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.