The Gift of Living With the Not Gifted

The Gift of Living With the Not Gifted

People with disabilities want to relate, Jean Vanier says. ‘It makes people who are closed up in the head become human.’

By Sohrab Ahmari in the Wall Street Journal

Trosly-Breuil, France

I

t’s lunchtime at the Ferns, a group home about an hour northeast of Paris, and the smell of fried fish wafts through the rooms. The food is typical French fare, but the dozen or so diners are anything but typical. The Ferns is part of L’Arche, or the Ark, a global community of people with mental disabilities and their nondisabled peers who live together as equals, as the organization’s founder, Jean Vanier, says he was called by faith to do.

Residents at the Ferns are among the most severely disabled in the local L’Arche chapter. There is Jorge, a young man with motor dysfunction who expresses himself with grunts. Loïc, in his 60s, has the body of a small child but the facial wrinkles and missing teeth of an old man. His language consists of piercing screams. Then there is Emilie, a gregarious, wheelchair-bound young woman with an infectious smile.

 “Emilie would like you to know that she speaks English,” says the community’s director, who serves as my interpreter and guide, passing along the voluble resident’s fanciful messages. “Emilie would like you to know that she helped cook today’s lunch.” “Emilie would like you to know that she recently attended a concert in Paris by Grégoire” (a French pop singer).

All the grunting, screams and chatter meld to form an uncommon orchestra as more residents gather to eat. Then we hold hands and sing: “Bless the Lord, you, God’s servants, / All of you who live in God’s house, / Lift up your hands to the Holy Lord / Proclaim God’s greatness and the power of God’s name. Amen.”

Eating at a L’Arche house can be discomfiting if you’re a stickler for table manners. There is much spitting, spilling and gurgling. But gradually the discomfort melts away, and the residents draw you into their world, unhindered by politeness or social rank. That’s the point of the place: to understand what it means to be human in all its imperfect forms, and to mark human dignity where it is least physically obvious.

The nondisabled residents at L’Arche include both seminarians and secular spiritual seekers, many of them young, who will spend months or even decades there. At a house for the severely disabled, like the Ferns, there are almost as many of these assistants, as the nondisabled are called, as there are residents with disabilities.

Mr. Vanier, a Canadian theologian and philosopher, founded the first L’Arche community in 1964. It has since grown into an international federation of 147 communities on five continents. Mr. Vanier was awarded this year’s $1.7 million Templeton Prize, which honors individuals who make “exceptional contributions to affirming life’s breadth of spiritual dimensions.”

Mr. Vanier, who is 86, has retired from day-to-day management, but he still lives in the original community in Trosly-Breuil, in a modest house next to a chapel, not far from the Ferns. Well over 6 feet tall, the former naval officer has the bearing of a gentle giant, with bushy brows, large ears and kind eyes. Dressed in a windbreaker and dusty corduroy trousers, he is reluctant to talk about himself.

“Don’t push me up,” he says in a voice that rarely rises above a whisper. “I’m always frightened. Because what I’m trying to live and trying to say is that people with disabilities are important—in themselves but also they have a message to give to humanity. I’m talking about going down to the bottom and listening to the bottom, which has something to say.”

What Mr. Vanier hears today fills him with both hope and anguish about the place of these people in today’s world.

He acknowledges that “there’s a desire to respect” people with disabilities, which reflects progress after centuries of persecution. “In the Gospel of St. John we hear the disciples asking Jesus about a man who was born blind: Why was he born blind? Was it because of his sins or the sins of his parents?” In other words, he says, “the idea was that disability was a punishment from God. And now we are saying at L’Arche that people with disabilities are a way to God. So the world is evolving.”

Yet Mr. Vanier also sees people with disabilities being compelled to adopt the aspirations of the nondisabled. “There’s a tendency of being happy because they’re winning—the Paralympics, working at McDonald’s and so on,” he says. Labor is a central element of life at L’Arche, where residents learn everything from candle making to pottery to bee farming. But, Mr. Vanier warns, if we only celebrate people with disabilities insofar as they’re like us, this risks overshadowing the gifts of these “people of the heart.”

“What people with disabilities want is to relate,” Mr. Vanier says. “This is something unique. It makes people who are closed up in the head become human. The wonderful thing about people with disabilities is that when someone important comes, they don’t care. They care about the relationship. So they have a healing power, a healing power of love.”

That power permeates L’Arche, but in the world outside, threats to human difference and the dignity of the disabled are proliferating. Prenatal screening has meant that a majority of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted, though some recent studies suggest the termination rate is declining. Advances in biotechnology and genetic engineering will make parents and physicians more likely to attempt to “design” away disabilities, to create perfect babies.

