The subject we are taking up is exceptionally delicate. We must, after all, enter into the mystery of the human heart—the most sensitive, fragile, and vulnerable part of our being. Only with profound respect can we approach this theme.
"I Am Always Waiting for You"
A few days ago, we were having lunch in the foyer where I live when a young man began to sing. It was a love song; the refrain, full of tender longing, went something like this: "My eyes are in your eyes, my hands in your hands… but I have not yet met you. I am always waiting for you."
Paolo, who was listening, left the room at once. He is twenty-six. Abandoned as a child, wounded deeply by that rejection, he had hidden his hypersensitivity for a long time behind extreme violence and aggression. After spending some time in the kitchen, he appeared in the doorway to listen. I knew what he was feeling in his depths: the words of that song spoke to everything in him. They voiced his hope and, at the same time, his reality: "I have not yet met her… I am always waiting for her."
Yes, I understand you. I understand what you feel. It is something sacred: perhaps it will never be filled, but I respect it deeply.
In that moment, he needed vast respect—a gaze that would tell him: "Yes, I understand you. I understand what you feel. It is something sacred: perhaps it will never be filled, but I respect it deeply."Love Does Not Depend on Intelligence
We encounter people considered wise and prudent, holding positions of responsibility, who laugh and joke when they see a man and a woman classified as handicapped, hand in hand. As though their tenderness were a caricature of reality rather than a deep feeling simply because they are handicapped. Love is the same whether one is handicapped or not. I am always struck when a young man or woman with intellectual disabilities writes a love letter. The language is identical—whether the writer is profoundly disabled or a graduate of the polytechnic.
The language is always the same: "Did you tell him you love him?" "Yes, I already told him—once." He had not felt the need to say it again. But in love, we do repeat ourselves. And if we do not, it is a catastrophe—something married couples often seem to forget. The language of love is truly universal. When a young man with intellectual disabilities offers a daisy picked from a field, he expresses himself in the same way as a man who buys ten roses for the woman he loves. Love makes us simple, humble, small again.
Everything that touches the human heart must be surrounded by great respect. I know of a mixed residence in Canada that welcomes young people with handicaps from age twenty, but only for three years, so that many may benefit. Yet no one thought that between a man and a woman, love might arise—and that one day they would suffer deeply when separated by different placements, without being asked their opinion. Or if someone did think of it, they said to themselves: "It's not serious. With them, you know, it's just childish games!"
It is true that handicapped people can dream just as non-handicapped people do: they listen to records, tape posters of singers and actors to their walls. These are simple, timeless dreams, utterly disconnected from reality—the same gap from life that one finds in prisons, except that there the photographs on the walls reveal an even more explicitly erotic world.
But the desire to love and be loved can manifest itself in much more realistic ways.
One evening, at a discussion about hope in our foyer, Vincent was present. He lives in a psychiatric hospital but visits us for a weekend now and then. He is a very fragile man, filled at once with tenderness, anxiety, and aggression. I asked him: "Vincent, what is your hope?" "I hope one day to leave the psychiatric hospital."
The conversation continued, and then Vincent asked to speak. He told us: "I hope to have a family. I hope to marry."
What Does Marriage Mean?
The words "I hope to marry" carry different meanings for each person. For many, it means reaching adulthood. Everyone surrounding a young handicapped person is married. So for him, being married means being free, independent, recognized as a person. It means leaving mother and father, breaking free of their guardianship, having his own small home.
And this takes shape as a great celebration of which the young man dreams of being the hero, the girl the queen: wearing the white dress, chosen with great care… behold the bride—long live the bride! Many gifts arrive. There is dancing, singing, champagne. It is wonderful, for once—perhaps for the first time—to be the center of the celebration.
And certainly, marriage also means having a child. A person labeled handicapped shows toward children a tenderness that is almost incredible: when he holds a newborn, violence and aggression disappear, and only gentleness and delicacy remain.
For a girl, this dream of having children runs even deeper, because it is not only her heart that awaits the child but her body as a woman, made to receive and welcome it. Those who have suffered deeply may experience, at puberty, a particularly intense awakening of sexual drives. Panic takes hold because they understand nothing: he was so at peace! Then suddenly a world of images invades him, unexplainable impulses inscribe themselves in his body.
If no one is there to calm him in that moment, if he lives in an institution, if he has no contact with the opposite sex, he can sink into profound anguish. The fragments of reality he can grasp from photographs or television only plunge him deeper into a sad and morbid world.
