The Jean Vanier I knew, and the one I didn’t

Open this photo in gallery:

The first time I met Jean Vanier, we talked non-stop for an hour and a half. The next day, it happened again. He was an easy guy to talk to. This was in 2008, when he was 79, in his small, cluttered stone house in Trosly-Breuil, 90 kilometres outside Paris, before anyone knew, as the world discovered this week, that, over more than three decades, he had sexually abused at least six women.

Back then, he was a hero, almost (some said) a saint. The new revelations revealed him as an all-too-common offender, a man who forced women into having sex against their will, under cover of helping them spiritually, and who then denied that anything untoward had taken place. Like so many of his admirers, I suddenly felt like a dupe. I told myself I ought to have known.

But how can you know, one way or another, about anyone? To assume you can know someone definitively, one way or another, that they are good or bad, means they are something other than human. Jean Vanier abused women sexually in an unpardonable way. But he was nothing if not human.

Open this photo in gallery:

I wanted to meet Mr. Vanier because of my son, Walker. Walker was born with a rare intellectual disability that renders him incapable of speaking or thinking logically or taking care of himself on his own, among other shortcomings. I was looking for a model of a community of care where he might live after my wife and I are no longer here to take care of him. Maybe you can imagine how terrifying that thought is.

He was smaller then, and lived with a group of disabled children in a group home I admired: the standard of care was exemplary. Physical care, in fact, was the home’s main concern: the house felt like a tiny, excellent hospital as much as it did an actual community. The caregivers ran the show, and the inhabitants were their wards. The goal was to make them as healthy as everyone else.

But I had a secret and possibly ludicrous fantasy that, as an adult, Walker might one day live a life with a goal beyond mere care, that he might live a life that looked like a real life, in a real community that might recognize whatever intentions he had in his off-shaped head, and honour them.

L’Arche was the reality of that fantasy. At L’Arche, intellectually disabled people (the core members) lived in houses with their assistants (the people who care for them) as equals. They sat down to meals together every day in their communal dining rooms – meals are the central ritual of L’Arche – and they shared a life they invented every day. It sounded revolutionary. They made their own rules, and invited the rest of the world to play by those rules, only to have outsiders discover what a thrill the game was.

The first time I ever had lunch in a L’Arche home, I sat next to a man in his early fifties. His name was Jean-Claude. He was in a wheelchair, and he couldn’t speak. I worried how we were going to communicate. Then Jean-Claude spotted a sketch of himself I had made in my notebook. This caused a roar of pleasure, and suddenly we were pals. I talked, he made noises, I understood the noises. The process was instinctual, almost effortless. Duty and self-consciousness had been replaced by curiosity and enthusiasm. We followed this by helping each other drink a glass of wine, which went as well as you can imagine. I can still see his face clearly.

Mr. Vanier invented the revolutionary communities where such equality is possible. He wasn’t like other founders of large institutions I had met. That day in his cluttered cottage, he told me he wanted to go down the status ladder, not up. He was wary of awards and honours. Given what we know now about him, maybe he knew he had done terrible things that deserved a demotion.

Open this photo in gallery:

Still, he was an avid listener and a daring talker. He could take any detail and make something bigger out of it.

For instance, he said, “What is it that makes you open your heart to someone else? A weak person. Someone who is saying, ‘I need you.’” I’d never thought of that. He said: “I mean, it’s crazy. We all know we’re going to die. Some of us will die at the age of 10. Some of us will die at 85. We begin in fragility, we grow up, we are fragile and strong at the same time, and then we go into the process of weakening. So the whole question of the human process is how to integrate strength and weakness.” He was the first person I ever heard say, “I think people are frightened at seeing people with disability. The disabled can be a sign of death.”

Somehow, during the three days I spent at L’Arche, something changed in the way I understood my son, and in the way I understood myself. I had spent a decade trying to help Walker be like everyone else – healthy, normal, accomplished. He was not capable of that, and so I considered myself a failure, and sometimes I thought that of him as well.

