unexpected tears for jean...

Last night, I began to weep over Jean Vanier's death. Everyone even remotely connected to L'Arche knew it was coming, perhaps Jean himself being the most aware. On the occasion of his 90th birthday last year, he posted "Ten Rules for Life." It was shared for the community but also for the world. I watched it when it was first made public and then again last night.

I never met Jean Vanier, but felt close to him nevertheless. Especially since I started visiting/volunteering with the L'Arche Ottawa community. After reading his books on a regular basis, I needed to know and experience more. By the grace of God I was led to the community of L'Arche in Ottawa, CA. Here my new friends welcomed me, invited me to make connections, taught me about love and forgiveness and humility, shared supper and hospitality with me, teased me when I took myself too seriously, laughed and prayed with me - and invited me to go deeper. The more I visited - the more I listened - the more I loved. I came to know and love Jean through L'Arche Ottawa. Of course, I knew I would never have the honor of meeting Jean in this life time; but growing closer in love to those in community impelled me to make a commitment a few years ago. I felt called to live into the L'Arche spirituality of embodied tenderness as a way of being real and whole in a broken and overly busy world. 

After serving God as a public person of faith and church pastor for 40 years, you see, my heart told me it was was time for a change. My soul knew that my days of public engagement was over. That era had its own measure of meaning and value, of course, and I would never want to exchange any of the profound pastoral connections I made in the four local congregations I served. Still, I was now fraught with anxiety, felt the chill of emptiness within, and knew the sacred was calling me into a new way of being faithful. As Jean himself had to learn - and Fr. Richard Rohr made so clear to those of us in the second half of life - it was now time for me to make peace with my weaknesses and fears before I could authentically share more of Christ's love. “All of us have a secret desire to be seen as saints, heroes, martyrs," Vanier wrote in Community and Growth, "We are afraid to be children, to be ourselves... and true growth only starts when we begin to accept our own weaknesses." In fits and starts that still continue, I found this to be true; and began to slowly reorder how I used my time, gifts, resources and prayer to live into the truth of this insight as faithfully as I could: 

Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.... To love someone is to show to them their beauty, their worth and their importance. (Vanier, Community and Growth)

When news of Jean's death came across the Internet, I was in San Francisco. I had been blessed when one of my oldest friends invited me to be the celebrant at his wedding. It was a festival of joy and commitment and I was filled full to overflowing with love. Being on the West Coast also gave me the chance to see my younger brother, Phil, and his wife, Julie. That, too, was grace upon grace.

And then the news of Jean's death came. I sat quietly backing my suitcase. I held complex feelings of loss and sorrow within even as a few tears snuck out. For the next seven days I sat with these feelings; they did not rise to the surface nor did I know what to do with them. I was grateful that for Jean all suffering and pain was over. I trust the truth of Christ's life, death and resurrection that we will all be made whole in a life beyond life and death by God's grace. Like St. Paul said: "we do not grieve as those who have no hope." And that is true.

Then, without warning, silent tears burned my eyes. I ached to be in community with my friends in Ottawa even as I knew that was impossible. I found myself praying to the Lord about how sad Jean's death felt to me - and more than me for all those who knew and cherished him for decades - for the L'Arche communities across the world. For the Pope. For the Archbishop of Canterbury. For core members of every faith, race, gender, culture and class. So much sorrow. Such a vivid emptiness. Long ago, having read these words from Frederick Beuchner, I embraced their prophetic wisdom:

YOU NEVER KNOW what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.

Tomorrow, in solidarity and faith, joy and sorrow, I will take part in Jean's funeral on-line with thousands of others across the world. I will have my candles lit especially for my friends in Ottawa as they weep and rejoice. And I will give thanks to God for the life, witness, teaching, death and new life given to the Lord's servant, Jean Vanier, by the grace of God.