Sunday, February 23, 2020
Lamenting The Me In Jean Vanier
Photo taken from the website of L'Arche Portland
Yesterday, along with numerous other friends, I saw the news story that someone we had deemed a saint, someone we loved and looked up to as an interpreter and embodiment of the teachings of our Lord in a special and revealing way, apparently engaged in decades of sexually coercive and predatory behavior. Even worse, it happened in the context and under the guise of his role as a counselor for the spiritual formation of the very women he was abusing!
Jean Vanier is indirectly and to some degree responsible for my current vocation. I used to be an architect. I had a bit of a Messiah complex. I thought I was going to save architecture with my special gifts. That was how I was going to be known and celebrated. I, however, had a problem. I was looking at the world upside down. I now practice as a hospice nurse in part because of Vanier's teachings and the communities he instituted. He is to some degree responsible for showing me how Jesus turns our images of status and identity on their head by becoming the Servant-Man in the flesh, a Crucified Messiah. As an architect, I had no idea that my desires for how to be known, find a place in the world, be successful, have stability, and live a fulfilling life were shaped by schemes of Lordship other than that of the Lord himself!
And, Jean Vanier played a part in giving me some idea of the difference. Jean Vanier helped me see Jesus. Come to find out, his sexual manipulation was extremely hurtful and damaging to his victims - to the point of being traumatizing.
BAD NEWS
So, when I saw the news yesterday - LINK HERE - I was, to put it mildly, hurt and distraught. As Rich Villodas said it, I "called him one of my heroes in the faith. Devastated to read this." So, I wasn't the only one feeling this way. Another friend, who was dealing with similar emotions, messaged me privately:
In the midst of that effort to reconcile complete opposites, I am not, however, thinking so much in terms of "God uses broken people." Though that seems true both in the scriptures and in my life, I internalized that message at a time when I held to a theory of atonement that relies on a lot of presumptive and speculative understandings of how God works in the world. And, where does "God uses broken people" leave space for accountability and transformation?
So, instead of reaching to grasp hold of an understanding of what's happening in the world and how God is working through it, I, as much as I could, began to consider how I myself tend to grasp hold on and around created things or people rather than the Word of God to guide me. The news of Jean Vanier's sin confronts me with my now false image of Jean Vanier. My ability to process this requires certain assumptions about God's accounting of sin in which I don't live in fear of punishment as I confront or lament the fact of evil lurking around my own heart. As William Blake said, "We become what we behold," so beholding the sin of Jean Vanier brings us face to face with the facts of our own story.
It's true that no facts go uninterpreted. There is no pure, spiritualized Jesus on which we can fix our gaze. The message and enactment of our Lord and His Way is always mediated through and in the world and its broken vacuum of darkness. Acknowledgement of the wholeness of our personhood in its full embodiment in incarnate flesh thus makes discernment of Jesus more difficult than if we skip over all that difficult mediation stuff and just stick to the Spirit's direct guidance and teaching into our disembodied spirit of what is taught as abstracted concepts in "scripture alone." The way that doesn't shed the flesh but redeems it, after all, is also His Way that itself goes straight through the dark night of the Cross.
LAMENTING THE BAD NEWS
So, in confronting, dealing with, and reconciling to our full embodiment in flesh redeemed in and by our Lord Jesus Christ, I feel like it's good to simply lament this news about Jean Vanier without necessarily needing a "take." My first response was to grasp hold of some articulated response to it rather than to simply face my sadness. I noticed that my response was attempting to covered over my grief, which itself needed some air, some room to breathe. Noticing these responses, I continue to learn that I suck at lament.
I'm also in the midst of learning my own role in patriarchy, so that made my grief over Jean Vanier's predatory sexual advances more complex. From a recent blog post I wrote (LINK HERE):
On one female friend's page, she was expressing anger that people are surprised at this. With my desire for distance from the bad news of my own sin, her anger felt convicting. Another female came along and said that the accusations are clearly not true, since they're just as obviously politically motivated. That turned into a whole, long, giant argument. And, I felt the need to take sides. The last thing I saw my angry friend say was that it almost doesn't matter whether the accusations of Vanier are true or not, because how we respond to them (surprise and shock or rather total lack of surprise and almost expectation) says a lot about how we view the world and our solidarity or relationship with the plight of women.
