But Darkness Did Not Overcome It

Recently, the feed in my YouTube channel brought up a podcast on the revelations regarding the actions of Jean Vanier who founded the L’Arche communities for developmentally challenged people.  A report released in 2020 into allegations of sexual abuse by Vanier and Thomas Philippe, a Catholic priest who was Vanier’s spiritual mentor concluded:

The key finding in the report: That Vanier’s founding story about the creation of L’Arche was false. Vanier often said he started L’Arche in response to hearing a “cry” from God and seeing the inhumane conditions prevalent in mental institutions. In reality, the creation of L’Arche provided a means for Vanier to reconstitute a sect Philippe had led earlier but that had been broken up by the Catholic Church.

This news sent shockwaves through the religious and spiritual world and shocked the countless number of people who held Vanier to be a modern saint.  Vanier’s impact has been and continues to be almost immeasurable on those who have been positively impacted by the many L’Arche communities in so many countries and by the writing in the prolific books by Vanier.  Fortunately, one positive aspect of the terrible situation was that the report concluded that the abuse by Vanier and Philippe, “did not involve any of the members or residents that the organization served there or elsewhere.”  They involved vulnerable adults who came under the influence of the specter of holiness enabled by the L’Arche communities. 

I was introduced to the work of L’Arche communities during my theological studies at Huron University College.  I was blessed with the opportunity to experience the wonderful work that is done there when I was able one reading week to live with the L’Arche Daybreak community in Richmond Hill, Ontario.  The life of that community and their wonderful acceptance and upholding of all the members of the community as well as the respect and support for each member has left a lasting impression on me.  In revisiting the exploration of the tragedy, I wanted to see if I could better understand how someone who seemed to be so saintly could be what can only be described as evil at his essence.

I decided to reread one of the books by Jean Vanier which I had on the shelf in my office - Becoming Human.  I reread the book with the awareness of the revelations of the actions of Vanier and the realization he had founded L’Arche as a means to carry out his perverted theology which, “Vanier and Phillipe were fully committed to a spiritual deviance that they fully believed in themselves.” 

I have very mixed emotions rereading Becoming Human.  I found Vanier to be very insightful in understanding the need for love, need for community, and the need for security that is at the heart of human existence.  Vanier shows this in statements such as, “We do not discover who we are, we do not reach true humanness, in a solitary state; we discover it through mutual dependency, in weakness, in learning through belonging.”  Statements confirm that Vanier had a deep understanding of the human condition, “To be human is to be bonded together, each with our weaknesses and strengths, because we need each other.”

Vanier was able to use this knowledge and insight to prey on that very weakness to accomplish his wicked and perverted goals.  The paradox of Vanier is that, in founding L’Arche he has been the source of great goodness for so many and at the same time, he caused great suffering to the victims of Vanier and Phillip’s evil actions. 

All this is a huge red flag warning about placing individuals on saintly pedestals that can cloud the need for discernment and safeguards by institutions and individuals in how and who we place our trust.  The L’Arche organization set an example for how such revelations should be handled once they come to light.  L’Arche funded the investigation in the actions of Vanier and Phillippe and were open and transparent about the findings. 

One small but significant question that is raised for me is what should I do with the book in my possession and what should become of the many copies of the works Vanier has authored?  Should they be destroyed?  Book burning is not a great idea under any circumstance that I can imagine.  There is great truth and even wisdom in what Vanier has written.  Unfortunately, it was not reflected in who Vanier was.  Perhaps there should be a warning label pasted in every copy.  I will include a copy of this edition of my blog within the covers of my book. 

Let this be a cautionary tail for us on our journey.  

Who’s Your God?

 Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274), who was the Minister General of the Franciscan Order, defined God as a "circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." This is a definition of God that resonates with me.  This is, at least in part, because it is a paradox.  After all, how can a circle have a centre everywhere and have no circumference?  And yet, for me, this definition of God seems to sum up God better than any other definition I have encountered. 

This paradox gets at the problem of trying to define God.  How can we define the undefinable.  Any definition we have is, of necessity, incorrect because it limits God which is unlimited.  However, the paradox is that we have to define God to try and understand what we are talking about.  Of course, theologians, clergy and all kinds of people have been defining God ever since the cavemen (and women) gathered round their fires and looked at the night sky and made symbols on the walls of caves.

