A Man of the Kingdom

Four hundred twenty-eight pages. That's how long Emmanuel Carrère's The Kingdom runs in Italian translation — a sweeping inquiry into Luke's Gospel conducted by the French writer in the style that made him famous: weaving together historical research and autobiography. Carrère is not Christian, though he was once. He investigates the substance of the Gospel message with the passion of an outsider. Parts of the book grip you. Parts amuse. Parts unsettle your faith. But as you near the end, a bitter taste lingers. Why, Carrère asks, if resurrection stands at the heart of Christian witness, where are the Christians who actually live as if the Son of Man rose from the dead three days later? He finds no concrete trace of them. Then, sudden as a rope thrown to someone sinking in quicksand, comes a turn. "It comes to pass," he writes on page 421, "that I find myself in the living room of a renovated farmhouse." After spending time in that place, singing and dancing with people he's never met before — people of whom he knows only that "no one ever invites them anywhere" — Carrère confesses: "I have to admit that that day, for a moment, I understood what the Kingdom is." I never asked Jean what he thought reading those pages about Carrère's encounter — or rather, his collision — with L'Arche and with Vanier, described as a man "very old, very tall, very attentive, very gentle, and, you can see, very good." But I am certain that no human recognition could be more resounding: to have shown, through the fruit of his own life, to a non-believer that the Kingdom of God exists. It is to Vanier — a man of God and of the world, who died a month ago — that we dedicate this special issue of Ombre e Luci. Special because the layout has been overturned, sections have been rearranged, exactly as our lives have been overturned and our measures rearranged since we knew him. Beginning, above all, with his works — L'Arche and Faith and Light.