by Jean Vanier

BELONGING

The first chapter was about loneliness, the emptiness we feel when we are isolated and all alone. The basic human need is for at least one person who believes and trusts in us. But that is never enough, it doesn’t stop there. Each of us needs to belong, not just to one person but a family, friends, a group, and a culture. So this chapter is about belonging.

Belonging is important for our growth to independence; even further, it is important for our growth to inner freedom and maturity. It is only through belonging that we can break out of the shell of individualism and self centeredness that both protects and isolates us.

However, the human drive for belonging also has its pitfalls...

There is an innate need in our hearts to identify with a group, both for protection and for security, to discover and affirm our identity, and to use the group to prove our worthiness and goodness, and indeed, even to prove that we are better then others. It is my belief that it is not religion or culture at the root of human conflict but the way in which groups use religion or culture to dominate one another. Let me hasten to add that if it were not religion or culture that people used as a stick with which to beat others, they would just use something else.

Are human beings basically evil? The French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, maintained that love is only one person’s freedom eating up another person’s freedom. Are we all called to live and die in conflict? Do all our generous acts merely conceal the need to be superior to others?

Sartre leads me to my main point: What is the need to belong? Is it only a way of dealing with personal insecurity, sharing in the sense of identity that a group provides? Or is this sense of belonging an important part of everyone’s journey to freedom? Is the sense of belonging akin to earth itself, a nurturing medium that allows plants and trees to grow and to share their flowers and fruits to all?

A group is the manifestation of this need to belong. A group can, however, close in on itself, believing that it is superior to others. But my vision is that belonging should be at the heart of a fundamental discovery: that we all belong to a common humanity, the human race. We may be rooted in a specific family and culture but we come to this earth to open up to others, to serve them and receive the gifts they bring to us, as well as to all of humanity.

In 1986, l’Arche founded a community in Bethany, in the West Bank, just a few miles from Jerusalem. Our house was located in a Palestinian Muslim area, not from the mosque. All our neighbor were Muslim as were the owners of our house, Ali and Fatma, who lived on the top floor and did everything they could to make us feel at ease. Marie-Antoinette and Kathy, the leaders of l’Arche, welcomed two young women, Rula and Ghadir, and a few other people with disabilities from the local area.

Whenever I visited the little community, I was touched by Ghadir’s beauty. She suffered from cerebral palsy and couldn’t speak, but her smile, her trust, and her shining eyes welcomed me each time I came. Through her body, she "spoke" so lovingly. I was touched also by the pain in the heart of Rula’s mother. Rula lived in terrible anguish and sometimes she would scream for hours. The tears of her mother were no different from the tears of a Christian or Jewish mother.

We human beings are all fundamentally the same. We all belong to a common, broken humanity. We all have wounded, vulnerable hearts. Each one of us needs to feel appreciated and understood; we all need help. Through Rula and Ghadir, I saw more clearly how those who are weak and in need have a secret power to touch our hearts and to bring us together in mutual belonging, whatever our religion or culture.

People with intellectual disabilities are so similar, wherever you go. From their place of obvious weakness, the most often respond to love, a love that reveals to them their value, a love that understands. They radiate a certain peace and seem to attract others through their love and trust. If our little community in Bethany was accepted in the neighborhood, it was because of Ghadir, Rula, and the others.

During my frequent visits to the community. I often went to Jerusalem, only a few miles away. Most of the Jewish people I met could not understand why we wanted to live with Palestinians. "Aren’t you in danger?" they would ask. Our Palestinian friends were not happy, either, that we had contact with Jewish people. It was difficult for both sides to see the beauty of the person hidden under the cloak of a different religion and a different culture. And the reactions our Jewish and Palestinian friends are really no different than the reactions most of us tend to have towards those from other groups. We judge them according to our fears and prejudices.

I remember a weekend in Ottawa in the 1970's, when I helped to organize a meeting with men in prison; a group of ex-inmates and offenders, prison guards, policemen, prison chaplains, prison directors, and psychologists. We shared together, ate together, slept in dormitories. Nobody carried any label or sign showing which group they belonged. We were together as persons, not as representatives of a group. It was, if you like, an image for me of how we actually behave towards each other when we have no "markers" to tell us what we are supposed to feel towards someone. It was also a small indication of what society might look like, and how it might function, if we could overcome our prejudices.

The illusion of being superior engenders the need to prove it; and so oppression is born. A bishop in Africa told me that, even though there were few Christians in the area, he had built his cathedral bigger than the local mosque. All this to prove that Christianity was a better, more powerful religion than Islam. So we build walls around our group and cultivate our certitudes. Prejudice grows on such walls.

How did we, the human race, get to this position where we judge it natural not just to band ourselves into groups, but to set ourselves group against group, neighbor against neighbor, in order to establish some ephemeral sense of superiority?

One of the fundamental issues for people to examine is how to break down these walls that separate us one from the other; how to open up one to another; how to create trust and places of dialogue.