Saturday, January 24, 2015

We are more fully human when we allow all our competence to drop. #JeanVanier


Kayte Brimacombe
Members of the L'Arche community in Bognor Regis, West Sussex. Photograph: Kayte Brimacombe
As the world’s 1% and their courtiers were preparing to meet on the ski slopes of Davos, the heroic figure of Jean Vanier – founder of the L’Arche communities – shuffled into a small room in the House of Lords to speak on the subject of why the strong need the weak. We are more fully human, he argued, when we allow all our competence to drop. In 1964, Vanier invited Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux to move in with him in his home in the north-east of France. It was the first act in what came to be a worldwide franchise of communities for people with learning disabilities. These are the people who carry a vital message to the strong, something the strong do not often fully know, some piece of information the strong are often running away from.
“In a world that values winning and coming first, L’Arche communities are places where people can discover who they are, not just what they can do,” is how L’Arche explains itself. In other words, all our efficiency and instrumental reason, all our busy organising and succeeding, can easily block our appreciation of what it is to be a human person.
Quite understandably, many of us run from the fear of our inherent and all-too-human vulnerability by trying to become a success – as if success (money, position, fame, etc) can relieve us of the fear of being vulnerable and exposed. But the problem is, to run away from our vulnerability is to run away from ourselves: they are inextricably linked. Which is why those whose vulnerability cannot be hidden under a fancy suit have so much to teach us. According to Vanier, those who are often rejected by society as unimportant embody the most important truth of them all: that of what it means to be human.
All of this chimes with my own personal experience. I have learnt much more from the depths than I have from the heights. I feel exposed to my own humanity much more in my failures that in my successes. And, yes, there is certainly a Christian subtext to all of this for me – St Paul, strength in weakness, etc.
But I have a worry, a niggle, that won’t go away. Sitting next to Vanier on stage was the archbishop of Canterbury, and ex-oil executive, Justin Welby. I refer to his former profession because one of the directions in which Archbishop Welby is trying to steer the church is towards greater professional competence for the clergy. A recent report commissioned by the church and written by Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint, former chair of HSBC, spoke of the need for “a radical step change in our development of leaders who can shape and articulate a compelling vision and who are skilled and robust enough to create spaces of safe uncertainty in which the kingdom grows”.
The Green report has received near-universal condemnation, both within the church and without. The idea that following in the footsteps of the crucified requires some sort of church-style MBA in which a priest’s performance will be measured against “growth factors” may make sense in the boardroom of HSBC, but it is theologically illiterate. More like The Apprentice than the Acts of the Apostles. Indeed, the sentence, “if there is a decline in measurable performance or potential, an individual will be asked to leave,” is pure Alan Sugar.
Writing in the Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway said that our Lord’s “genius for forgiveness” must have been “sorely tested” by the “dreary management cliches” of the Green report. And she is right. I mean, how does the Green report fit alongside Jean Vanier’s wisdom about the need for failure with which the archbishop was so vigorously nodding in agreement? Not that good management is a bad thing – obviously. But church leaders are not called to be elite executive managers. We are called to fail. And to find a different kind of success in that failure. That is what Vanier points us to at L’Arche. In theological terms, it is called resurrection.


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