Finding Jesus in Lent

Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote a very good thing about the Jean Vanier revelations for Angelus:

Finding Jesus in Lent

It is interesting, because she raises two thoughts I had immediately. The first is:

“I can’t trust anyone, can I? I can’t even trust my own judgment? How can I ever know if someone is holy? “

Then also that, “I don’t think it is any coincidence that we learned about Vanier just before Lent.”

It reminded me of how the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris caught on fire at the beginning of Holy Week last year. It was tragic and heart-rending as we entered a week focused on death and suffering. I don’t think that’s why either of these things happened, but that it is all right to find spiritual meaning in something that seems, at best, senseless. I think it is human to do so, actually.

So, Lent is here, as Lopez notes. I attended Ash Wednesday Mass at 8 am at the Cathedral and Fr. Conrad Murphy said that Lent is a time to “rend your heart and return to the Lord.” This was also in the first reading. My heart is rent, how about yours?

Truth, Grief and Mourning

Friends,

Yesterday the news broke that L’Arche’s founder, Jean Vanier - revered during his time by many, including myself, as a “living saint” - was not quite what he seemed. Specifically, he was guilty, over decades, of covering up and potentially enabling the sexual and spiritual abuse of adult women without disabilities in community by his “spiritual father,” Pere Thomas Phillippe. More importantly, though, Vanier was himself the perpetrator of spiritual, emotional and sexual abuse against at least 6 adult women without disabilities, including several assistants and even one consecrated religious sister. Here is L’Arche USA’s statement on the matter.

To say this news is devastating is an understatement. As I woke and learned the truth - mostly through friends reaching out, followed by reading everything I could online - all I could do is sit back and cry and wonder how it even makes sense. How can one reconcile the genuine reality that what Jean founded - L’Arche, a place of healing, belonging and welcome - could be tied to this darkness? How do we keep one and throw out the other? How could someone who championed the weak and oppressed actually use his position of power to prey on the weak? What, then, even is real within L’Arche?

I thought Catholic News Agency Editor in Chief JD FLynn - whose son is named for Vanier, and who has adopted two children with disability - did a great job of stating something at the heart of this:

“I think part of the reason we look to holy people is b/c they seem like confirmation that the proposition of the Gospel is possible. When we discover their hidden wicked deeds, we wonder if we can be set free of our own wickedness. Holiness is possible in Christ. But hard.”

Indeed, if there is something wicked at the heart of L’Arche, which I thought was through and through full of light, how is there any hope for me to live up to the promise of the Gospel, and of what God calls me to be and do? Who, after all of this, can I - or any of us - trust?

Tomorrow night a few of us are getting together to discuss, process and understand how to move forward. I am aching for that time, to be with what has become my family.

Ultimately Vanier’s words - his writing, the philosophy, the spirituality - were very much a part of what drew me into 'L’Arche. But I realize they have not been the things that have kept me there. What has kept me there have been the relationships, especially with core members - with Laurie and Charles and Bruce and all the assistants who have welcomed me like family. It has been the acceptance, and the finding of a place where I and my gifts are recognized and needed. But ultimately where it matters more to be, rather than to do. None of that changes, with this news.

What questions are you asking?

The other night I was having dinner at Highland House, one of the L’Arche homes in Arlington. At the end of dinner, someone typically comes up with a question for everyone to answer, accompanied by each person’s prayer requests.

For some reason we were having trouble coming up with a question when Brooke leaned back in the candlelight (lights are turned out for prayer time at Highland House) and smiled. “Ah,” she said. “I’ve got a good one. What questions have you had lately?”

I loved this. I love questions in general (and find a way to incorporate question-asking into pretty much any talk or workshop I hold*) as a means of getting to know self and others, but have never thought to ask someone else purely: what are you wondering about?

Answers around the table varied: Why is the grass green? This one made me catch my breath: how can I live a simple and mystic life? And: how do you love someone you disagree with?

So I have been thinking about that these past few days, and will take this forward with me, to check in now and again and wonder, what questions do I have right now?

Here is what I have had the past couple days:

• Are you compromising your own faith when you affirm what others believe?

• What do virtue and habit have to do with each other if virtue is unearned and comes from God?

• Do people with disabilities live outside of time the way God does? (obviously, not in a physical sense - but in their own way of viewing and interacting with the temporal world)

• What role does government have in building community?

So anyway, those are a few.

*If the practice of question-asking sounds interesting, register for my March 7 workshop, Know Thyself: A Workshop for Growing in Self-Awareness! Prayer, writing and naming one’s values will be discussed and practiced; one needs to learn how to ask good, self-searching questions to do any of these three things, and certainly to know oneself. Shazam, people!