Jean Vanier's Visit to Egypt in 1985

edited October 2014 in Coptic Orthodox Church
December 1985
Trosly

Dear Friends,

I was in Egypt from December 10 to 16. The days were very full and blessed with the grace of Jesus. In spite of my fatigue, Jesus gave me the strength each day to give talks and to meet new people. It was my first trip to Egypt. Egypt is a country full of history. On the Sunday morning as we travelled to Alexandria by car, we passed by pyramids that had been built more than fifteen hundred years before Moses! History seems much closer!

Around the sixth century after Jesus, there were thousands of monks in the desert between Cairo and Alexandria. After Jerusalem, Antioch and Rome, Alexandria is a real cradle for our faith in Jesus and for Christianity. Today in that same desert there are five Orthodox monasteries with many monks. After visiting the pyramids, we stopped in the monastery Deir Anba Bishoi, where there are one hundred monks. The monastery was founded in the fourth century; there are parts of it that date from the sixth century. It is amazing to be in a monastery where people have been praying for fifteen centuries.

This was my first encounter with the Coptic Church. Their Pope, Shenouda III, had invited me to speak in the auditorium of their faculty of theology. There were between eight hundred and a thousand people with quite a large number of Coptic clergy, including ten bishops. I was able to talk and meet His Holiness Shenouda III for thirty minutes before the talk, then afterwards during a reception. My talk was translated from English to Arabic. I was touched by the opportunity to speak to such an audience. Shenouda III, in his beautiful robes, presided over the evening, which began with a long moment of prayer. I felt that my talk on people with a handicap was something new for the Coptic Church. Several Coptic bishops asked me to keep in contact with them.

The Orthodox Coptic population in Egypt is about 6 million; the Catholic population is about one-tenth of that (600,000); and the Muslim about seven times that (42 million). The Coptic Church is quite powerful and when the government does anything against the Muslim extremists, it feels it also has to do something against the Coptic Church, and so Shenouda III spent several years in guarded residence.

At my two-day retreat there were several Orthodox Church members, including Sister Ruth from the Convent of the Daughters of St. Mary. She founded a small centre for people with a mental handicap. I was touched by our meeting and I think that she too was touched to discover L’Arche and Faith and Light. Her Bishop, Atanasios, encourages her a great deal in her work. There is a Coptic monk who is known in North America as Matthew the Poor. A collection of his writings has been published in book form by St. Vladimir’s Press, called The Communion of Love. Matthew was a rich pharmacist who entered the monastery of St. Macarius. Ten years ago there were only ten monks in the monastery. Today there are a hundred, which shows that the Holy Spirit is at work and giving much life. These contacts with the Orthodox Church touched me deeply and I have the feeling Jesus is going to increase and deepen them. We have so much to learn from our Orthodox brothers and sisters. They have a deep sense of what is sacred, of the divinity of Jesus. As I have often experienced, the poor can truly lead us along the path to unity.

Egypt is, of course, a country where the majority are Muslims. My contact with them was mainly through schools. I spoke in several large Catholic schools where more than half of the students were Muslims. I sensed such thirst and expectation in all those young people. It is important for us to create links with Islam. In Islam, there are extremists whom we hear so much about, who are fanatical and ready to wage a holy war against Christians. However, the majority of Muslims are men and women filled with a deep respect for and fear of God. They have such a sense of surrender to the will of God. Let us pray that we may continue to develop links with them.

I gave several public talks. I was moved by the “cry” of parents. It was almost unbearable for them to hear talks on people with a handicap, their beauty, their value, their possibilities, when they themselves are so alone with their child and struggle to help him or her. In Cairo there are only five or six schools for handicapped people, very few workshops and practically no residences. There is a world of suffering that most people seem to ignore or want to ignore. However, I met some men and women, Christian and Muslim, who are trying to do their best to create a few little institutions. I feel very close to them.

One of the reasons for my trip to Egypt was to visit the Faith and Light communities. There are three lively communities, coordinated by Bernadette Labbad, the mother of two children with a handicap. These communities lack young people who are truly committed. Perhaps my talks to young people will help some to discover the grace of sharing with people who have a handicap and of celebrating with them in Faith and Light.

