Jean Vanier Thoughts

Control of Sexuality

Running away from relationships by throwing oneself into intellectual, manual, artistic and sporting activities, or by exercising power and seeking honor and praise, does not help people to integrate their sexuality; rather it enables them to control it by rejecting it and directing their energies elsewhere. Sometimes this is necessary.
- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 196

Healthy Communities as a Context for Sexual Integration

When I have talked about adolescence I have pointed out how internally divided human beings are. They both thirst for and fear communion, permanent communion. They have sexual desires that are to a greater or lesser extent divorced from true relationship. In thirty years of community life, I have noticed that a community is one of the places in which human beings can recover inner unity, provided that the members of the community are deeply united and loving, that they celebrate their unity, that they have a clear code of ethics and a spiritual life directed towards communion with God and with others. Monasteries and convents provide the same kind of experience. They are places where each member of the community, through gentle love and attention, learns to integrate his or her sexuality.
- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 196

Difficulties in Sexual Integration

Sometimes there is discord between the heart which thirsts for communion and for loyalty to one person, and sexual fantasies and desires. Many good husbands have spoken to me about the difficulties they have in this area, and their attraction to younger women. The integration of genital sexuality is never an easy thing. It is a slow process which requires effort and clear choices, a communion in love, tenderness and concern for the other, and the help that comes from God..
- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 196

Harmony of the Sexes

It is good for men and women to work together with their different emotional makeup and different ways of expressing anger. The differences between men and women are first and foremost in their bodies and sexuality. The woman welcomes, her sexuality is more internal, whereas the man’s sexuality is external. These biological differences have their repercussions on the psychological level. When a man exercises authority, he thinks more about structure, about devising a plan that will enable him to achieve a project. A woman is more concerned with people. The man is more reasoning, the woman more intuitive, finer, more delicate, more attentive to detail. These differences, which I have experienced a thousand times in L’Arche, are obviously not absolutes. Men can be intuitive and women reasoning. What is important is to find a harmony between the masculine and feminine, where one does not dominate the other.
- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 192

Divide and Rule

The citizens of Eastern Europe, and especially of the former USSR, have suffered greatly under regimes that sought to stamp out associations that foster community and to destroy trust between people. They followed a policy of divide and rule. I have seen in these countries how long it can take for people to trust one another.
- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 184

SUnhealthy Families

Families can become very closed and shut off from other people, places of mutual protection, jealously guarding their possessions and inheritance. Is that not why in certain Asian and Latin American countries, ten percent of the population owns seventy five percent of the land? Obviously, in this kind of situation, wealthy families can help the poor in a paternalistic way, taking care of them when they are ill or in dire need. However, they do nothing to share their land or wealth, or to change an unjust situation. We can understand the reaction which can come from the anger of those who are oppressed and who see the family as a ‘bourgeois’ reality that supports the rich.
- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 180
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Schools of the Heart

There are schools and institutions which develop our minds, but communities and families are schools of the heart, of love and of faithfulness to others. These schools teach us to be more open others, especially to those who are different from ourselves, as well as helping us to learn about forgiveness and universal love.
- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 179

Friends

We spend our free time with friends. We can relax with them and allow our masks to fall. It is all right to be ourselves and we can do what we like, we are not constrained by rules. But friendship also implies commitment. A true friend feels responsible for his friends, during bad times as well as good, in success and failure, humiliation and sorrow. So there is commitment. Friendship without commitment is not true friendship.
- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 173

Retaining Solidarity

In his book "Les Exclus," or "The Outsiders," Rene Lenoir talks about young North American Indian children in Canada. He describes a group of twenty children to whom someone had offered a prize for the first one who could answer the question, 'What is the capital of France?' They got together to exchange ideas, and then shouted out in unison, 'Paris!' Why did they do that? Because they knew that alone there was only a one in twenty chance of winning. They also knew that the person who won the prize would somehow no longer be part of the community; he would be above them all. In our rich societies, many have won the prize at the expense of losing the sense of community and solidarity. In poorer countries, they have not won the prize, but they have often managed to retain the sense of solidarity.
- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 178

People tend to want everything, and to want it immediately. They look for powerful and exciting experiences to make them feel alive. In a situation like this, it is difficult to re-find real guidelines to life. The kind of supports that used to exist are no longer there, and anyway life is so different from what it was before and it is impossible to go backwards.
- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 171