But more than anything else, "I want to marry" corresponds to a profound desire: "to be the only one for someone." If this is true for every person, we must understand what it means for men and women who have always felt rejected. They have always felt themselves to be a disappointment to their parents. Their parents—and this is entirely natural—would have wanted a child healthy in body and mind. Then came that birth trauma, or encephalitis, that car accident, and the child felt himself to be the one they would want different, the burden, the one causing anguish—the one who forces parents to run hither and thither seeking the doctor who will cure him, the center that will accept him.
Being a Friend
Then one day, something extraordinary happens for someone. A girl, in a sheltered workshop, chooses him—just as he is, with his somewhat disfigured face, his deformed hands, his wounded body. She chooses him above the others and says to him: "I love you. I love you more than the others. You are likable. Come with me." And this is an incredible experience for him. He who has been tolerated, supported, rejected—now another being comes and tells him: "I prefer you. I love you, with your crooked nose, your ruined face, the difficulty you have in making yourself understood." But truly, for her, everything in him is beautiful, because the eyes of love know how to transform ugliness into harmony, or they see only the beauty of the one you love. And the girl, who throughout her life has known the same reality of being one who disappointed hope, now experiences that same extraordinary moment: the moment of revealing herself as the unique one, without hesitation, in the face of his deficiencies and wounds.
When a young man and young woman experience this, they feel new forces of life rising within them, a wholly new creativity. It is as though they pass from death to life. You have seen how people who are sad, depressed, dragging life like a weight—when they discover love, they are reborn with a vigor that astonishes. They throw themselves into work with dedication. They become capable of undertaking difficult things. You can hear hope inhabiting them: love, truly, is not something external. It touches the very depths of being.
"I want to marry" means then: "I want to be happy." Because for humanity, marriage is the symbol of happiness. In Scripture, the kingdom of God is compared to a wedding feast. It is a celebration. And in the Apocalypse, when the kingdom of heaven is described, Jerusalem makes herself beautiful as a bride who is about to meet her bridegroom. Through marriage, the fullness of life will be discovered. "I want to marry" means "I want to live in a world of peace, in a world of joy, in which the one who has chosen me communicates to me through his gaze the inner unity."
Tenderness and Sexuality
Love introduces us into the world of tenderness, which is the opposite of the world of solitude. Love is someone who thinks of me. He may be a thousand miles away. That does not matter. He cares for me. Not what I do, not my abilities or my duties, but my very self.
We can all attach ourselves to a person who may be useful to us—a bank manager, for instance, because he might lend me money. And if he is replaced, it does not matter; I will attach myself to his successor. In the world of love, what matters is not the position one holds, not one's abilities, but the person.
Yet the moment anyone alludes to tenderness, psychological resonances immediately rush in.
Especially in our Western civilization, we immediately link sexuality to tenderness. We struggle to conceive of tenderness without sexuality, and by sexuality I mean genital sexuality. At this point, adults living with handicapped people are seized by fear. The meeting between two people, their presence together, their communion—this is beautiful. But my daughter is very handicapped. What will happen? She might become pregnant. It is a problem that until now we have carefully tried to avoid.
I do not know if you have noticed: when we speak of handicapped children, we often talk as if they had no sex. Neither boy nor girl… without complications. We try to live as if their emotional life did not exist.
That girl learned to read, to write, to manage many things. Yet she was kept almost shut away, so great was the fear that she would become pregnant. Her parents decided, once and for all, that they would fill her emotional life; but she, like any other girl without handicaps, cannot find her complete development in them alone.
In that case, the child or young person may take refuge in a world of dreams, which sometimes leads to mental illness. Or he may be driven to aggression, hatred, and refusal to live. Because there is no suffering greater than that of the heart. The sufferings of the body are easily borne, but the suffering of rejection runs to terrifying depths.
What Is to Be Done?
But nothing is simple, nothing obvious in the problem we face. On one side lies this immense desire to love and be loved, this hunger for happiness, this desire to have a child. But—let us not deceive ourselves—there is the impossibility for many of founding a family, of taking on the responsibility of a child.
So what is to be done? Can we say: "No, you cannot marry, therefore love is forbidden to you"? This love that brings presence, peace, joy, creativity? For this reason, we must create spaces that are very protected, very reassuring—especially for those who care for them.
And further: Is it possible to develop deep emotional life with all it implies of tenderness, faithfulness, attentiveness—without the use of the sexual organs?
This is far harder to say and to live in our time, with thousands of writings treating the exercise of sexuality as the condition of true development.