Meanwhile, another more disheartened friend posted the very same article and said what appeared to me to amounted to something like: "OK I'm going to go dig a hole and lay in it now." Something like, "This makes me want to give up on humanity." (Whether that's really what my more despondent friend meant or not, it's how I processed it in my own soul)
All the while, I was noticing that, as I was drawn into the content of those two posts and arguments, I wasn't simply allowing myself to feel the sadness and grief of the news. And, that sadness and grief that I WAS feeling, I should affirm and make clear, is mixed with the same lament I've been feeling lately over how I've been so verily missing the boat with my own sexuality, dishonoring myself and others for so long and not realizing it. Both are really a lament of the same thing.
But, my desire to take EITHER side in the angry argument OR give up and crawl in a whole with my despondent friend felt like different ways to cover over and resolve my grief and lament rather than face, access, and touch it. Rather than making friends with it.
That one woman's urge to declare the news obviously untrue participates in my urge to fight and win the culture wars. Whether that's what she was doing or not, I don't know. It's my urge to reach out and grasp for answers that aren't really there. My hole-digging friend's response seems to resolve the loss in the opposite way.
PRAYER AS OFFERING THE CLAUSTROPHOBIA OF OUR DARKNESS ROOM TO BREATHE IN GRACE BEFORE THE LIGHT OF GOD
So, with all of that complexity and contradiction in mind and heart yesterday, I was praying through what I said above. I know from many life experiences - including my lessons in how I made idols of my Architectural creations - that I tend to fix hold on created things or people to guide me. In prayerful communion with the Spirit, I became encouraged yesterday that we aren't called to carry forth the message of Jean Vanier but of Jesus. And, we celebrated Jean Vanier not in his self-glorification but as a messenger of Jesus. My one friend's question of whether or not to throw his books out got me to asking gently: "Did we not actually hear Jesus in Vanier's message and in what he did in and through L'Arche?" I think we DID hear Jesus in it, right?
In the midst of that prayer, I began to suspect or imagine that Vanier's coercive and abusive sexual advances weren't actually disconnected from his GIFT for the truly and genuinely authoritative presentation of compassionate and gentle connection. To participate in our desire to declare the character and actions of Jean Vanier as simply and completely either good or evil fits the same above-noted pattern of my trying to cut myself off from the lament of sin and evil in and among myself and the world I inhabit. My shock was my desire for easy resolution, for final answers, and for a fully circumscribed horizon around a world I can draw up for myself in my imagination.
So, in the process of facing - in the safety of the grace and mercy of prayerful communion with Christ - the complex realities I know about myself and dear, close friends (I do still consider Vanier a friend of sorts), I suspect that or wonder if Jean's sin was the dark and disordered side of his gift - rather than the other way around. Perhaps it's too easy to now simply declare him a wolf in sheep's clothing, deem him evil incarnate, and burn his books in a new Inquisition. Taking this more complex approach would mean that we can't throw out our love for what he taught us, as though it's rooted in evil. Evil doesn't have that much of its own existence, much less authority. The evil, rather, is the empty, vacuous, twisted side of the good. In Jean Vanier, the world, and in myself.
At that point, then, I have to take the revelation of this news story of what went on in Jean Vanier as an opportune moment to embrace the fact and reality of precisely what's going on in me. To wit:
GOOD NEWS
Imagining the news of Vanier's transgressions this way allows me to remain in touch with what I'm lamenting, without covering it over, hiding it, or cutting myself off from it. I am still moving forward, both in connection to what I'm lamenting - as it's still present among us and myself - and in acknowledgement of how the same relationship between good and evil is ever on the open horizon before me.
Imagining the sin of Jean Vanier and myself this way also doesn't excuse it or make it OK. Because it's clearly not. In fact, imagining it this way also fits perfectly with the way I've begun to, thanks to my friend Mako Nagasawa, better or more clearly imagine the scriptural narrative within the framework of "medical" or "ontological" substitution. Without confidence and trust in the love of God, without a robust belief in God's goodness, I would have more difficulty relating to my grief. As Mako said it in a now lost conversation (I can send it to you privately if interested):
So, in effect and to sum up, I would not even be wary of my desire to cut myself off from my sadness and grief in the first place if not for the tender mercy of the Father for the Son that overflows into love for and blessing over us. The purity and completeness of the goodness, mercy, and love of God allows, enables, and empowers me to confront my own sin in the process of grieving and lamenting the loss of the purity of the idolatrous image I improperly held of one of the heroes of my faith. As it turns out, the idolatrous image of my hero is the same idolatrous image I hold of myself. Pressing further into the good news that God not only accounts for but overcomes our sinful disobedience that launches a world engulfed in evil, the idolatrousness of the idolatry has no substance or solidity of its own for us to carry forward with us.