We can say that God is eternal but people will misunderstand that eternity is not a long time, it is outside of time as we know it.  Again, we can try and define eternity – one on-line source defines it this way, “a state to which time has no application; timelessness.”  However, it is beyond our understanding of time – at least Chronos time which is the time that we experience each day with the sun rising and setting and we move one day further from our birth and one day closer to our days on this earth running their course. In this, we are dealing with Kairos which an on-line source defines as, “the right time” from Ancient Greek, Kairos variously refers to an “opportune presentation” in rhetoric and a “spiritual opportunity” in Christian theology.

With all this I will put before you the question, what is the definition of the God you believe in – if you believe in God or a God.  If you don’t believe in God or a God, what is the God you don’t believe in?  In either case, are there aspects of God that possibly don’t fit into that definition?  Are you open to the possibility of encountering a God which doesn’t meet that definition?

In any case, I hope that whoever or whatever the God is that you encounter on your journey God will bless you as Jacob was blessed when he wrestled with the angel (God’s messenger).

 

 

Four Ways of Knowing

Last week I wrote about paradox and the truth that lies beneath opposites.  This week I want to explore different ways of understanding or knowing what lies at the heart of things.

How we understand the bible is a current critical issue among Christians and is behind many of the arguments and disagreements and worse that have arisen between different groups ̶ even within the same denomination such as Anglican.  The ongoing disagreement within the Anglican Communion around Same-sex marriage/blessing is at it foundation about how we understand the bible.  People on all sides of the issue can support their position by proof text i.e. taking biblical quotes that support their positions.  There are without doubt passages that give what appears to be direct support for opposing same-sex marriage. 

Those who support it can point to the idea that scripture is inspired by God but is not infallible.  They also point to context in which the scripture was written using in part the Historical Critical method which is s taught in many theological schools.  The also suggest the direction of the bible is pointing to a broader understanding of the relationships between people which is based on a different understanding of marriage which is in part based on new understanding and development of psychology.

It seems at times that the divisions which have developed are too deep to bridge and I do not want to argue either side of this argument.  Rather, I want to take a step back and look at an old way of understanding which has to a great extent been forgotten in this modern era.  Currently I have been reading, or I should day attempting, to make my way through The Figure of Beatrice by Charles Williams.  This is a wonderful exploration of the character of Beatrice in the works of Dante, especially the Divine Comedy.  It is by no means an easy read.  However, I alternate my reading with emersion in Detective Stories.  I am a late convert to this genre and have become an inveterate consumer of these stories while I am at the cottage. 

But I digress; Charles Williams writes about the four ways of in understanding employed by Dante which can be used to understand his work and especially the Comedy.  These were not unique to Dante but were in use in the late middle ages.  To quote Williams:

At the beginning of the second treatise, just before the theme of the Lady of the Window, Dante explains the four senses in which books may be understood.  They are the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical.  The first goes no further than the letter as it stands.  The second is the literal sense translated into and applied to things of the intellect, and as it were, abstract life; the third is the literal sense applied to the moral life; the fourth, the literal sense applied to what may be called the spiritual life. 

These concepts can be difficult to grasp for those of us who are not used to these different ways of understanding a concept or work.  Fortunately, Dante give an example as quoted by Williams:

He (Dante) takes the sentence: ‘When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a strange people; Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion.’  He says of this: ‘If we consider the literal sense alone, the thing signified is the going out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; If the allegorical, our redemption through Christ; of the moral, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to a state of the grace; if the anagogical, the passage of the sanctified soul from the bondage of corruption of this world to the liberty of everlasting glory,’

This may or may not help clarify the meaning of the example used but it shows how an example may be read in many different ways.  This does not clarify any issue to allow us to say, ‘ah, yes now I can use this to beat the other side into submission.’  Indeed, the example, could be used by either side of the same-sex marriage debate to support their position.  My purpose is not to support or oppose.  My hope is that it will show that more than one understanding can reside in the books of life and perhaps even reveal a deeper truth. 

Indeed, one of the guidelines for understanding dreams is that if you immediately think you know the meaning of a dream you are likely mistaken.  There are deeper meanings to be revealed for you when you explore it.  Indeed, there can be truth on many different levels.   In these times when divisions seem to be becoming deeper and wider, we all should take a step back and see if there is a message and a meaning which will reveal the truth beneath the surface that we perceive.  God does work in mysterious ways which are not always or often revealed to us without exploration. 

I invite you to explore the different ways in which your journey is revealing the truth to you. 