Yet one thing is certain: sexuality, the meeting of bodies, without this communion of persons in friendship, in tenderness, in faithfulness, does not lead to true development. It is only a caricature of love.
Another thing is sure: the wounded person often has very rich emotional capacity, a gift for listening, for tenderness, for self-oblation, for giving—and is able not to bind this affection with sexuality. Sometimes this reality fills me with wonder.
Last evening I met a young woman, severely disabled, in a wheelchair, poor in her being, yet of incredible delicacy—so attentive to the other, to his needs, his sufferings, his difficulties; nothing selfish in her. She had understood that love is not possessing the other, not wanting him near in body, but willing him to be true, happy, free.
A Place of Peace and Friendship
The deep needs of the human being—to feel chosen, to meet a friend with whom to share, to have a bit of "my own home," to be, now and then, the queen, the king, of the feast—these needs can find space in community life.
Not in an imposed community, but in a community that, at least to some degree, one can choose.
For many years I have lived in a foyer with about ten handicapped men. Our profound desire is that each of them feels loved as a unique person. We try to ensure that each one feels heard, understood, in a certain way irreplaceable.
Pierre, by his choice, one day left us for another Arche community, where he felt his presence helped others, but he knows he will remain our brother.
In community, there are moments when you are the king of the feast because it is your birthday, or because you have just returned from an absence.
When you are engaged together, when you have lived together for many years, relationships settle at a very deep affective level—with true tenderness for the other, true respect for him, a profound desire to see him grow, progress, deepen. And you do not worry then about the little incidents along the way, even if they touch on sexuality. But this does not mean that in community life everything is perfect. Community does not solve the problems of its members any more than marriage solves the problems of a couple. The problems become different. There is much suffering on earth: separations, deaths, infidelity, rejection, violence, hatred. One must not think that the handicapped person living in community will be sheltered from every trial and will know only compensation.
No, in each of them I sense much suffering, pain, anxiety. But at the same time, they are seized by a movement of life, of hope. We still have so much to do together—so much work at the table, so many people to welcome and help. Within community, there are certainly moments when one feels rejected; but these can be overcome when one has the certainty of being truly loved, when one lives deeply at peace in the community.
At evening prayer or at Mass, I look at the faces of some of them. Five years ago, they wore drawn, aggressive expressions. Now they are relaxed, eyes closed, able to remain so for twenty minutes without moving; I glimpse a certain smile on their lips, a certain peace. It is clear they are living an experience: the experience of feeling loved. It is a mystery that does not come from the world, but from God. As Jesus says: "I give you peace, but not the peace that comes from the world." It is extraordinary to encounter men and women wounded deeply, who have discovered that they are loved by God and that they truly have power over God. They believe completely in this word of Jesus: "Ask for whatever you wish, and you will have it." At that point, one is no longer handicapped. The reason for existing has been discovered.
The rejection of men may exist, but it does not matter. I know I am loved and that there is this deep peace despite sufferings of all kinds.
There is a parable I love very much. It is the parable of the wedding banquet, in which Jesus speaks of a king who prepared a great banquet, and all the invited guests made excuses; they could not come: one had bought oxen, another had to go see a field he was thinking of buying, another had business to attend to…
But there is a request for the infinite in his heart, the request for a love that might fill it.
The king, very annoyed, said to his servants: "Go out into the streets and squares and invite all those you find—the crippled, the lame, the poor…" It is extraordinary to invite to the wedding all the poor and weak of humanity.This makes me think of Yves, a man I live with. Outwardly, he is not very religious; we never see him at Mass. During the discussion I mentioned earlier, I asked him: "What is hope for you?" He answered: "That one day in heaven we will have what we never had here." Yves spent many years in a psychiatric hospital. He was abandoned, "failed." Since he has been with us, he has made much progress and will progress still more. But there is a request for the infinite in his heart, the request for a love that might fill it.
To discover that I am invited to the feast, that I am invited to the wedding of heaven; to keep hope—sometimes through tears, through long nights, through temptations to despair, to revolt—that the bridegroom will come one day. As in the parable, in the middle of the night, a cry: "Behold, the bridegroom comes!"—the one who will fill this immense thirst of my being. To keep this hope, amid misunderstandings, contradictions, darkness, struggles, rejections—because the bridegroom is already here. He is here to heal our selfish hearts, our hearts closed off by barbed wire, which sometimes seem less and less capable of love. He is here now to teach us his tenderness and to prepare us for the fullness of love, for the eternal wedding feast.
Jerusalem, beautiful as a young bride who goes forth to meet her bridegroom.