Editor’s update: In February 2020, L'Arche International released a report detailing an investigation that found Jean Vanier "engaged in manipulative sexual relationships with at least 6 adult (not disabled) women," and was aware of sexual abuses against women committed by his mentor, Fr. Thomas Philippe. For additional reporting and commentary on this news, visit sojo.net/jean-vanier.
ON A BALMY SUMMER afternoon in July, I rang the bell at Jean Vanier’s sky-blue gate in Trosly-Breuil, France. Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, an international federation of communities of people with and without developmental disabilities, is central to a new documentary film, Summer in the Forest. I was there to interview him about the film and as research for a play I’m helping to write for the 50th anniversary of L’Arche Daybreak community, near Toronto.
As the gate opened, Vanier, wearing his signature navy blue jacket, greeted me with the warmest presence I have ever felt, saying, “All the way from Daybreak you have come to visit me!” I replied sheepishly, “Yes, to finally meet the man who changed my life.”
My salutation was not hyperbole—Vanier’s gift, a vision of communities where people live in a spirit of mutual learning, dignity, and care, has touched and changed the lives of thousands of people around the globe. Though I’d come for professional reasons, it also felt like a pilgrimage to seek Vanier’s wisdom in the place where it all began. He ushered me into his small office and living room to chat.
In 1964, while Vanier was living in Trosly-Breuil, he visited a psychiatric hospital near Paris. He saw men there subjected to violence, locked up all day, and feared by the public. He was moved with a compassion that he couldn’t totally understand at the time. But as Vanier told me, “We all have, as human beings, a design that teaches us to reach out to others, and not only to serve ourselves. If we listen to this inner design, this inner voice, it will lead us always to do what is right.” With little training and no formal plan, Vanier bought a dilapidated house and took three of the men out of the institution to live with him in the village.
The first night didn’t go so well, as they could not find how the electricity worked and one of the men became so frightened and violent, smashing windows, that he had to return to the institution the next day. Two of the men, Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux, lived with Vanier for the rest of their lives. Vanier named their home “L’Arche,” French for “The Ark”—it became the first of what are now more than 150 L’Arche communities in 37 countries.
A hunger for relationship
Trosly-Breuil is a pristine and peaceful French village nestled against rolling forested hills where Vanier has spent years walking, the inspiration for the film title Summer in the Forest. When asked about the film, which is a meditative portrait of him and his life with L’Arche, Vanier said, “I hope it will show the forgiveness and celebration that are at the heart of L’Arche communities.”
I asked Vanier what forgiveness means today. He spoke about the troubles and conflicts we are living in. “You know, there’s a whole vision of Trump which is deep,” he said. “And it’s a very deep vision because it reflects what humanity was like a few thousand years ago. ‘My tribe, my way.’ The question is, how can you break down the walls of tribe that then become the walls of war? We need to break these down and become plains of peace, places where we can meet.”
This idea of meeting one another, of finding places where we can meet both physically and figuratively, is at the heart of Jean Vanier’s message now as he enters his 90th year. “In this moment,” he says, “forgiveness is about coming together with people that you normally don’t want much to do with. Forgiveness is not a forgiveness of struggle, but a desire to be together, and to say ‘I need you. I need relationship. I need communion.’”
He admits that there is great difficulty in having this happen but points to the L’Arche community in Bethlehem as a prime example. Summer in the Forest follows Vanier to this community where Muslims, Christians, and Jews celebrate life together daily. In the film, Vanier asks, “How can we come together, because in each of us there’s that little child yearning for peace and for love?” We see the community embracing Vanier as a loving hero of peace, and we witness him praying at the Israeli wall that divides up Palestine as gunshots in the distance haunt the stillness.
“You’re beautiful”
As we talked, Vanier circled back to the idea of forgiveness in the chaos and fear of our contemporary world. “There is a trickle of peace in this world now, with people who want to live together with one another, to help one another, to forgive one another, across all conflicts and divides. Now it is a trickle, and it will become a great flowing river of peace.” He sees this in the communities such as The Simple Way in Philadelphia, in the outreach to the homeless on the streets of Paris, in the Little Sisters of Jesus serving as hubs of peace inside violent urban communities, in interfaith collaborative living popping up all over the globe. “But we must nurture it,” he adds, “or it will decay and become like dust. It is a fragile thing, but with careful nurturing we can grow it and it will become stronger than the hate that threatens it.”
Vanier told me about a Little Sister of Jesus who was serving in a rough neighborhood in France where many Muslim women wear the burka. The sister wanted so much to meet some of these women and befriend them, but she didn’t know how. “One day she was walking through the community and caught a boy throwing stones and hurling expletives at a woman in a burka,” Vanier said. “She knelt down to the boy and said, ‘You shouldn’t do that, it’s not nice and you should say you’re sorry.’ The woman [in the burka] had stopped to watch. The boy asked the sister, ‘Will I be forgiven?’ and she replied, ‘Yes.’ And the boy looked up to the Muslim woman and said he was sorry. The sister knelt down again to the little boy and said, ‘You’re beautiful because you can say I’m sorry. It shows how beautiful you are.’” And after this, the Little Sister made many friends among the Muslim women.
Vanier describes this experience as vital because, he says, “You see what’s interesting here is that if there hadn’t been conflict, there could not have been this meeting. If there hadn’t been conflict, they would have gone on passing one another by. [It shows] how conflict can lead to a meeting, and then in that conflict, there is forgiveness. I find something beautiful about conflict as a source of peace, if you know how to welcome conflict and the way through it, by kneeling to one another and offering help and forgiveness. And saying to one another, ‘You are super because you can ask for forgiveness.’”
I spoke with an executive producer of Summer in the Forest, Oliver Pawle, who said his hope was for the film to be a tribute to Vanier and the spirit of L’Arche, and to demonstrate “the reality that we spend our life rushing around when in fact relationships are built by taking and wasting time ... having patience.”
Whether in person or through Summer in the Forest, Jean Vanier and the communities he helped create are a breath of pure air in the middle of a culture where it can feel as if hope is drowning. As I left his home, Vanier concluded, “It’s a very dark difficult time, and we need this message of peace. It’s not easy work.”
Stephanie Sandberg is an assistant professor of theater and film studies at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. Her most recent work is Stories in Blue: A Pilgrimage to Heal Human Trafficking, which follows the stories of six survivors of sex trafficking.
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