Jean Vanier Thoughts

Awakening the Beautiful
Power and strength can separate people; whereas weakness and recognition of weakness and the cry for help brings people together. When you are weak, you need people. It's very easy. When you are strong you don't need people, you can do everything on your own. So, somewhere the weak person calls people together. And when the weak call forth the strong, what happens is they awaken what is most beautiful in a human person--compassion, goodness, openness to another and so on. Our weakness brings people together.
Jean Vanier
Belonging: The Search for Acceptance
Windborne Production Video

What Do We Want?
The important thing is to keep the eyes on what we want to grow into. Do we want to grow toward greater community, greater openness, greater compassion, greater listening? Or do we want to just be a tree that's more powerful so that I'm the biggest tree and all the other little trees are stupid? It's all about this question of growth.
Jean Vanier
Belonging: The Search for Acceptance
Windborne Production Video

Culture as a place of Belonging
There is something very profound about culture as a place of belonging, a place of security, a place of celebration, a place where we can be poor and weak and strong together because the group protects the weaker ones, protects the more fragile ones.
Jean Vanier
Belonging: The Search for Acceptance

Entering a New Age
We are entering in a totally new age where either we're going to move into universalism and a quest for greater love--love that needs to discover one's culture, to discover one's language, to be proud of culture, to love one's culture but to be open to other people’s culture, and this has to do with welcoming difference.
Jean Vanier
Belonging: The Search for Acceptance
Windborne Production Video

An Insight from Jung
Carl Jung in one of his letters says this: I find you Christians a very good people. When you see somebody in prison, you see Jesus. When you see somebody hungry, you give him food and see Jesus. When you see someone naked, you see Jesus. But what I don't understand is why you don't see Jesus in your own poverty. Why is it that you see him in the poor that are outside of you but you don't in the poor one that is inside of you?
Jean Vanier

Letting Go of the Mask
Disabled persons can reveal to me my tenderness. But they can also reveal to me my hardness. They can reveal to me a world of darkness in me and a capacity to hurt that I don't want to admit and which I don't want to accept. But the discovery of my wounds, of my own brokenness, is a source of peace if I accept it, because then I do not have to pretend that I am what I am not. I do not need a mask.
Jean Vanier

Wholeness and the Inner War
I cannot think of taking the speck of dust out of my neighbor's eye unless I'm working on the log in my own. Evil is here in me. Warfare is inside my own community, and I am called to be an agent of peace there. But warfare is also in me and I am called to seek wholeness inside of myself. Healing begins here, in myself. Wholeness and unity begin inside of myself. If I am growing toward wholeness, then I'll be an agent of wholeness. If our community is an agent of wholeness, then it will be a source of life for the world around it.
Jean Vanier, From Brokenness to Community, p.50

Avoiding Becoming Paralyzed
If children can become paralyzed by fear, and teenagers by a lack of hope and self confidence, adults are sometimes paralyzed, more or less consciously, by guilt which leads them to shut themselves off from others and prevents them from giving life and being responsible.
Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 119

Yearning for Solidarity
I am sensing a yearning for solidarity, a cry coming from people for togetherness and for love. For too long we've been walking on the road to independence. We're beginning to feel our loneliness. We're beginning to see that we can only live if we're together. We have had enough of loneliness, independence and competition.
Jean Vanier, From Brokenness to Community, p.34

Being the Best
I remember visiting a school in Canada where there was a big poster: “It Is a Crime Not To Excel.” There was another poster of one car overtaking another which said: “Are You in the Passing Lane?” Right from an early age we cultivate this feeling that it is a crime not to be the best.
Jean Vanier, From Brokenness to Community, p.33