Jean Vanier, the Canadian philosopher who this week won the Templeton prize for progress in religion, is widely regarded as a saint, but I think he’s wonderful because he’s a sort of anti-missionary and unpreacher. His life’s work is not a book – though he has written many – but a community, L’Arche, where the disabled are welcomed and treated as being of equal worth, perhaps greater worth, than their helpers.
More philosophers should be that way, and certainly more theologians. Their work should be a reflection on their lives, not an idealisation. Vanier teaches, in word and deed, that the strong must let themselves be rebuked by the weak. “People who came to do good discover that the people they came to help are doing them good,” he said in London last month. “As we come together to listen we become, all of us, more human.”
And then he told a story about one of his workers cradling a prostitute dying of an overdose in a Sydney park. This could have been mawkish, but the point of the story was the dying man’s rebuke: “You have always wanted to change me, but you have never met me.” If it is possible to love our neighbours, that is how it must be done.