The Beauty of Paradox

Recently I listened to an episode of On Being on NPR radio.  The program was an interview with physicist Frank Wilczek and was entitled, Why Is the World So Beautiful?  The conversation began with an exploration of truth but turned to beauty which lies beneath the surface of things.  This is not surprizing given the traditional connection between beauty and truth. 

The interviewer Krista Tippett quotes Wilczek back to him, “you say is that “In ordinary reality and ordinary time and space, the opposite of a truth is a falsehood.” But, you say, “Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface.” This is so interesting. “You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”  

Here we are dealing with paradox which is, for me, is a hallmark of truth.  THE technical definition of paradox is, “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but, in reality, expresses a possible truth.” Wilczek uses the classic example in quantum physics of light being both a particle and a wave.  Both ways of looking at it are correct.  Sometimes under observation it behaves as a particle and sometimes is behaves as a wave. 

Paradox is central to the Christian story.  We worship a God who humbled himself and became human.  That fact for us is the strength of what on the surface is a really crazy act.  We worship and are followers not a God of power but one who gave up his power to become a creature; one who gave up immortality to become mortal; a God who was powerless on the cross.  And yet the God was born again to immortality and is returning to rule this world.Wilczek notes, “Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface. You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”

I believe that much of the problems that develop in religious doctrine come about by the belief that there is only one way of looking at things.  I have the truth and you don’t or my way of understanding this event of passage is the correct and only way.  It may very well be correct but there may be a different way which is also correct even though it seems contradictory.  There is beneath both a deeper truth which is reflected in part in the truth of both or many ways of looking at it.

The idea of paradox is an insult to our rational minds.  We want to believe desperately that our understanding of the world can only be either/or.  It must be either black or white.  We do accept that their may be shades in between but basically, they are one way or the other.  Things cannot be both.  That is why the Newtonian Universe is still the way that we understand the universe.  Quantum Physics turned that on it head but has not sunk into the foundation of our existence.  We look at the light and see only the object illuminated but not the shadow that is behind the object. 

We Christian do not truly believe that God could have chosen to become human and be born as a helpless baby in a lowly stable.  It fits into the romantic ideal of Christmas but we do not truly believe in the consequences of that action.  We do not truly believe that Jesus did not go to the cross without an internal struggle.  We do not truly accept the truly radical nature of a God willingly dying on the cross.  We cannot truly accept the implication of the paradox of the cross.  We do not believe that there is true power in the weakness of Jesus surrender to the will of Father and the submission to the cruelty of the cross.  That perhaps is the ultimate paradox of where true power lies.  If we Christians truly believed that the Christian Church would be very different.

Blessings on the journey and try and embrace the paradox.

Let the Mystery Be

This morning I am following up on yesterday’s sermon and pondering the mystery of life.  I based my sermon (which is posted seperately) attached) on the reading from the book of Job.  It is something of a mystery why the book of Job was included in the canon of the bible as it puts God in a less than favourable light.  Job becomes the pawn in a celestial wager between God and Satan with dire consequences for Job and his family.  However, the story does have a happy ending for Job. All that Job loses is restored to him and he lives happily ever after and dies at a ripe old age of biblical proportions.

In the course of the story Job demands an audience before God and demands justice.  However, God is less than sympathetic to Job’s plight and states that God and God’s works are beyond Job’s comprehension.  Job humbles himself and admits to God that it is beyond his comprehension:

Then Job answered the Lord: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; ⁶therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”     

It is hard for us human being to live in the mystery of life.  We can deny it as some people with a scientific bent try and believe that we will solve the mystery of creation.  Or, as religious people, we can try and put God in a nice box that we define and tie up with a bright bow.  However, if we are honest and humble enough, as Job was, we can try and live in the mystery of life.  In my sermon I quote Helen Luke, one of my favourite authors who is one of the great explorers of this mystery:

true mystery is the eternal paradox at the root of life itself—it is that which, instead of hiding truth, reveals the whole not the part.  So when, after having made every effort to understand, we are ready to take upon ourselves the mystery of things, then the most trivial of happenings is touched by wonder, and there may come to us by grace, a moment of unclouded vision. 

True paradox can be difficult to understand and to live with but it is in paradox that we can discover God.  I believe that we are called to let the mystery be in all its wonder and respond to God with praise and thanksgiving.  I will close with a verse from my favourite song on this mystery; Let the Mystery Be by Iris Dement:

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they all came from. Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done.
But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me.
I think I'll just let the mystery be.