Page 9 - C.A.L.L. #45 - Summer 2019

Jean Vanier and the gift of L’Arche

by Melissa Florer-Bixler
May 7, 2019
christiancentury.org

Vanier learned about the possibilities of intentional community while visiting Harlem in
the 1940s. It was here he met the people of Friendship House—experiments in cross-
racial living, founded by Catholics, that were cropping up around the US and Canada. He
saw similar work happening among the people who lived in the

Catholic Worker homes in New York.

Vanier returned to France after teaching philosophy in
Toronto and serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. A

local priest took him to an institution in Trosly called Val
Fleury. Here he saw people with profound disabilities treated
as refuse. Here are the poor, the priest told him.

In 1964 Vanier took three men out of this institution. Two of
those men, Raphael Semi and Philippe Seux, continued to live L'Arche founder Jean Vanier
with Vanier in a house in Trosly, the first L’Arche community.

It did not take long for the community to grow. “On the edge of the forest of Compiègne,
L'Arche has opened its first home for the mentally and physically handicapped,” Vanier
wrote in his earliest diary entries about L’Arche. “These family-like homes, each
welcoming from four to nine boys, at least twenty years old, are lifelong homes. They are
the first of a group of homes which will be linked together with workshops, a cultural
centre, a chapel and the necessary medical help.”

People continued to come, to see in L’Arche a spark of hope not only for people with
intellectual disabilities but for a new way of being in relationship, a new way of ordering
life. The community of Trosly grew. Then others began to gather together in homes to
undergo the transformative rhythms of daily life. L’Arche communities arose around the
world—in Uganda and the West Bank, in France and Washington DC, in Japan and Egypt.

Vanier offered the gift of L’Arche to the world through his writings, opening a window to
the communities of L’Arche International. Some of his reflections appear in his book The
Gospel of John: The Gospel of Relationship. In 2008 Vanier reflected on L’Arche and
nonviolence with theologian Stanley Hauerwas in their book Living Gently in a Violent

World. But the best known book, often called the “L’Arche Bible,” is Community and
Growth, a series of reflections that continues to form intentional communities throughout
the world—communities that hope to live the charism of friendship discovered in
L’Arche.