listening to jean - and jesus - to trust what is small and true...

In December 2007, the radio journalist, Krista Tippett, interview the late Jean Vanier for her "On Being" program. I have embedded the unedited version of their conversation here for those willing to go deeper. It takes time to savor this give and take - 90 minutes - and in our era of "breaking news" and "instant 24/7 emergencies" you may not feel you have the time. Americans are overly reactive - obsessively utilitarian - and always in motion. We already possess all the time that there is, but still we feel rushed. Pressured. Out of breath. Taking these 90 minutes might be just what the doctor ordered for you - an extended break in the middle of the day to be nourished by joy - but that's up to you to decide. I leave it here for you as an option. (I am going to re-listen later this afternoon.) 

The Wisdom of Tenderness from The On Being Project on Vimeo.

There is a portion of this conversation that continues to inform my sou and challenge my imagination: it occurs during the last third of the video and has to do with the blessing and curse of technology. Here's the set up from the show's transcript:

Ms. Tippett: Another piece of wisdom I think about L’Arche is, as you say, its presence, the physical presence. This is another conversation I have with people all the time in different context — that the world’s pain comes to people in Western cultures often through their television sets or through reading some horrific story in a newspaper or seeing an absolutely heartbreaking picture, like a picture I saw of an Iraqi child crying at a funeral the other week that haunted me for days. And yet, there’s nothing I can do for that Iraqi child, you know? He’s thousands of miles away. I think I’m also aware that it’s not only that I can’t touch his pain or the sources of it directly. It’s that I don’t know his sources of solace. I don’t know what’s going to help him get up the next day and somehow start to heal. I’m just, I’m throwing that out… 

Mr. Vanier: We are in an incredible world of technology, the global world. And yet, with television and even with cell phones and internet, we can cut away from relationship. To get an email, you don’t see the eyes of the person, you don’t see the face, you don’t see the smile, you don’t see the hands, you don’t see the tone of voice. And we have to come down to small is beautiful because small is where we relate.

Ms. Tippett: Isn’t it funny that global technology may bring us back to small is beautiful.

Mr. Vanier: Possibly. Or take us away from it. As I had said, as you look at that Iraqi child and you were wounded and wanted to do something, yet you were confronted by your incapacity because the child was not in front of you. If that child was in front of you, you could have taken the child in your arms. So we’re going into a world where the imagination, the virtual, the long distance, see things far away, appear as close. But you can’t touch them. They’re close to the imagination, but they’re not close to the body. So let’s come back to the reality of the small.

Vanier quietly but insistently makes a case for the upside wisdom of the gospel: that the way of healing in a world of power involves proximity, vulnerability, and tenderness. It is the blessing of being so small that you can touch what hurts. In another setting Vanier spoke of this as the "10 Foot Rule" where we realize, accept, and practice that we can only influence and touch the people who are closest to us. Ten feet away in any direction. The rest of the world's pain is beyond our ability to change. That is humbling, but true. "Look at that Iraqi child (you spoke of) who wounded you so that) you wanted to do something, yet you were confronted by your incapacity because the child was not in front of you. If that child was in front of you, you could have taken the child in your arms. So we’re going into a world where the imagination, the virtual, the long distance, see things far away, appear as close. But you can’t touch them. They’re close to the imagination, but they’re not close to the body."

Such is the seductive illusion of our social media technology: it causes us to trust a mistaken sense of being "in touch" with events and realities that we truly cannot touch. We believe we are connected, when we are alienated and isolated. I think of the story in St. Matthew's gospel where the scholars, literati, and lawyers came to Jesus to put him to the test.

"Show us a sign from heaven," they asked. Jesus replied, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot read the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given except the sign of Jonah.” Then he left them and went away. (Matthew 16: 1-4)

In truth, our ability to change life is limited. Modest and small. For most of my life I was trained and encouraged to think big. To strive for great things. To make a difference. Looking backwards, a few good things probably happened in the social justice organizing and pastoral ministries I gave myself to over the years. But not a lot. Like St. Paul, I was blinded by illusions of grandeur and too full of myself to grasp the miraculous grace and holiness of the small. The wisdom that Cynthia Bourgeault shares reminds me that we only learn to see with the eye of the heart, when we practice dying and surrendering to self before death, do things start to matter.

Spiritual practice doesn't ordinarily start on one's deathbed. The real dying is much more an inner attitude, more of a 'just let the fear come up and fall through it to the other side.' This gesture can be learned in life as well - in fact, that's the shortest description of what spiritual practice is all about. And once it's been learned, our actual physical death is no longer the huge watershed it formerly appeared to be, but is seen as merely a continuation of this same inner gesture we have already become intimately familiar with... The code word for this inner gesture is surrender... The word surrender means to "hand oneself over" or "entrust oneself." It is not about outer capitulation, but about inner opening. It is always voluntary and rather than an act of weakness, is always an act of strength. (The Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 72)

I first heard Vanier's wisdom about the holiness of all that is small - and the blessings it brings - at the close of my formal ministry. Di and I were in the car returning from one of our many trips to Montréal . As is our want on a long car trip, we were listening to a podcast. The first two thirds of this interview were engaging and informative, but the closing third was yet an encounter with the truth that when the student is ready, the Buddha appears. I was ready. I had been having panic attacks about continuing my work in the local church. Not only was I feeling dried up and worn out, only three parts of the grind held any meaning for me: celebrating Eucharist, visiting with individuals for conversation and prayer, and sharing music with the wider community. When I heard Jean say, "We’re going into a world where the imagination, the virtual, the long distance, see things far away, (yet they) appear as close. But you can’t touch them. They’re close to the imagination, but they’re not close to the body. So let’s come back to the reality of the small." the scales fell from my eyes. For the last two years of ministry I simply gave myself to being small: celebrating Eucharist, visiting and praying, making music.

