite
of but perhaps because of these challenges, he was able to forge an
evolving community, always in flux, but stabilized and shaped by
compassion for those less fortunate. He moved from what he witnessed
as an imprisonment of human capacity to a model of love and
compassion and service.
Not
only did Vanier model what a loving and open community of acceptance
could be, he also showed how disabled people could thrive in their
own rights. He gave them hope and a sense of personal worth. None of
this could have been easy, knowing what we know about how the
disabled have had to depend on advocates to advance their rightful
places in society. There have been incalculable emotional and
practical physical barriers to deal with. Learning that all humans
have idiosyncratic rhythms and pacing widens our realm of acceptance
of the “other.” Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the
Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity,
has a chapter on disability in which he says:
“For people who
must accept a fixed external reality, the only way forward is to
adjust internal reality. Many coping strategies have a Zen
simplicity. Instead of resolving chaos, find beauty and happiness
amid chaos.
“Empathy
and compassion work best in concert with the belief that you are
still capable of shaping a meaningful life for yourself and your
family. The technical term for this is internal locus of
control, wherein one determines
one's own trajectory, rather than external locus of
control, wherein one feels
entirely subject to outside circumstances and events. To achieve an
internal locus of control, people actively seek to match their
lifestyles with their priorities …. Paradoxically, however, parents
of disabled children often achieve a feeling of control by making a
firm and positive affirmation of their lack of control. The most
important thing, often, is a belief in something bigger than one's
own experience. The most common source of coherence is religion, but
it has many other mechanisms. You can believe n God, in the human
capacity for good, in justice, or simply in love.”
Inherent in the
relationships with the disabled is often a lack of reciprocity that
one expects from others of normal capacities and this challenges our
egos. But do we not become impatient when we don't get what we think
we deserve from our normal interactions? Aren't we challenged to
understand more deeply what it is to give and serve? Aren't we
challenged to explore our own identities and perceived needs? Don't
some of these issues arise in the silence of our meditations? Can we
train our attention to recognize what it is that we are feeling in
the first instance?
In our times we are
moving along with shifts in social structures and finding ourselves
sometimes at a loss to know just what it is that is happening and how
we feel about it. It creates a climate of uncertainty and unease.
When we experience this, we often default to hard-edged positions and
prejudices because it takes less energy and takes the contradictions
and ambiguity out of the equations of an easier everyday life. It is
easier to secrete away our own dread and confusion and fear than it
is to see ourselves as imperfect and perhaps broken. Without
overlaying any of the political burdens that now infuse so many
aspects of our communal lives, we are facing challenges of
identity—our own in relation to the “other;” whether those
individuals are mentally or physically challenged, or perhaps
identify as an alternative gender, or suffer mental conditions that
are difficult for us to comprehend, or are natives of a culture we
don't easily understand. Social trends often become legislated dicta
that strain what we might think of as unjust or inequitable or
oppressive.
We are
also challenged in our social lives to work with what science has
developed in the arena of genetic engineering, raising many ethical
questions about genetically selected offspring and the possibility of
picking and choosing traits as well as eliminating undesirable or
potentially harmful genetic components. Recent debates about
legislating reproductive rights and declaring when in the cycle of
pregnancy life actually begins in the womb are other examples that
challenge us to work through the difficult issues that have
implications for our existential well-being and concepts of right and
wrong. It seems as if legislators have jumped ahead of the
philosophers who can assist us in understanding some of the deeper
considerations. Science and politics are impatient and restless
worlds.
It seems that
segregating groups of individuals imprisons everyone. When we draw
boundaries out of suspicion or fear, or categorize individuals as
less-than in one way or another, we have drawn ourselves into a realm
in which we, too, draw back from expressing our most generous human
traits of acceptance and kindness. We retreat into the background of
the social fabric instead of opening ourselves and others to an
expression of what we most long for and that is to belong. Exclusion
is painful and creates many instances of a more constricted and
diminished world that all of us have access to as humans.
This little essay
is intended to be an example of how one might encounter the
everyday-mindful on the meditation cushion. I like to think that the
meditation space is full of all possibilities and that we are not
always able to sift and filter to the extent we desire, but we can
train our attention to see what comes to us and to keep the
objects/individuals/issues in the foreground, as difficult and
troublesome as they might be. One might think this is a sure formula
for taking on burdensome baggage but, paradoxically, it is a way to
escape being manacled to the concrete walls of a personal mental
prison. We can only find this out by being curious and open and by
experimenting with possibilities. In many ways, we can be grateful
for Jean Vanier for what he was able to do to free many individuals
imprisoned in imperfections, disabilities, and differences, and to
offer all of us a way to escape our own manacles.
