Jean Vanier (1928~2019) and his meritorious life dedicated to living in community with people who had serious mental and/or physical “disabilities” was the topic of my Sept. 10 blog posting. This article is about one of Vanier’s main emphases: doing things with rather than just for people with serious needs.

In Harmony with Vanier

In his L’Arche homes, Vanier and those who followed his example, modeled what it means to treat people who have physical needs with respect. They chose to live with people who had serious mental and/or physical “handicaps,” not just to provide homes where they could be taken care of.

Before I learned about Vanier and L’Arche, I heard about similar institutions in Japan, institutions very much in harmony with the L’Arche movement Vanier began in France in 1964.

Two years before Vanier started the first L’Arche home, Fukui Tatsu’u (福井 達雨), a 32-year-old Japanese man, founded what became Shiyo Gakuen (止揚学園) as a home for physically challenged people.

Fukui, a 1956 graduate of the Department of Theology of the renowned Doshisha University in Kyoto, remained the head of Shiyo Gakuen until 2015.

During the years I taught at Seinan Gakuin, Fukui-sensei was invited many times to be the guest speaker during the “Christian Focus Week” special chapel services at the university and the junior-senior high school. He always emphasized doing things with the “needy,” not just doing things for them.

In 1976, Hisayama Ryoikuen (久山療育園), a similar facility, was established in the outskirts of Fukuoka City. Their emphasis from the beginning has been “living with” (tomo ni, pronounced toh-moh knee, in Japanese).

Doing something for others is expressed in Japanese as tame ni (pronounced tah-meh knee). These similar words express a great difference—and the former continues to be admirably modeled by Hisayama Ryoikuen, Shiyo Gakuen, and Jean Vanier’s L’Arche homes. 

From a Hisayama Ryoikuen poster emphasizing "living with"

In the Spirit of Vanier

I don’t know if he was influenced at all by Jean Vanier, but Chris Arnade is a fascinating man who spent a considerable amount of time in the 2010s living out the spirit of Vanier by constant contact with the “underclass” of American society.

Arnade (b. 1965) earned a Ph.D. in physics and then worked with a Wall Street bank for twenty years before becoming a freelance writer and photographer. In 2012 he began visiting a neighborhood in the South Bronx where he became friends with homeless people, sex workers, and addicts.

Arnade then traveled over 150,000 miles around the U.S., spending time with “back row” people in American society. Based upon his experiences, earlier this year Arnade published a book titled Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.

I first learned about Arnade’s book by reading Peter Mommsen’s excellent interview with Arnade published in the Summer 2019 issue of Plough Quarterly. That interview and the book are both very impressive.

The first chapter of Arnade’s book is titled, “If You Want to Understand the Country, Visit McDonald’s.” He spent countless hours in McDonald’s restaurants talking with the people who are frequent visitors there.

Arnade concluded that many of the people he found at McDonald’s felt “excluded, rejected, and, most of all, humiliated.” He recognized that society has “denied many their dignity” (p. 284)—thus the title, and thrust, of his book.

At the end of his interview with Mommsen, Arnade emphasized, “Take time to listen to people. Give them respect.”

While most of us can’t, or won’t, choose to live in a L’Arche home or a similar institution, we can choose to spend more time with “needy” people of various sorts, seeking to show them dignity and respect by doing things with them rather than just doing something for them.

Becoming (More) Human

Jean Vanier, the French-Canadian Catholic philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian was born on September 10, 1928, and died in May of this year at the age of 90. He was the author of some 30 books, including Becoming Human, his bestseller.  

Vanier, the Founder of L’Arche

According to britannica.com, Jean Vanier (pronounced van-YAY) was born in Switzerland but spent most of his early childhood in Canada. At the age of 14, though, he went to England where he entered the Britannia Royal Naval College and then served in the Royal Navy throughout World War II.

In 1950 Vanier resigned his naval commission and went to France, where in 1962 he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of Paris. Then after teaching briefly at the University of Toronto, he went back to France.

Influenced by a local Catholic priest, in 1964 Vanier invited two men with “profound disabilities” to live with him. That was the beginning of the first home dubbed L’Arche (French for the Ark) and the precursor of the now nearly 150 such homes on five continents.  

That first home, about 50 miles northeast of Paris, and the subsequent ones have all been, and are, communities where “people with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities” live together “in faith and friendship.”

In addition to Vanier himself, the most widely known person to live in a L’Arche home was Henri Nouwen, the noted Dutch Catholic priest, professor, and theologian who lived in Daybreak L’Arche (in the suburbs of Toronto) from 1986 until his death in 1996.