Mr. Vanier, on the other hand, suggested I accept Walker as he was, and see the person who was already there, whose gifts were merely subtle. I didn’t have to be endlessly altruistic, or do it all alone: I just had to be present, and understand that I couldn’t fix him, and that I was therefore as disabled as he was, in that regard; and that this made us the same, and equal, and equally fragile, and if I could accept our mutual, floppy incompetence in the face of the world’s demands, then we might find in the grace of our sameness a chance to simply be, together. This was love. I had intimated this, but Mr. Vanier showed me it was possible, especially within a community.

He was a genius of the heart, at least some of the time, a kind of Socrates of the imperfect.

To put this in practical terms, I no longer had to stop Walker from rolling little sandwich bags of pop-can tabs between his meaty palms, because that was a strange and troubling thing he did: I simply had to pay attention, and take the habit seriously, and try it myself (groovy is the only word that describes it) and figure out why he did it (I think it is Walker’s physically embodied version of Keats’s negative capability, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas, softness and sharpness, in mind).

Open this photo in gallery:

Toward the end of the second afternoon’s conversation, Mr. Vanier said something I have never been able to forget. “There’s a really interesting text in Genesis,” he told me – he was deeply religious, which made the atheist in me distrust him – ”when Adam and Eve separate from God. And God runs after them. He says, ‘Where are you, it’s me, God. Where are you?’ He doesn’t say, ‘You’re not good.’ He just says, ‘Where are you?’”

“And Adam responds, ‘I was frightened because I was naked. And so I hid.‘ So: fear, nakedness and hiding. What is that nakedness? It’s our mortality. Whether we like it or not, we are not in control. So the whole reality for human beings is to accept oneself as one is.”

I think he was trying to say the only salvation for the flayed, flawed human soul is to find an antidote to shame. Some people find it in love, some in truth, some in bravery, some in art. Some never find it. Mr. Vanier, to everyone’s surprise, may have been one of them.

I remembered that story following last week’s bombshell that Mr. Vanier, who died at the age of 90 last May, had “manipulative sexual relationships,” many of them coercive, with at least six women between 1970 and 2005. (None of the women were intellectually disabled.) The investigation – commissioned by L’Arche itself – established that Mr. Vanier knew about, enabled and even shared in the sexually abusive practices of Père Thomas Philippe, a censured Dominican priest and serial sexual abuser who was Mr. Vanier’s “spiritual father” – and one of Mr. Vanier’s inspirations for L’Arche.

We live in a time when people are vaporized for their misdeeds. It isn’t enough for someone to be shamed; now they are cancelled. The sexual marauding of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were grossly underplayed in their day; now, at the other end of the pendulum swing, it seems impossible for us to grasp that people capable of terrible moral failings may also have redemptive qualities as well. We struggle to find a middle ground.

Now that Mr. Vanier has been found to have hurt women, will L’Arche be another casualty? What endures in a legacy? What should endure? The polished, perfect stuff everyone can agree with, or the nasty, broken, human bits as well? And how do you negotiate the truce between the two? As one long-time assistant at L’Arche put it: ”Extraordinarily flawed people can create extraordinary things. I think L’Arche is an extraordinary thing. And what I have learned in the report is that Jean was an extraordinarily flawed being.”

Open this photo in gallery:

L’Arche has been processing the revelations about Mr. Vanier like a cobra that has swallowed a lamb: digesting the beast will take time.

Leaders of L’Arche’s 150-odd communities around the world were the first to learn the contents of the independent investigation, last December. The process of informing the core members followed this week, using simplified pictograms and circle talking groups and more private one-on-one conversations. But there is nothing simplified or ambiguous about the report’s findings: they describe emotional and sexual abuse and allegations of sexual assault conducted under conditions of “psychological hold” and characterized by “significant imbalances of power,” where the “alleged victims felt deprived of their free will.” This happened repeatedly over more than 30 years with women old and young, married and consecrated. Mr. Vanier knew he had power over them, but when they complained, he said he thought things had been okay. When the husband of one of the abused women became angry, Mr. Vanier called him unreasonable. And while the plaintiffs were, in the words of the report, “humble and did not appear to be in any way hateful or vengeful” – they wanted to “help L’Arche reflect on the past" and avoid “possibly similar situations moving forward” – all of the women described “long-lasting, negative impact on their personal lives and inter-personal and spousal relationships.” Under the cover of spiritual guidance, Mr. Vanier did lifelong damage.