It wasn't easy, for me, or others. Who was going to attend to administration? Or fund-raising? Or church politics? It was painful to relinquish these tasks and trust being small. Some were angry that I no longer had a grand vision for ministry. I often felt confused, but knew from previous encounters with being blind before I could see, that God's way requires seasons of purification, silence and training in trust before Easter arrives. Authentic seeing "is accomplished by dying: for whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and whoever shall lose his/her life for my sake will save it." (Luke 9:24)

Cut back to the Vanier interview, please, especially given the anxiety and frantic reactions to the assault of our current news cycle of war, political intrigue, a world on fire and all the rest: what can you touch? "Let us come back to the reality of the small."

Ms. Tippett: Like the people who live down the street from us.
Mr. Vanier: We can touch them; we can be with them. The difficulty with L’Arche, which is also a beauty — I say it’s our difficulty, it’s our beauty, is that it’s small, and it’s just very little.

Ms. Tippett: It’s small, and yet the story of L’Arche is that from one community in France, you are now all over the world. You’re in Africa. You’re in Bangladesh. You’ve talked about Calcutta, some of the places you’ve mentioned.

Mr. Vanier: Yes. L’Arche has grown. But the reality of every day is sometimes quite painful in the smallness in a world where people are being pushed to pretend that they’re big.

Ms. Tippett: I think it is. It’s deeply countercultural that you say repeatedly, you don’t want with L’Arche to change the world. That’s not the goal.

Mr. Vanier: What we can do is what Gandhi says: We can’t change the world, but I can change. If I change, and I seek to be more open to people and less frightened of relationship, if I begin to see what is beautiful within them, if I recognize also that there’s brokenness because I’m also broken, and that’s OK, then there’s something that begins to happen. It’s so countercultural, but that doesn’t matter. What has happened, what I sense for the future of our poor little world, with all its ecological difficulties and financial difficulties, that maybe the big thing that’s going to happen is that little lights of love will spread over the country. Little places where people love each other and welcome the poor and the broken. Where we give to each other their gifts and have these little, little places, and that the world is — we’ll never hit the headlines, but we’ll be creating these little lamps. And if there are sufficient number of little, little lamps in each village or each city and parts of the city, well then the glow will be a little bit greater.

Ms. Tippett: What is it you’ve said, that L’Arche is not meant to be a solution but a sign.

Face Book is currently saturated with anxious anti-war memes. There is now a new round of vicious name calling and rants about the cruel nature of our current regime, too. So what? Venting has a place, to be sure, but mostly among friends and in private. Our public witness, our calling as people of faith, our engagement in the world that matters is to love what can be touched. To trust that God is greater than our feelings.Or the evidence. To live into the promise that the word becomes flesh when we take our bodies seriously. When we quit being reactive and anxious and start trusting the slow rhythms of creation.

Right here we come to another significant fork in the road between Wisdom and our common cultural assumption. For many of us in the West (giving up our obsession with grand acts and the affects of individualism) sound like the death of art, the death of any seeing. Ever since the grand era of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, we've had a cultural tendency to think that art is made up entirely of passions and that we need our egoic self to keep the pot of passion stirred. But remember the surprising teaching that the problem with the passions is that they divide our heart. To the storm-tossed vision or romantic individualism, Wisdom poses an astonishing counter-vision: that this "passion" we are so impressed with in the West cannot possible be original, and it keeps us stuck on the surface of ourselves, bobbling around in a chop... The actual meaning of the word "original" doesn't mean being different. It means being connected to the origin. (Bourgeault, Wisdom, pp. 88-89)

I am not pretending that these are placid, peaceful times. They are not. But adding our anxious reactions and vitriol to the pot does not advance the cause of compassion. Or healing. Or hope. Rather, that comes from trusting the counter-cultural wisdom that small is holy. It is a work in progress for me - and probably for you, too.  It requires a lot of quiet time where God can grow trust within us. The interview with Vanier and Tippett closes with this insight - a reminder that only as we surrender and trust can we advance God's peace - and it is a good place for me to end, too.

Ms. Tippett: What is it you’ve said, that L’Arche is not meant to be a solution but a sign.

Mr. Vanier: Yes, we can’t. Once I was speaking to a man in a big city in the United States. He said, “Give me the formula, and I’ll create 300 L’Arches in the next two years.” I said, “It doesn’t work like that. It’s a transmission of a vision, and it’s counter culture. But that’s OK. Who we are, who we are.”