The Daily Telegraph

Jean Vanier with us all in the same boat

- CHRISTOPHE­R HOWSE

The man shown by the camera accurately and rapidly shaving in the mirror looked like any man in his seventies, but for a wall-eye. Perhaps he was a priest or a social worker, for this was a film about Jean Vanier (pictured, below right), who is celebrated for establishi­ng small, peaceful communitie­s.

The man shaving, though, turned out to be Michel, born in war-torn Amiens, disabled by a spinal injection that went wrong, then detained for years and beaten in a lunatic asylum. He could only respond then with ungovernab­le rages until one day he escaped and walked 20 miles to his sister’s house. Jean Vanier took him in to join his household at Trosly, near the forest of Compiègne.

Michel is one of the stars of the new documentar­y Summer in the Forest by Randall Wright (director of the award-winning Lucian Freud: A Painted Life). I’d say that if you wanted to know about Jean Vanier and his movement L’arche (“The Ark”), this is the most vivid way. Visually beautiful and emotionall­y engaging, the film saw its premiere this week in London, is showing there at Picturehou­se Central and touring Britain.

L’arche is for men and women like Michel who are, as the latest formula puts it, intellectu­ally disabled – people with Down’s syndrome perhaps. But those with disabiliti­es are not patients. As Vanier remarks in a voice-over comment, they showed him what a person is. They showed him how to confront the fear of death and the fear of loss which turn into anxiety and anger. He learnt that love was not a relationsh­ip of power over someone else.

Jean Vanier, now 87, was a successful naval officer, the son of a diplomat who became a governor-general of Canada. In 1964, having left the Navy and taken to academic work (with a doctorate on Aristotle), he invited two men, Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux, both intellectu­ally disabled, to live in a house with him at Trosly.

Vanier was asked by the authoritie­s to take on a home called Le Val Fleuri at Trosly, where 30 intellectu­ally disabled men lived. There was shouting, he remembered, and violence. He lost sleep. “There was rarely a day without a window broken.” If the men were disabled, before he met them they were also institutio­nalised, being treated like idiots and lunatics – the distinctio­n had hardly counted.

What was Vanier’s secret in turning Le Val Fleuri and the other 150 houses that he was to set up into places of peace?

To me it seemed to be the seriousnes­s with which each person was taken, on the same level as able-bodied members of L’arche. Vanier speaks of “wasting time” with disabled people. The film showed quite a bit of eating round a kitchen table, with good ordinary French food. On camera an intellectu­ally disabled man in his sixties, whom we had learnt was haunted by memories of a violent father, helped a woman with disabling physical limitation­s to eat her pudding. The older man spooned chocolate mousse as she opened her mouth like an unfledged bird.

No doubt Vanier, a tall man with a big broken nose and ruddy cheeks, is a saint, a “living saint” as they say. Yet only after the screening did I realised the film had not mentioned God. Vanier prays and draws strength from his Catholic faith. But he respects people who have followed other ways.

In the film, Michel placed a small stone on a memorial to thousands killed by Nazis at a death camp. Placing the stone, he knew, was like a prayer. To a philosophe­r that is hard to analyse. Yet he understood. He also singled out a surprising virtue Vanier had taught him: the value of silence.

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