The outside world is dropping the Vanier name like a scalding potato. The University of the Sacred Heart has revoked a prestigious award it laid on Mr. Vanier decades years ago. A high school in Milton will likely change its name, and there are 20 others that share its dilemma. The widely respected Jean Vanier Research Institute at the King’s University College in London, Ont., will likely not be called that any more. And that’s just the start of the disavowals.

L’Arche is ahead of the game in this regard. Mr. Vanier was a figurehead at L’Arche until he died, but he had handed over day-to-day operations by the mid-1970s, a mere decade after moving into a small house in Trosly-Breuil with two non-speaking middle-aged men with intellectual disabilities who had been living in a vast and dehumanizing institution. (L’Arche’s charming origin story is now tainted with the knowledge that, even then, Mr. Vanier was enabling and even copying Père Thomas in his abusive practices.) But “he hasn’t been an authority [on disability] since about 1984,” says Pam Cushing, director of the disability studies program at the Jean Vanier Research Centre.

Ms. Cushing spent a year at L’Arche two decades ago for her PhD, and discovered L’Arche kept its assistants loyal (some stayed for 40 years) by making them part of a (then-Catholic) liberation movement. Such assistants are much harder to come by in today’s secular world, and the scandal won’t help. “L’Arche is living the consequences right now,” Ms. Cushing says. “But it’s bringing them together. It is time for them to own the whole thing, and not to stay content with one person as L’Arche’s embodiment.”

The next and most brutal stage for L’Arche is to decide how big a part Mr. Vanier will play – if any – in the organization’s ongoing story. Its well-known As I Am videos, made by Mike McDonald, L’Arche’s Canadian director of communications, within the last decade, have never referenced Mr. Vanier. “It didn’t occur to us that we had to talk about Jean to talk about L’Arche,” Mr. McDonald says. Will L’Arche ban Mr. Vanier’s image from L’Arche homes, and cut his name from the origin story? “I hope not,” says Stephan Posner, the director of L’Arche International, with a sigh. “But it’s too soon to tell.”

Some think a complete exorcism would be a mistake, on balance. Joe Egan helped run L’Arche for more than 40 years. He is furious with Mr. Vanier, both for leaving a mess and for lying. But like Mr. Posner, he has no desire to shy from the truth. “Jean’s story,” he says, “the full story, with the shadow, is a truer reflection of what we are as human beings. The truth of his whole life – that he wasn’t a saint, or a mythical guy, but a complicated guy, capable of doing wonderful things, and also of doing the most godawful things – we have to talk about that, or we lose our humanity.”

Open this photo in gallery:

Will Mr. Vanier’s books (he wrote more than 30) still be read? Stephanie Calma, the director of the L’Arche community in Stratford, Ont., was drawn to work at L’Arche in part after reading books like Mr. Vanier’s bestselling Becoming Human, the basis of a Massey Lecture. But she has had trouble reading Mr. Vanier since the news broke. “When he talks about relationship and intimacy, I personally ask myself, can I trust these questions about intimacy?”

The books are now interesting for new reasons. In his last, A Cry Is Heard, published in 2018, Mr. Vanier grapples with the 2014 revelations that Père Thomas, his self-proclaimed “spiritual father,” had sexually abused women. At the time, Mr. Vanier repeatedly denied any knowledge of the abuses, and never mentioned his own participation. In A Cry Is Heard, he reaches again and again toward a confession, but he can’t quite get there.

He could never break the hold of Père Thomas, his so-called spiritual father, whom he met at the age of 20, when Père Thomas was in his mid-forties. At 22, travelling with his famous parents, Georges and Pauline Vanier, to visit their friend, the future Pope John XXIII, in Rome, Mr. Vanier said he wanted to be a priest. The future pontiff replied that he would have to cut his ties with Père Thomas. Mr. Vanier never could, and never did. As Mr. Vanier was dying last spring, Stefan Posner asked him what the most painful experience of his life had been. “My relationship with Père Thomas,“ Mr. Vanier replied.