Vanier, the Author

In 1998, Vanier gave the Massey Lectures, and those five lectures became the five chapters of Becoming Human, published that same year. When the 10th-anniversary edition was published in 2008 with a new introduction by Vanier (who was then 80), over 70,000 copies had been sold.

The titles of the chapters of Becoming Human are “Loneliness,” “Belonging,” “From Exclusion to Inclusion: A Path of Healing,” “The Path to Freedom,” and “Forgiveness.” (You can find my two pages of excerpts from Becoming Human here.)

In this, his best-known book, Vanier doesn’t say much about L’Arche, but he uses many of the developmentally challenged people he had known at L’Arche as illustrations of the various points he makes.

Among his nearly 30 other books are Community and Growth (1979), From Brokenness to Community (1992) and Befriending the Stranger (2005). With eminent Protestant ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, he also co-authored Living Gently in a Violent World (2008).

Vanier was highly ecumenical in the broadest sense. At the same time, he was a devout (Catholic) Christian. One of his books is I Meet Jesus (Eng. ed., 1987), a quick read with illustrations on every other page.

Vanier, the Man Who “Made Us All More Human”

Soon after Vanier’s death in May, pastor and author Bethany McKinney Fox posted a noteworthy Christianity Today article titled “Jean Vanier Made Us All More Human.” Her point is that Vanier “showed the church how disability, vulnerability, and weakness bring us closer to one another and closer to Jesus”—and how that makes us more human.

On the second page of the Introduction to his 1998 book, Vanier declared that “life together” in L’Arche “has helped me become more human.”

In “To Become Human,” a sub-section of his third chapter, Vanier asserts, “As the human heart opens up and becomes compassionate, we discover our fundamental unity, our common humanity” (p. 97). That is the key to becoming more human.

In 2015, Vanier was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize, and here is the link to a related 4-minute video where he talks informally about the question ““What does it mean to be fully human?” It is well worth the time to watch.

The Amazing Nick Vujicic

There have been, and are, many amazing people in the world. Recently, I wrote (here) about the amazing Grimké sisters. They were amazing because in spite of growing up as privileged white girls in Charleston, S.C., they became leaders in the movement to abolish slavery in the U.S.

In completely different ways, Nick Vujicic (pronounced voy-a-chich) is also a most amazing person. He was born on December 4, 1982, in Australia of parents who had, before they met, each fled their native country of Serbia.

What a shock it was to them when Nick, their first child, was born with phocomelia! That little-known term describes the condition of babies who are born with malformed or missing limbs. (The term literally means “seal limbs.”)

Nick was born with no limbs at all, just one small foot with two toes at the bottom of his torso. Thus, he was destined to live a life without arms or legs as even prosthetics did not seem to work for him. Appropriately, his official website address is LifeWithoutLimbs.org.

His best known book, though, is titled Life Without Limits (2010). It is the inspiring, first-person story of this truly amazing man. In spite of their initial shock, Nick’s parents were pretty amazing, too, in the way they reared their son in spite of the tremendous challenges.

Nick’s book is a combination of autobiography, motivational messages, and Christian testimony all mixed together.

On the first page of the Introduction, Nick writes, “I was born without any limbs, but I am not constrained by my circumstances. I travel the world encouraging millions of people to overcome adversity with faith, hope, love, and courage so that they may pursue their dreams.”

It is certainly amazing how a person born with what seems to be such serious physical handicaps and disabilities has become an international speaker who seeks to motivate people to overcome their own physical or psychological handicaps that keep them from achievement and happiness.

Nick learned how to overcome the tremendous physical challenges he was born with, so in most ways he lives much the same as “normal” people—although he does need the help of a caregiver for many things, especially when he travels.

And Nick has literally travelled to countries around the world and has, as he says in the Introduction, spoken to millions of people in person and over television. June and I have seen him on “Hour of Power,” the Schullers’ TV program.

As strange as it might seem, Nick has even starred in a short movie. You can access “Butterfly Circus,” the movie he was in, here and watch the whole 20 minutes.

Kanae Miyahara was born in central Mexico, the daughter of a Japanese agricultural engineer and a Mexican mother. When she was a teenager, she moved to Texas to live with relatives, including her older sister.

Later, Kanae went to hear Nick speak in Dallas met him on that occasion. A romantic relationship developed, and they were married in February 2012. One year and one day later their first son, Kiyoshi, was born. Their second son was born in August of last year.

In 2014, Nick and Kanae co-authored a new book titled Love Without Limits: A Remarkable Story of True Love Conquering All. And theirs is truly a remarkable story.

Without a doubt, Nick and Kanae are amazing people. If you, or someone you know, are discouraged and feeling defeated, or even if you are not, I recommend the reading of Nick’s book. Those who do so will surely be amazed and inspired.