I also wanted to visit the place where tradition tells us Joseph, Mary and Jesus lived when they escaped into Egypt. I wanted to pray there, but I never found it. There are many places of pilgrimage but none are certain.

I entrust to your heart and prayers the people of Egypt, all our contacts there, the Faith and Light communities and the “cry” of so many parents. We will see what Jesus wants for their future.

Jean


(From "Our Life Together" by Jean Vanier, p298-301)

Comments

  • Thank you Cyril for this I had to google Jean Vanier as I had no idea who he is and would love to read/sample one of his books. Ironic how he has been honoured and had schools named after him and so on but from the above he is a very modest simple and down to earth loving man and that's where his power lies!
  • Here's another interesting excerpt by Jean Vanier:


    "We are taught that we must seek success individually, for we are in a society where we must compete, or die. This means that we are obsessed by efficacity, by work and by recognition. We want to be recognized, not necessarily for the value of what we are doing, but rather to be promoted. This is success. Success is evaluated in money and power. This is what we are continually being taught right from childhood. Thus, in every field, we are all pushed by the sense of promotion. We must get on, must have success, power and riches....

    We...have the cult of liberty and of liberalism, with some innate and phobic fear of anything that might smell of socialism and of community in the larger sense. We are told that we must have the signs of success in the quality of our houses, cars and various other ornaments or furniture inside our houses. The whole aspect of prestige and recognition by the neighbours is very, very fundamental in our society which has pushed us to a very individualized culture.

    It follows that very quickly the family is fragmented. What I mean by a fragmented family is that old people must be put in old people's homes; mentally handicapped people must have their own residences and physically handicapped people must too. Delinquents must have their place also. All those who are the marginal ones are categorically placed together in residences where necessary specialists can be hired to provide programs to govern their existence, and this permits the nuclear family, husband, wife and two children just to be together about their business.

    The children of the family are taken up with children's activities, clubs and youth movements. The wife can join a bridge club, take a part time job or do volunteer work at the local hospital or for meals on wheels. The husband frequently becomes obsessed by this idea of promotion which is very deeply ingrained. He must go up the ladder or he just might go down, and this can be very serious, particularly when they have bought a lot on credit without any money. What if he should lose his job? So, he has to become a slave to the system because everything has been bought before he had the money. Sometimes the husband and wife will be so divided in their activities that there is an even greater fragmentation....We are taken up in a world of activities; we have to do and we have forgotten how to be. And because we are always doing, we get into a vicious circle, with the result that relationships begin to break down....

    When there is despair, I begin to throw myself into activity in order to forget my pain. I do and I do and I do and one day, I retire. Then, having nothing to do, I fall sick. This is the story of many people who are caught up in the world of doing, because in reality, to do, can be to flee. Doing should flow from my being, but frequently I do, because I am frightened that I do not really exist sufficiently. Maybe in this world of intense noise, I am running away. Maybe I'm terribly frightened of silence, frightened because in silence I meet myself, and I confront myself. Maybe also in the silence I meet my God.'"

    - Jean Vanier, Excerpts from Monograph No. 4: Learn to Live. Edited by Sue Mosteller. (Richmond Hill: Daybreak Publications/PrintOne, 1978)
  • In 1964, Jean Vanier, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, created the first L’Arche community in the village of Trosly in France. Forty-nine years later there are 146 L’Arche communities for the developmentally disadvantaged around the world. Our film celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the beginnings of that achievement in France and in Canada.

    In Love and Belonging, Jean Vanier shares his memories of the early days of L’Arche and the spiritual insights its subsequent development has provided. These recollections are supplemented by the narration of Peter Flemington and by excerpts from the film he made only three years after the founding of the first L’Arche community in 1964. The music is supplied by current residents and assistants at that community at Trosly-Breuil providing both a history and a meditation on a rich and rewarding spiritual adventure.
  • "To discover that to be a human being and therefore to be a Christian is to learn how to listen to people and to reveal to people, not to seek to convert them, but to reveal to them that they are precious."