God's accounting for and overcoming our darkness with the light of His Kingdom in Christ is mediated in and through His grace at work in the L'Arche communities established by their founder, who we now know was often overcome by evil. God's launching of His Kingdom in the redeemed flesh of Christ, with our dark disobedience cut off from said flesh at the Cross like the excretory and toxin holding organs of the sin offerings of the ancient Jewish sacrificial system, like a circumcision of the heart, allows me to confront the darkness in the heart of my idols, which is no different from a confrontation with the vacuous, empty, disordered distresses of my own heart. It's the love of God that allows me to face and lament the me in my image of Jean Vanier.
Jean Vanier is indirectly and to some degree responsible for my current vocation. I used to be an architect. I had a bit of a Messiah complex. I thought I was going to save architecture with my special gifts. That was how I was going to be known and celebrated. I, however, had a problem. I was looking at the world upside down. I now practice as a hospice nurse in part because of Vanier's teachings and the communities he instituted. He is to some degree responsible for showing me how Jesus turns our images of status and identity on their head by becoming the Servant-Man in the flesh, a Crucified Messiah. As an architect, I had no idea that my desires for how to be known, find a place in the world, be successful, have stability, and live a fulfilling life were shaped by schemes of Lordship other than that of the Lord himself!
And, Jean Vanier played a part in giving me some idea of the difference. Jean Vanier helped me see Jesus. Come to find out, his sexual manipulation was extremely hurtful and damaging to his victims - to the point of being traumatizing.
BAD NEWS
So, when I saw the news yesterday - LINK HERE - I was, to put it mildly, hurt and distraught. As Rich Villodas said it, I "called him one of my heroes in the faith. Devastated to read this." So, I wasn't the only one feeling this way. Another friend, who was dealing with similar emotions, messaged me privately:
"What do we do with the way in which people like Jean Vanier shaped our world?Like this young woman - LINK HERE, which itself includes a link the official report of the third party findings Vanier's abuses - we're left trying to reconcile what we knew before with what we know now about Jean Vanier.
I’ve read and implemented a shit ton of his work and theories into the way I see the world and practice what I believe. The news of his abusive behaviour is painful.
Do we chalk it up to 'God uses broken people?' That seems fucked up, to be honest.
Do I toss his books, now? (That’s a lot of money in the garbage can.)
I’m not sure what to do. Or how to process. This sucks. I’m sad."
In the midst of that effort to reconcile complete opposites, I am not, however, thinking so much in terms of "God uses broken people." Though that seems true both in the scriptures and in my life, I internalized that message at a time when I held to a theory of atonement that relies on a lot of presumptive and speculative understandings of how God works in the world. And, where does "God uses broken people" leave space for accountability and transformation?
So, instead of reaching to grasp hold of an understanding of what's happening in the world and how God is working through it, I, as much as I could, began to consider how I myself tend to grasp hold on and around created things or people rather than the Word of God to guide me. The news of Jean Vanier's sin confronts me with my now false image of Jean Vanier. My ability to process this requires certain assumptions about God's accounting of sin in which I don't live in fear of punishment as I confront or lament the fact of evil lurking around my own heart. As William Blake said, "We become what we behold," so beholding the sin of Jean Vanier brings us face to face with the facts of our own story.
It's true that no facts go uninterpreted. There is no pure, spiritualized Jesus on which we can fix our gaze. The message and enactment of our Lord and His Way is always mediated through and in the world and its broken vacuum of darkness. Acknowledgement of the wholeness of our personhood in its full embodiment in incarnate flesh thus makes discernment of Jesus more difficult than if we skip over all that difficult mediation stuff and just stick to the Spirit's direct guidance and teaching into our disembodied spirit of what is taught as abstracted concepts in "scripture alone." The way that doesn't shed the flesh but redeems it, after all, is also His Way that itself goes straight through the dark night of the Cross.
LAMENTING THE BAD NEWS
So, in confronting, dealing with, and reconciling to our full embodiment in flesh redeemed in and by our Lord Jesus Christ, I feel like it's good to simply lament this news about Jean Vanier without necessarily needing a "take." My first response was to grasp hold of some articulated response to it rather than to simply face my sadness. I noticed that my response was attempting to covered over my grief, which itself needed some air, some room to breathe. Noticing these responses, I continue to learn that I suck at lament.
