A Cry is Heard: My Path to Peace
JEAN VANIER
(Darton, longman & todd, 144 PP, £9.99)
Tablet bookshop price £9 • tel 020 7799 4064
We Need One Another
JEAN VANIER
(SPCK, 144 PP, £9.99)
Tablet bookshop price £9 • tel 020 7799 4064
These two books by Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities for people with and without learning disabilities, were published to coincide with his ninetieth birthday in September. The first, A Cry is Heard, is a personal memoir, written in collaboration with François-Xavier Maigre, and available here in English translation. The second, We Need One Another, consists of talks delivered during an English language retreat given by Vanier in Nyahururu, in the wake of the 2007-08 Kenyan crisis.
The source and style of each book is different, and the reader may wonder to what extent the memoir renders Vanier’s own words. Nevertheless, his essential message, the one he has been announcing for many years, shines through both books.
Vanier is driven by passion for an all-inclusive unity, one that is grounded not in action but in being. In the context of modernity, such unity can only be achieved through encounters that subvert the hierarchies of power we create through our technological achievements. To be sure, collaboration can unite people to some extent around common projects. However, the unity yielded by human endeavour is always also a source of alienation, both from ourselves and from others, since it is achieved by setting aside or overcoming weakness. All-inclusive unity, by contrast, is reached by moving towards weakness.
