We human beings have a great facility for living illusions, for protecting our self-image with power, for justifying it all by thinking we are the favored ones of God.... How difficult it is for human beings to move from the recognition of the ultimate value of their own particular culture and way of life to the acceptance of the value of other cultures and ways of living.
Jean Vanier
Communities must not be isolated one from another. They are called to live in communion and to collaborate one with another. They are all part of a vast body uniting heaven and earth, uniting those who have gone before and those who are present on the earth today. And together they are all preparing the seeds that will flower and bear fruit in the generations to come. They are preparing the ways of tomorrow so that the body of Christ may be fulfilled. Each community is but a sign of the liberating love of God.
We all tend to wear masks, the mask of superiority or of inferiority, the mask of worthiness or of victim. It is not easy to let our masks come off and to discover the little child inside us who yearns for love and for light, and who fears being hurt. Forgiveness, however, implies the removal of these masks, an acceptance of who we really are: that we have been hurt, and that we have hurt others.
Forgiveness of ourselves, then, implies an acceptance of our true value. The loss of a false self-image, if it is an image of superiority, or the need to hide our brokenness can bring anguish and inner pain. We can only accept this pain if we discover our true self beneath all the masks and realize that if we are broken, we are also more beautiful than we ever dared to suspect. When we realize our brokenness, we do not have to fall into depression; when we see our true beauty, we do not have to become proud as peacocks.
Seeing our own brokenness and beauty allows us to recognize, hidden under the brokenness and self-centeredness of others, their beauty, their value and their sacredness. This discovery is sometimes a leap in the dark, a blessed moment, a moment of grace and a moment of enlightenment that comes in a meeting with the God of Love, who reveals to us that we are beloved and so is everyone else.
As the desire grows in us to be whole and to struggle for this wholeness in ourselves, in others, in our community, and in the world, and as we desire to be free in order to free others, a new energy is born within us, an energy that flows from God. It is as though we are crossing the Red Sea from slavery to freedom. We can start to live the pain of loss and accept anguish because a new love and a new consciousness of self are being given to us.
Jean Vanier is the founder of L'Arche, an international network of more than 100 communities in 30 countries for people with intellectual disabilities and their assistants.
Each community needs to be in contact with others. They stimulate and encourage, give support, call forth and affirm each other.... A community that isolates itself will wither and die; a community in communion with others will receive and give life.
Mission is revealing to others their fundamental beauty, value and importance in the universe, their capacity to love, to grow and to do beautiful things and to meet God. Mission is transmitting to people a new inner freedom and hope; it is unlocking the doors of their being so that new energies can flow; it is taking away from their shoulders the terrible yoke of fear and guilt. To give life to people is to reveal to them that they are loved just as they are by God, with the mixture of good and evil, light and darkness that is in them: that the stone in front of their tomb in which all the dirt of their lives has been hidden, can be rolled away. They are forgiven; they can live in freedom.
Some people flee from commitment because they are frightened that if they put down roots in one soil they will curtail their freedom and never be able to look elsewhere. It is true that if you marry one woman you give up millions of others--and that's a curtailment of freedom! But freedom doesn't grow in the abstract; it grows in a particular soil with particular people. Inner growth is only possible when we commit ourselves with and to others.
It is important that [those] who hear the call of God or of the poor come into community to be there as a sign of the Kingdom, a sign that love is possible and that there is hope.
I am struck by some people who want to enter community. Their energies are so taken up by this objective that they are unable to hear the cry of the poor and to see those near them who need their attention, their love and their presence. Their desire to enter community seems to blind them. The best way for them to prepare for community life is to love and be present to those near them. Then the passage to life in community will come quite naturally.
To have a mission means to give life, to heal, and to liberate.... And we can become people of liberation and of healing because we ourselves are walking along that road toward inner healing and inner liberation. Healing begins here, in myself.
Each new community is called forth by God, as he inspires a particular man or woman or a group of people to respond to a specific cry or need of humanity at one particular moment of history. This cry can be very obvious: the cry of the dying in the streets of Calcutta or of the street kids in New York or of people with physical and mental handicaps. Or else it can be a more hidden cry: the need of the sixth-century Church for oases of prayer, the need of the thirteenth-century Church in Assisi for communities close to the poor. There is a cry hidden in the heart of God, of the Church and of the saints to give life. And finally, there are the hidden tears of the rich floundering in their wealth and the pain of their selfishness, emptiness, illusions, error and sinfulness, as they search for meaning. Each new community with its founder has a specific charism, gift and mission, responding to a particular cry for help, for recognition and for love.