I'm also in the midst of learning my own role in patriarchy, so that made my grief over Jean Vanier's predatory sexual advances more complex. From a recent blog post I wrote (LINK HERE):
"My default way of functioning is to seek after or peruse the 'external good' I want by preying on a woman’s desire to be desired, in order to get half of what I actually want [Genesis 3: 16]. In our world that is the macrocosm to which Victoria’s Secret is the micro, that desire amounts to fulfillment in being VALUED. We think of Victoria’s Secret as more 'adult' than the innocence of Disney stories, but I am having a hard time seeing much of a difference right now. Either way, in a social world characterized by what we have given the name 'patriarchy,' who is it who establishes what values?So, of course, my first thought when I saw the news about Vanier was: "Is this true?" I wanted it be able to keep my distance from it. As it turned out, however, the news did, indeed, seem to be true. Cutting myself off from it was't going to be an option.
I don’t participate in this with the 'external goods' of TV’s on Black Friday. My way is a much more shocking affront to human dignity. I (at times) do it with the image of Woman. And, it’s a POWER that I am using!"
On one female friend's page, she was expressing anger that people are surprised at this. With my desire for distance from the bad news of my own sin, her anger felt convicting. Another female came along and said that the accusations are clearly not true, since they're just as obviously politically motivated. That turned into a whole, long, giant argument. And, I felt the need to take sides. The last thing I saw my angry friend say was that it almost doesn't matter whether the accusations of Vanier are true or not, because how we respond to them (surprise and shock or rather total lack of surprise and almost expectation) says a lot about how we view the world and our solidarity or relationship with the plight of women.
Meanwhile, another more disheartened friend posted the very same article and said what appeared to me to amounted to something like: "OK I'm going to go dig a hole and lay in it now." Something like, "This makes me want to give up on humanity." (Whether that's really what my more despondent friend meant or not, it's how I processed it in my own soul)
All the while, I was noticing that, as I was drawn into the content of those two posts and arguments, I wasn't simply allowing myself to feel the sadness and grief of the news. And, that sadness and grief that I WAS feeling, I should affirm and make clear, is mixed with the same lament I've been feeling lately over how I've been so verily missing the boat with my own sexuality, dishonoring myself and others for so long and not realizing it. Both are really a lament of the same thing.
But, my desire to take EITHER side in the angry argument OR give up and crawl in a whole with my despondent friend felt like different ways to cover over and resolve my grief and lament rather than face, access, and touch it. Rather than making friends with it.
That one woman's urge to declare the news obviously untrue participates in my urge to fight and win the culture wars. Whether that's what she was doing or not, I don't know. It's my urge to reach out and grasp for answers that aren't really there. My hole-digging friend's response seems to resolve the loss in the opposite way.
PRAYER AS OFFERING THE CLAUSTROPHOBIA OF OUR DARKNESS ROOM TO BREATHE IN GRACE BEFORE THE LIGHT OF GOD
So, with all of that complexity and contradiction in mind and heart yesterday, I was praying through what I said above. I know from many life experiences - including my lessons in how I made idols of my Architectural creations - that I tend to fix hold on created things or people to guide me. In prayerful communion with the Spirit, I became encouraged yesterday that we aren't called to carry forth the message of Jean Vanier but of Jesus. And, we celebrated Jean Vanier not in his self-glorification but as a messenger of Jesus. My one friend's question of whether or not to throw his books out got me to asking gently: "Did we not actually hear Jesus in Vanier's message and in what he did in and through L'Arche?" I think we DID hear Jesus in it, right?
In the midst of that prayer, I began to suspect or imagine that Vanier's coercive and abusive sexual advances weren't actually disconnected from his GIFT for the truly and genuinely authoritative presentation of compassionate and gentle connection. To participate in our desire to declare the character and actions of Jean Vanier as simply and completely either good or evil fits the same above-noted pattern of my trying to cut myself off from the lament of sin and evil in and among myself and the world I inhabit. My shock was my desire for easy resolution, for final answers, and for a fully circumscribed horizon around a world I can draw up for myself in my imagination.
So, in the process of facing - in the safety of the grace and mercy of prayerful communion with Christ - the complex realities I know about myself and dear, close friends (I do still consider Vanier a friend of sorts), I suspect that or wonder if Jean's sin was the dark and disordered side of his gift - rather than the other way around. Perhaps it's too easy to now simply declare him a wolf in sheep's clothing, deem him evil incarnate, and burn his books in a new Inquisition. Taking this more complex approach would mean that we can't throw out our love for what he taught us, as though it's rooted in evil. Evil doesn't have that much of its own existence, much less authority. The evil, rather, is the empty, vacuous, twisted side of the good. In Jean Vanier, the world, and in myself.
