Lent, Jean Vanier and Harvey Weinstein
Lent is traditionally a time we think about sin. Of course, we think we know what sin is, who are the saints and who are the sinners. Jimmy Saville & Harvey Weinstein = sinners. Mother Teresa & Jean Vanier = saints.
Or so it seemed.
What Jean Vanier did with l’Arche was remarkable, as I tried to explain in an article I wrote in Unherd when he died. To create a set of communities across the world based on the conviction that mental or physical abilities bear no relation to the value and beauty of an individual human being was extraordinary. So the news that over a period of 35 years, he abused at least six different women is devastating, first and foremost to the women who suffered at his hands, who still live with the effects of his behaviour, but in a lesser way for the many who thought of him as someone as near as you might get to a modern saint. The discovery that someone who displayed a level of compassion and love beyond which most of us can manage, was also capable of devious manipulation of women who trusted him is disillusioning and deeply depressing.
There seems to be a pattern, maybe particularly strong in religious circles, of placing our trust entirely in those who seem better than us. Maybe it is a sign of our need to find heroes, saints, people we don’t question, who can lift us up to be better than we are. We desperately need to find people who satisfy our need for a Saviour who compensates for our own weakness and compromise.
Yet it never quite works out that way.
The writers of the Bible seem at pains never to let us believe the hype about the ‘heroes of faith’. Moses murdered a man and tried to hide the body. Abraham lied repeatedly about his wife out of fear for his own skin. Jacob cheated his own brother out of his inheritance. Samson ended up a proto-suicide bomber, killing his enemies as he died. King David, the ‘man after God’s own heart’, arranged a contract killing of one of his own loyal soldiers to cover up getting his wife pregnant. Even St Peter swore blind that he had never even heard of Jesus.
Wayne Lapierre, Chairman of the National Rifle Association in the USA once famously said “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” If only it were that simple. The world is not neatly divided between the good and the bad, saints and sinners, with or without guns. We are all a bit of both (that’s why guns are dangerous whoever wields them). Some, granted, are more one than the other, but all of us share in that odd mixture of compassion and neglect, truth and lies, bravery and cowardice. We are divided selves.
The Czech writer and politician Vaclav Havel, reflecting on his experience as a dissident under Stalinist eastern Europe once wrote that “the line between good and evil did not run clearly between them and us, but through each person. No-one was simply a victim. Everyone was in some measure co-responsible.” There are no irredeemably bad people. There are bad actions that deserve punishment, but no purely evil people. There may be some that have turned so far away from goodness and life that it’s hard to imagine them ever being turned back toward the light, but if, as Christian faith says, all that God has created is good, then however much a person may have turned away from the light towards the darkness, while they are still alive there is something good in there – if only the continued existence of life itself.
At the same time there are no totally good people either. Some while ago, a Labour politician was doing a question and answer slot for a political website. He was asked a series of questions that demanded quickfire answers. One of them was ‘Winston Churchill – hero or villain?’. He thought for a brief moment and instinctively replied ‘Tonypandy - Villain’, referring to Churchill’s decision to send in troops to control striking coalminers in South Wales in 1910. Predictably he came in for a barrage of criticism for this slur on one of Britain’s favourite and most revered Prime Ministers. Yet the problem was not really the answer, it was the question. It was the instinct, so common in our polarised, Twitter-mediated world, to place people entirely on one side or the other of a moral ledger. Was Churchill a hero or a villain? Was Jean Vanier a saint or a sinner? The reality is that at times they were one, at other times they were the other. Like the rest of us.
Jean Vanier was capable of real compassion. He was also, it turns out, capable of devious wickedness. None of us in leadership positions, however holy and wise we think we become, are immune from the abuse of power, from the possibility of self-deception, from giving in to the seductive temptations of harmful desire.
Jean Vanier was capable of greater goodness yet also darker sins than most of us. The revelation of the terrible harm he did to the women he abused, despite his great achievements, brings us back to the realisation that there is only one true Saviour.
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