A safe place

As all the inner pains surface, we can discover too that community is a safe place.  At last some people really listen to us; we can, little by little, reveal to them all those terrible monsters within us, all those guilt feelings hidden in the tomb of our being.  And they can help us to accept them by revealing to us that these monsters are protecting our vulnerability and are our cry for and our fear of love.  They stand at the door of our wounded heart.  In each one of us there is such a deep wound, such an urgent cry to be held, appreciated and seen as unique and valuable.  The heart of each one is broken and bleeding.

Jean Vanier

Community and Growth

True community

The fundamental attitudes of true community, where there is true belonging, are openness, welcome, and listening to God, to the universe, to each other and to other communities.  Community life is inspired by the universal and is open to the universal.  It is based on forgiveness and openness to those who are different, to the poor and the weak.  Sects put up walls and barriers out of fear, out of a need to prove themselves and to create a false security.  Community is the breaking down of barriers to welcome difference.

Jean Vanier

Community and Growth

Life in a community

One of the signs of life in a community is the creation of links with others. An inward-looking community will die of suffocation. Living communities are linked to others, making up a huge reservoir of love for the world. And as only the one Spirit inspires and gives life, communities being born or reborn will be alike without ever even knowing each other; the seeds the Spirit sows across the world, like prophetic signs for tomorrow, have a common source. It is a sign of maturity for a community to bind itself in friendship with others; it knows its own identity, so doesn't need to make comparisons. It loves even the differences which distinguish it, because each community has its own gift which must flourish. These communities are complementary; they need each other.

Jean VanierCommunity and Growth

The perfect community

I'd like to tell the many people in communities who are looking for this impossible ideal: 'Stop looking for peace, give yourselves where you are. Stop looking at yourselves -- look instead at your brothers and sisters in need. Be close to those God has given you in community today; and work with the situation as it is. Ask how you can better love your brothers and sisters. Then you will find peace. You will find rest and that famous balance you're looking for between the outward and the inward, between prayer and activity, between time for yourself and time for others. Everything will resolve itself through love. Stop wasting time running after the perfect community. Live your life fully in your community today.'

Jean VanierCommunity And Growth

Welcoming....

My experience has shown that when we welcome people from this world of anguish, brokenness and depression, and when they gradually discover that they are wanted and loved as they are and that they have a place, then we witness a real transformation--I would even say 'resurrection.'

Jean Vanier
From Brokenness to Community

Change and security

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, leads 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.

From Jean Vanier's Becoming Human, chapter 1 (Loneliness)