12.05.08

living gently in a violent world

Posted in community, formation, learning, mission, reviews at 5:30 am by len

Among the books that have appeared spontaneously in the last month are two that showed up this past Tuesday. IVP is publishing a “Resources for Reconciliation” series, and pairing up a theologian and a practitioner for each book. The two books that arrived this week are the title above, pairing Jean Vanier and Stanley Hauerwas, and Reconciling All Things, pairing Emmanuel Katongale and Chris Rice. Because I know Jean Vanier’s work and the history of the L’Arche communities, it was this title I cracked first. Honestly, I could barely wait and the rewards were not long in arriving.

The introduction is penned by John Swinton, and as you read you may feel yourself questioning the assumptions you have made about ability.. and disability… about humanity, health, and even about heaven. You may begin to see the cross.. and redemption.. through unfamiliar lenses. John relates this story.

“A few years ago I was teaching a course on pastoral care. It was a distance-learning course [and among] the students was one who had no sight and another who was profoundly deaf and spoke through an interpreter. At one point in the class, people where sharing their various spiritual experiences. The woman who was deaf, Angela, began to tell us about a dream she’d had. In that dream she has met with Jesus in heaven. She and Jesus talked for some time, and she said she had never experienced such peace and joy. “Jesus was everything I had hoped he would be,” she said. “And his signing was amazing!” (13)

A bit earlier he relates that advancing technology means that within a few more years in France there will be no Down Syndrome children born because they will all have been aborted. But is this progress? Is this a move toward a better world? Setting aside even the question of the morality of abortion, is this a sign of a better world? The writer quotes his friend John, who has Down Syndrome: “That doesn’t make us feel very welcome, does it?” (12) One of the casualties of advancing technology, no less than the pace at which we live, is compassion.

In the story above it is evident that for Angela heaven’s perfection did not involve healing.. but acceptance. It was a place where relational and communication barriers that exist for her were finally removed. What had led to exclusion and anxiety no longer mattered. In the second chapter Stan Hauerwas quotes Paul Virilio: the dominant form violence takes in modernity is speed. Hauerwas writers,

“Gary was.. mentally disabled. Gary also read Scripture [in the gatherings]. It would take a long time. But for the church to learn to wait for the lesser member to speak is to witness to the world a different way of living..” (45).

Chapter 2 is where I began to slow down.. because, in part, this is what Stan Hauerwas asks of us in the second chapter. And this is what he maintains that L’Arche has to offer us: it calls us to slow down. Patience is the first thing we learn when we begin to deepen our humanity. “L’Arche offers a kind of time, a kind of patience and a kind of placedness that comes from faithfulness and produces a different understanding of catholicity. That is how L’Arche helps the church find the gospel.”

If God really chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong, and the foolish things to shame the wise, then ecclesiology should begin with 1 Cor. 12:22. Radical? Crazy? Yes.

The book is 103 pages.

Permalink