I have just started listening to some tapes of Jean Vanier the founder of the l'Arche communities. Jean has been giving talks to long-term l'Arche assitants on the Gospel of St John.
As I listen I am struck first by the fragility of Jean's voice since the last time I spoke with him - perhaps 15 years ago. At the same time, I am even more touched by the obvious strength and commitment from which he is speaking so that the fragility of his voice (he is 83) is quickly forgotten. I find myself deeply moved at his faith and his ability to articulate in language that speaks more to the spirit and the heart than to the head. That has, I think, always been the case with him.
One of the things Jean starts with in the first talk is the importance in that Gospel of signs and how there are people who see the signs and respond positively to them and others who see the signs and ignore them. As I was listening and after, as I was pondering what I had heard, it seemed to me that this applied very much even as we live now.
There are many signs in our world that all is not right: poverty, wars, the environment, the fear at the heart of many of our communal relationships and we know something needs to be done. However it seems so overwhelming and costly to change this state of things that we say things like: ' we will form a task force', 'we will send an envoy', 'we will give to charity'. And maybe those things can be useful. But if I hear Jean and John's Gospel rightly, there is a more immediate and personal response we each can make - or begin to make.
John the Gospel writer speaks of what people experienced in Jesus - most especially that combination of compassion, love, truth and integrity. These are surely all qualities we admire and, hopefully, wish we had. But when you think about it, if each of us could make some - even small - commitment to more deeply embrace compassion, embrace trying to love, embrace truth and integrity (which may be the sum of the other three) then surely things would start to turn around for the better in our world.
We so often say we can't trust our politicians, we can't believe them; in fact we are less and less sure who we can trust. Maybe if we start with ourselves in our own small piece of our world, the whole spirit of our world would be a better place for the generations to come. I by my actions am not going to reform the world but by trying, however feebly, to reform myself surely that will be like the ripple of the water which gradually moves outward. I hope so.
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I saw a sign on a bus this morning that said 'Knowledge defeats fear'. My immediate thought was 'yes okay, that makes some sense because if I know about something, if that knowledge helps me to understand better then I am less likely to be afraid of that thing or person or country or whatever'.
It is certainly true I think, that the more I am aware of why other people think the way they do or know something about the experiences that have formed them, the more I may be able to see them as unique and interesting human beings. If I see shadows in a dark room, I am much less afraid when I turn on the lights.
But I also know that the older I get the more aware I am that there are some things I cannot know or understand. Like death. Like evil. I experience these things but I do not have any kind of knowledge of them that makes it possible to control or escape them or not fear them . I imagine that you could think of other things like that.
It seems to me that there are also things that we may have knowledge about but still are afraid of. Like violence. Like injustice. Like why I get angry. Like why there is pain.
In all these things we surely face our vulnerability and that can be very, very hard. We can try so hard to control our lives so that we don't feel so vulnerable: so we won't get sick and die, so the people we love won't get sick or hurt or die, so we can keep our job, so our children will be okay and so on. And then we experience something like a gunman who shoots to death 12 innocent people and we learn something about the limits of our control.
Learning to live with vulnerability is a lifetime's task and possibly never entirely successful. But I think peace only comes when we do so. Living fully the present moment , because that is all there is, is maybe a good place to start.
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