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Peace takes time and patience
By Dorothy Cummings McLean
March 31, 2009
Dorothy Cummings McLean
Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier (InterVarsity Press, softcover, 115 pages, $10.20).
I opened Living Gently in a Violent World in a St. Hubert’s restaurant in downtown Montreal. I was steaming mad. A snowstorm was howling, my fiancé’s Scottish debit card had ceased to work in Canadian bank machines and I had had an argument with the francophone ticket seller in the bus station. I suspected that the woman was giving me a hard time because I was an anglophone, and I said so. We missed the bus.
We agreed I would sit in a restaurant to calm down while Mark found a bank that could help him. When I restlessly flipped open the book of essays by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, my eye fell on the following passage:
I opened Living Gently in a Violent World in a St. Hubert’s restaurant in downtown Montreal. I was steaming mad. A snowstorm was howling, my fiancé’s Scottish debit card had ceased to work in Canadian bank machines and I had had an argument with the francophone ticket seller in the bus station. I suspected that the woman was giving me a hard time because I was an anglophone, and I said so. We missed the bus.
We agreed I would sit in a restaurant to calm down while Mark found a bank that could help him. When I restlessly flipped open the book of essays by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, my eye fell on the following passage:
“Peace takes time. Put even more strongly, peace recreates time by its steadfast refusal to force the other to submit in the name of order. Peace is not a static state but an activity which requires constant attention and care. An activity by its very nature takes place over time. In fact, activity creates time, as we know how to characterize duration only by noting that we did this first, and this second, and so on, until we’ve either gotten somewhere or accomplished this or that task. So peace is the process through which we make time our own rather than be determined by ‘events’ over which, it is alleged, we have no control.”
I calmed down. My exasperation disappeared. I regretted that I had fallen into the old anglo-franco nonsense, but most of all I felt peaceful. The author of the passage, Hauerwas, went on to cite the peace-loving L’Arche community founded by Vanier.
Vanier founded the original L’Arche community in France and it has spread around the world. L’Arche is a place of belonging for people living with disabilities and the people who share life with them.
“Patience in time is the first thing we have to learn from L’Arche,” he writes.
The gentle presence of L’Arche can be felt throughout Living Gently in a Violent World. The short volume is a collection of four essays that came out of a meeting between Canadian philosopher Vanier and American theologian Hauerwas at the University of Aberdeen. Both men write about L’Arche. But whereas Vanier writes about Christ, Hauerwas writes about Vanier.
Hauerwas almost ruefully contrasts his own vigourous personality with the gentleness of the founder of L’Arche. (Hauerwas’ hot-tempered defense of pacifism is indeed seen as an amusing paradox in some theological circles.) But both he and Vanier are convinced that the peace and acceptance L’Arche offers people with mental disabilities are fragile and may one day come under attack.
In the first essay, Vanier describes how L’Arche came to be and how L’Arche transformed him and many other people, disabled or not, who came to live there. He emphasizes how much fun and acceptance people who live at L’Arche share together.
In the second essay, Hauerwas writes of how the church needs L’Arche as a model of patience, of commitment and of beauty. He observes that “humanism gone bad” makes compassion something deadly. This sort of “compassion” would “cure” Down syndrome by eliminating people with Down syndrome before they are born.
In the third essay, Vanier touches upon Hauerwas’ field — war and peace. He writes of walls that divide people. The principle walls are fear and dismissal of others.
“The heart of the vision of Jesus is to bring people together, to meet, to engage in dialogue, to love each other. Jesus wants to break down the walls that separate people and groups. How will He do this? He will do it by saying to each one, ‘You are important. You are precious.’ There can be no peacemaking or social work or anything else to improve our world unless we are convinced that the other is important.”
In the final essay, Hauerwas discusses how liberal political theory excludes the disabled. Here he draws as much upon the work of ethicist Martha Nussbaum as on the work of Vanier.
My one quibble with the volume is Hauerwas’ distrust of the Christian church as church. He writes that he disliked John Paul II’s idea that the family was the “domestic church.” Hauerwas is not a Roman Catholic, and I suspect he doesn’t understand what Catholics mean by domestic church.
Vanier admits to having a hard time adjusting to the world outside of L’Arche. For Vanier, it is not the disabled who seem odd, but the world. And given that we live in a society where we pretend that aborting a disabled baby is an ethical, even meritorious act, I am inclined to agree with him.
This book is an excellent read for hot-tempered, impatient people. It will also be of interest to people with disabilities, philosophy students, peace activists and any teen or adult interested in what L’Arche offers us all.
I calmed down. My exasperation disappeared. I regretted that I had fallen into the old anglo-franco nonsense, but most of all I felt peaceful. The author of the passage, Hauerwas, went on to cite the peace-loving L’Arche community founded by Vanier.
Vanier founded the original L’Arche community in France and it has spread around the world. L’Arche is a place of belonging for people living with disabilities and the people who share life with them.
“Patience in time is the first thing we have to learn from L’Arche,” he writes.
The gentle presence of L’Arche can be felt throughout Living Gently in a Violent World. The short volume is a collection of four essays that came out of a meeting between Canadian philosopher Vanier and American theologian Hauerwas at the University of Aberdeen. Both men write about L’Arche. But whereas Vanier writes about Christ, Hauerwas writes about Vanier.
Hauerwas almost ruefully contrasts his own vigourous personality with the gentleness of the founder of L’Arche. (Hauerwas’ hot-tempered defense of pacifism is indeed seen as an amusing paradox in some theological circles.) But both he and Vanier are convinced that the peace and acceptance L’Arche offers people with mental disabilities are fragile and may one day come under attack.
In the first essay, Vanier describes how L’Arche came to be and how L’Arche transformed him and many other people, disabled or not, who came to live there. He emphasizes how much fun and acceptance people who live at L’Arche share together.
In the second essay, Hauerwas writes of how the church needs L’Arche as a model of patience, of commitment and of beauty. He observes that “humanism gone bad” makes compassion something deadly. This sort of “compassion” would “cure” Down syndrome by eliminating people with Down syndrome before they are born.
In the third essay, Vanier touches upon Hauerwas’ field — war and peace. He writes of walls that divide people. The principle walls are fear and dismissal of others.
“The heart of the vision of Jesus is to bring people together, to meet, to engage in dialogue, to love each other. Jesus wants to break down the walls that separate people and groups. How will He do this? He will do it by saying to each one, ‘You are important. You are precious.’ There can be no peacemaking or social work or anything else to improve our world unless we are convinced that the other is important.”
In the final essay, Hauerwas discusses how liberal political theory excludes the disabled. Here he draws as much upon the work of ethicist Martha Nussbaum as on the work of Vanier.
My one quibble with the volume is Hauerwas’ distrust of the Christian church as church. He writes that he disliked John Paul II’s idea that the family was the “domestic church.” Hauerwas is not a Roman Catholic, and I suspect he doesn’t understand what Catholics mean by domestic church.
Vanier admits to having a hard time adjusting to the world outside of L’Arche. For Vanier, it is not the disabled who seem odd, but the world. And given that we live in a society where we pretend that aborting a disabled baby is an ethical, even meritorious act, I am inclined to agree with him.
This book is an excellent read for hot-tempered, impatient people. It will also be of interest to people with disabilities, philosophy students, peace activists and any teen or adult interested in what L’Arche offers us all.
Dorothy Cummings McLean