At that point, then, I have to take the revelation of this news story of what went on in Jean Vanier as an opportune moment to embrace the fact and reality of precisely what's going on in me. To wit:
“Communion did not come easily to me. I had to change and to change quite radically. When you have been taught from an early age to be first, to win, and then suddenly you sense that you are being called by Jesus to go down the ladder and to share your life with those who have little culture, who are poor and marginalized, a real struggle breaks out within oneself.That's a quote from Jean Vanier himself (link here). So, maybe my angry friend was right. We should't be so shocked. He, in a sense, already told us about himself - just as he told me about myself! In a sense, then, my shock of this news about Vanier isn't any different from the shocking news that my Architecture had been my idolatry. Does our response not remain the same? Are we not "called by Jesus to go down the ladder and to share your life with those who have little culture, who are poor and marginalized"?
[....]
I discovered something which I had never confronted before, that there were immense forces of darkness and hatred within my own heart. At particular moments of fatigue or stress, I saw forces of hate rising up inside me, and the capacity to hurt someone who was weak and was provoking me! That, I think, was what caused me the most pain: to discover who I really am, and to realize that maybe I did not want to know who I really was! I did not want to admit all the garbage inside me. And then I had to decide whether I would just continue to pretend that I was okay and throw myself into hyperactivity, projects where I could forget all the garbage and prove to others how good I was. Elitism is the sickness of us all. We all want to be on the winning team. That is at the heart of apartheid and every form of racism. The important thing is to become conscious of those forces in us and to work at being liberated from them and to discover that the worst enemy is inside our own hearts not outside!”
GOOD NEWS
Imagining the news of Vanier's transgressions this way allows me to remain in touch with what I'm lamenting, without covering it over, hiding it, or cutting myself off from it. I am still moving forward, both in connection to what I'm lamenting - as it's still present among us and myself - and in acknowledgement of how the same relationship between good and evil is ever on the open horizon before me.
Imagining the sin of Jean Vanier and myself this way also doesn't excuse it or make it OK. Because it's clearly not. In fact, imagining it this way also fits perfectly with the way I've begun to, thanks to my friend Mako Nagasawa, better or more clearly imagine the scriptural narrative within the framework of "medical" or "ontological" substitution. Without confidence and trust in the love of God, without a robust belief in God's goodness, I would have more difficulty relating to my grief. As Mako said it in a now lost conversation (I can send it to you privately if interested):
"[Jesus] shared in our fallen human nature, so we could share in his healed human nature...Jesus shows wrath against the diseases, the demons, and death. But his wrath is an expression or activity of his love - and his love for...persons...Jesus succeeded at battling temptation and killed the thing that was killing us, so he could rise cleansed and purified from the Adamic wound. 'He learned obedience...he became perfect...to become the source of salvation' from human evil' (Heb. 5: 7-9)...The sacrificial system proved medical, not penal substitution, because God was acting like a dialysis machine. He was drawing to himself all the impurity and uncleanness of Israel, and giving back purity, as an expression of His restorative justice. God was not acting like a Western courtroom judge, giving out 'punishments' to exhaust His supposedly retributive justice...God does not change a disposition in Himself. He changes something in us. Atonement is medical, healing, and restorative, not penaal, punitive, and retributive."This isn't a post about penal vs. ontological substitution, so I'm just going to let that sit there. The point is that God is good, and God is love. That is required for me to not only say what I've said here but to process the world in what I am learning is a more healthy way. Fear of omnipowerful punishment doesn't have to be one of the things that might stop me from even looking in the direction of the darkness I can now otherwise lament.
So, in effect and to sum up, I would not even be wary of my desire to cut myself off from my sadness and grief in the first place if not for the tender mercy of the Father for the Son that overflows into love for and blessing over us. The purity and completeness of the goodness, mercy, and love of God allows, enables, and empowers me to confront my own sin in the process of grieving and lamenting the loss of the purity of the idolatrous image I improperly held of one of the heroes of my faith. As it turns out, the idolatrous image of my hero is the same idolatrous image I hold of myself. Pressing further into the good news that God not only accounts for but overcomes our sinful disobedience that launches a world engulfed in evil, the idolatrousness of the idolatry has no substance or solidity of its own for us to carry forward with us.
God's accounting for and overcoming our darkness with the light of His Kingdom in Christ is mediated in and through His grace at work in the L'Arche communities established by their founder, who we now know was often overcome by evil. God's launching of His Kingdom in the redeemed flesh of Christ, with our dark disobedience cut off from said flesh at the Cross like the excretory and toxin holding organs of the sin offerings of the ancient Jewish sacrificial system, like a circumcision of the heart, allows me to confront the darkness in the heart of my idols, which is no different from a confrontation with the vacuous, empty, disordered distresses of my own heart. It's the love of God that allows me to face and lament the me in my image of Jean Vanier.
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