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Befriending the Stranger

Reviewed by Robert Wiggs.

Jean Vanier, prophet of the disabled, a witness to the modern world that God’s power is made perfect in weakness, learned through the L’Arche movement (which he founded) about his own capacity for hating. His teacher was Lucien: “The pitch of Lucien’s screaming was piercing… I could sense even hatred rising up within me… it was not only Lucien’s anguish that was difficult to accept, but the revelation of what was in my own heart…. I, who had been called to share my life with the weak, had a power of hatred for a weak person” (p.62 ).

So the task for Vanier was to welcome the unwanted stranger who was himself; to learn to live with his own violence, slowly to pray it, until it turned into something else. He had many teachers, including his father, who trusted him, when as a 13 year old French Canadian in war time, he decided he wanted to train for the Royal Navy. There was nothing so life changing as being trusted by one so significant as a father. There were also the survivors of Auschwitz, whom he was waiting to welcome on the Gare d’Orsay in Paris; and the countless disabled people, who have again and again reintroduced him to Jesus over the last forty years.

Befriending the Stranger is not a book to be read by one seeking information, or by someone in a hurry, nor will it satisfy quickly, unless the reader travel from the head to the heart. It began as six retreat addresses for members of L’Arche gathered in the Dominican Republic. It weaves Scripture, personal reminiscence and the stories of Vanier’s friends. Perhaps its most arresting Biblical metaphor is from Hosea: “Therefore, behold, I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her….I will give her back her vineyards….and make the valley of Achor a door of hope’ (Hosea 2.14).

Vanier’s is a joyful story. The joy is deep because of his evangelical attention to the darkness. In these times (I am writing a week after the 7 July London bombs), there is no living guide whom I would prefer to follow before Vanier. Walter Wink has spoken famously of the Christian inability to face “the continuing darkness in the life of the redeemed.” Those who, like Vanier, stay longest with their own perplexing unknownness will be best placed to befriend the stranger, which is the principal evangelistic task of our time.