But biotech-aided parenting will be a messy business, Mr. Vanier warns. “They want to have babies according to what they want,” he notes. “But, boy, they’re going to have trouble when that boy grows up to be an adolescent and says, ‘I don’t want to be what mummy and daddy want!’ ”

Unhindered biotechnology, moreover, risks alienating man from man. The L’Arche movement, Mr. Vanier says, “is about the discovery of the Word became flesh. Jesus was a human being, with a human face, and taught us through the way he lived how to meet people.” But we are now entering a “virtual world,” he worries, “where we’re frightened of meeting people” as they are, even though what they are is what makes them human.

“Everything is about coming together,” he says, “through the eyes, through the face, through the hands, through the imperfections, with all that is beautiful and all that is painful.”

Jean Vanier was born in 1928 in Geneva, where his father served in the Canadian diplomatic corps. In 1939 his father became the Canadian envoy in Paris, and when German troops advanced on France the next year, the Vaniers made a narrow escape to Britain and from there back to Canada. But Mr. Vanier wasn’t done with Europe.

“At the age of 13,” he recalls, “I heard that there was a school for the future officers of the British Navy, and something rose up within me. I knew I had to go.” At the Royal Naval College the young Mr. Vanier was both a foreigner and a Roman Catholic in a Protestant environment.

“There is that little compass within each one of us where we know what is right, what is just, what is good, what is true.” Less than a decade later, Mr. Vanier abandoned a military career to follow the little compass elsewhere.

“Because I believed in the Gospel values, I felt called to leave the navy to follow Jesus,” he recalls. “For me to follow Jesus was to announce the good news to the poor.” Eventually he returned to France, where he began studying with a Dominican priest, Father Thomas Philippe.

After earning a doctorate on Aristotelian ethics from the Catholic Institute in Paris in 1962, Mr. Vanier began lecturing on both sides of the Atlantic. Father Thomas, meanwhile, became chaplain at an institution for the mentally disabled in Trosly-Breuil and urged Mr. Vanier to visit.

“I discovered this world,” Mr. Vanier recalls. “People locked up in institutions. Parents feeling ashamed, pained.” At an institution near Paris, he saw 80 men locked up in a building meant for 40. Violence and abuse were rampant. Elsewhere he saw a teenager chained in a garage.

“What do you do when you see something like that?” asks Mr. Vanier. His answer was to purchase a small house in Trosly-Breuil and invite two disabled men, Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux, to leave an institution near Paris and live with him as friends.

Raphael only knew 20 words and didn’t speak very much. “Whereas Philippe spoke too much,” Mr. Vanier says with a smile. “The great thing about people with intellectual disabilities is that they’re not people who discuss philosophy. . . . What they want is fun and laughter, to do things together and fool around, and laughter is at the heart of community.”

The men bought a trick mustard pot with a spring in the lid that would jump out when opened. “Raphael, he loved that,” Mr. Vanier recalls. One day a state inspector visited the house, and Raphael “would push the mustard pot, inch it forward toward the inspector, and he finally opened it—and there was laughter! That was at the heart of everything. After long years of being looked down upon, being seen as stupid, they were finding a place of freedom and happiness.”

L’Arche grew quickly, drawing strength from the spirit of the 1960s. Communities sprang up in India, Egypt, Honduras and beyond. “It was a propitious time,” Mr. Vanier says. “Everyone wanted community. People were angry against authority.” There was ferment also within the Catholic Church thanks to the Second Vatican Council, and spiritual seekers descended on Trosly-Breuil. Without Mr. Vanier’s and Father Thomas’s philosophical vision, however, L’Arche would likely have withered away like many a hippie commune did.

With growth came a degree of professionalization and greater state oversight of the houses and the care provided to residents. Though this meant losing some of the original spontaneity, Mr. Vanier has for the most part welcomed the change. Life at L’Arche is never easy, even with the added assistance of psychiatrists and social workers.

“L’Arche teaches us also the difficulty in meeting the poor,” Mr. Vanier says. “Some have been too hurt, some have psychological problems. And so here we’re called to be very attentive to the needs of the other.” This is the challenge that has proved attractive to thousands of nondisabled people.

But what about those who can’t take years off to serve? “Try and find somebody who is lonely,” Mr. Vanier says. “And when you go to see them, they will see you as the messiah. Go and visit a little old lady who has no friends or family. Bring her flowers. People say ‘but that’s nothing.’ It is nothing—but it’s also everything.” He adds: “It always begins with small little things. It all began in Bethlehem. That was pretty small.”

Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial-page writer based in London.