Kathryn Spink, Mr. Vanier’s biographer, believes the agony of that relationship ran like a crack through Mr. Vanier’s life. “Jean wrote and talked a great deal about brokenness and the need for love, a love that was accepting of fragility,” she told me the other day. “I had always felt that the reason he could describe the journey from brokenness to wholeness in a way with which so many could identify was because it was his journey. Only now do I realize to what extent.”

Does the possibility that Mr. Vanier may have been tortured by his abusive habits excuse the abuse? Not in the slightest. And his punishment will be stingingly appropriate: insiders insist the final decision on Mr. Vanier’s role in L’Arche’s legacy will be made, ultimately, by the assistants and the core members who live in L’Arche. Jean Vanier created a revolutionary form of community that made intellectually disabled men and women so equal and so enabled that they can now boot the founder out of the origin story of the community he created. That feels like real liberation.

Open this photo in gallery:

At the end of the week of distressing revelations, I was invited to lunch at Daybreak, a L’Arche home north of Toronto. I went because I knew it would make me feel better, somehow. Snow had fallen heavily the night before, and all the day program buses had been cancelled, resulting in a full house for lunch: six assistants, five core members, me, quiche, salad, apple pie. The room was white bright from the sun off the snow.

The usual non-stop entertainment was at hand. As soon as I sat down, someone asked if he could see my watch, because he too had a sport watch. His was nicer, which of course he knew. A lovely, quiet, thoughtful guy was sitting at the head of the table, wearing a Leafs cap. “Why aren’t you a Habs fan?” I said. “Because the Habs are not the Leafs,” he said. I had no reply to that.

The terrible news of Jean Vanier’s abuses had been passed along to the core members, in one-on-one conversations (they dismissed the pictograms) the Sunday before. Afterwards, at dinner, one of the assistants told me, “it was almost like Christmas.” Some strange relief seized them.

I asked the man next to me, a fellow with Down syndrome, how he felt about the news about Mr. Vanier. He rolled his eyes. “You’re disappointed?” I asked. “Just a little," he said. In the Green House, where they all live and where we were eating, he is known for his mastery of understatement.

A man with a brown mustache at the other end of the table – he’d been living in L’Arche more than 50 years – heard the news about Mr. Vanier and wanted to know if L’Arche was going to close. I had to ask the core members how they felt about Mr. Vanier, and sometimes I had to wait while they considered an answer, but they always answered. Sometimes the answer was “oh.” “Sad” was another. “Ashamed” was a third. “I wanted him to change and not do that,” someone else said.

Eventually everyone started talking at once. That felt good. There was quite a lot of laughing, too, but in my limited experience at a L’Arche table, that is a given. Eventually the quiet guy in the Leafs cap told me that when he learned the bad news about Mr. Vanier, he had wanted to pray – ”especially for the women,” he said. I asked him if he thought all L’Arche’s pictures of Mr. Vanier should come down. “Yeah, they should,” he said. “Because it’s still shocking. And especially for the women.” He meant the pictures in public places, not the private photographs some core members have in their bedrooms, of them arm-in-arm with Jean. The man in the cap wanted to keep those. “I want to remember him,” he said then. “But he did a shameful thing, and you want to remember that he did it.”

Open this photo in gallery:

From the archives

Ian Brown’s correspondence with Vanier

2008: ‘Your questions come, I sense, from your loneliness’

2008: After Morgentaler, Jean Vanier kept his Order of Canada. Why?

2009: ‘Am I fearful of death? No, I cannot say I am’

2010: ‘There is a beginning and an end to all things’

2015: ‘What we have to do is find the places of hope’

More on the Vanier abuse revelations

Ian Brown: L’Arche founder Jean Vanier sexually abused at least six women, report finds

Ian Brown: Allegations spark reckoning over Vanier's legacy in Canada

Madeline Burghardt: Vanier was revered, but revelations of abuse and manipulation should not come as a surprise