07.20.08
love transforms chaos
A while back I was in a conversation around the life and work of Jean Vanier, a Catholic layman who founded the L’Arche communities – communities that so deeply impacted the life of Henri and enabled him to find the friendship and inner rest he so deeply longed for.
Thinking about Jean, I reached for one of the books I keep near my desk, “Becoming Human.” This and an earlier work, “Community and Growth” are rich and profound works. Jean not only articulates life and growth with unusual clarity, he lives it out. And yes, the two are connected.. his rich articulation comes from a rich soil of love, wisdom and lived community in the spirit of Jesus.
Here are some thoughts from “Becoming Human” from chapter 1, “Loneliness.” The section is headed, “Order and Disorder.” I chose this piece to share because it hits at the level of change and emergence from the heart places, the place of our own insecurity and brokenness.
“In human beings there is a constant tension between order and disorder, connectedness and loneliness, evolution and revolution, security and insecurity. Our universe is constantly evolving: the old order gives way to a new order and this in its turn crumbles when the next order appears. It is no different in our lives in the movement from birth to death.
“Change of one sort or another is the essence of life… when we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while… but inevitably there is an explosion..
“And so empires of ideas, as well as empires of wealth and power, come and go. To live well is to observe in today’s apparent order the tiny anomalies that are the seeds of change, the harbingers of the order of tomorrow. This means living in a state of a certain insecurity, in anguish and loneliness, which, at its best, can push us towards the new. Too much security and the refusal to evolve, to embrace change, leds to a kind of death. Too much insecurity, however, can also mean death. To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder. In this way we discover the new.”
kuestioner said,
July 24, 2008 at 2:00 pm
“Too much insecurity, however, can also mean death. To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder.”
Somehow, this particular thought does not seem to ring true in my mind. I’m inclined to think that to be human never ‘creates’ order. Any order or disorder is independent of us, except to the degree that we push past our insecurities to the point where, looking back, that which seemed to be disorderly, was merely the unknown.
And there is very much we don’t know.