    Jean Vanier
  • "So there's something very particular... Not just living together...but a meeting...and meeting is a sort of...something happens, as if we've been bonded together as if in a moment of Communion, mutual presence, and what I think we've become much clearer is the difference between communication and presence.

    We're in a world of a lot of communication. Internet, Facebook...but people can be communicating all the time through words but they're frightened of presence...to be with.

    And to be with is a mutual recognition of you giving me something and I giving you something...so behind the giving is a humility...

    To meet is not to do things for people, its not to tell people what to do...it's somewhere that the eternal within me meets the eternal within you... What is infinite in me meets the infinite in you...


    So meeting implies transformation...so people can come to do good, people can come to struggle for justice but then you discover something...that you discover as you meet the person that something has happened...that something has born or been born within me...that I discover that to be a human being...is not just to struggle to do good, not just to struggle for peace...it's to live peace and that's something very different."

    Jean Vanier
  • "Community is not the place of security...community is necessarily the place where there can be decisiveness... Because community is about welcoming difference...so if we have a community where everybody must be like the founder it's going to very quickly become sectarian...because everybody must think like the founder...and they are unclear about the mission...so unity comes as we learn to live difference.

    That means somewhere there has to be a change about what unity is about...the big thing is how to harmonize freedom and belonging.

    Because harmony can very quickly become a way to stifle freedom... "You must be like this..." Instead of yourself.

    And too much freedom and there's anguish, conflict...

    So how to harmonize freedom and belonging? That means clarity in mission...

    And for us, our strength is that our mission is clear.

    It is that people with disabilities are precious and important and are called to grow, and to grow in freedom."

    Jean Vanier
  • Jean Vanier, Untiring Advocate For People With Disabilities, Wins Templeton Prize
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/11/jean-vanier-templeton-prize_n_6842884.html

    "People are healed and become more human as they enter into real relationships with others. They then discover that under all the feelings of stress, rejection and humiliation, that they are someone! Those in need and those who come to help are all being healed, and are all, together, becoming more human. Our society will really become human as we discover that the strong need the weak, just as the weak need the strong. We are all together working for the common good."



    Jean Vanier on Loving Human Beings
    http://easternchristianbooks.blogspot.com/2015/03/jean-vanier-on-loving-human-beings.html

    Normally I find Canadian nationalism utterly risible, and a long time ago I developed an allergy to the pathetically passive-aggressive boosterism that some Canadians use (what is the current and apt portmanteau? "humblebragging"?) to try to prove their worth in the face of superior cultures. But in at least one instance, I am glad indeed to share the same terre de nos aïeux with this year's Templeton Prize winner, Jean Vanier. Axios!

    I think I first heard Vanier (who has a lovely and lyrical speaking voice) during his 1998 Massey Lecture, and thereafter began to read him. I have remained haunted by this man's life and work for he is an example to all of us, but especially those of us who endanger our faith and humanity by being academics. Descended from a famously distinguished and much-decorated vice-regal family of deep Christian faith, Vanier could have had a conventional academic career, for which he received a doctorate in Paris. But truly here is a man who has heeded and embodied that famous Evagrian dictum that Eastern Christians are forever quoting to each other: the "theologian" is a man of prayer, of service, and of love. All the degrees in the world matter not a whit if you have not love, especially for the most unlettered and unloved of people, including, in Vanier's case, those "handicapped" people otherwise condemned to be warehoused away.

    Vanier, appalled at such treatment, founded the now widespread international movement L'Arche, with 147 communities in 35 countries. L'Arche puts Christian hospitality into action, creating houses where "handicapped" people can love and be loved. Early on he helped me understand one thing clearly: people involved with serving others can often be prone to a kind of paternalism in thinking of themselves as only the givers, but in fact they often receive back far more than we give, and far more important gifts too. Moreover, Vanier, together with Henri Nouwen, helped me to realize that all of us are "wounded healers" and we need to be open to receiving from others even as we need also to be able to give. Vanier's life of heroic virtue shows us the wisdom that Charles Ryder utters in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: "to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom."
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