Where does your commitment come from?
Christian faith is the source of my work in public service as a senior official and in the Church as a deacon. Being a citizen of heaven is inseparable from being an engaged citizen on earth. Living for encounter with the other—and with the wholly Other—means exposing yourself to change and freeing yourself from the representations and norms that prevent people who are different from existing as they are. This applies to disability as much as to any other condition. One day at Lourdes, sitting in my electric wheelchair in the basilica of Saint Pius X, an organizer came and told me I had disrupted the procession. I answered: "But I am part of the procession." You have to know how to put love before order. Otherwise we are lost. It's also crucial to free yourself from a sick, sad relationship with suffering. Love saves us—lived even within suffering, not in spite of it.
God is not a Nero hurling misfortunes from the clouds. He desires our happiness. Certainly the Church has changed on this point. Yet too often the Church acts "for" the sick rather than "with" the sick. This is why I accepted an invitation to a Rosary pilgrimage on one condition: that I would preach the homily. It shouldn't always be the healthy who teach the ill. I do this not in a spirit of protest but of reconciliation. I will stand at the altar, and that is a sign far more powerful than any testimony.
How could the Church call people with disabilities more to service?
People with disabilities are called, just as "normal" people are, to the sacraments and to ministry. At the time of my ordination as deacon, some objected that because I am quadriplegic, I could do nothing without "legs and arms"—implying I could neither hold a baby for baptism nor carry the chalice to the altar. The Bishop of Amiens, invoking the sacrament of my marriage, authorized my wife to "lend me her hands" to perform gestures I cannot make—for instance, during a baptism. Jacques Lebreton, who was part of the diaconal fraternity and lived without eyes or hands, used to say, "My diaconate is this!"—meaning being, not doing.
Perhaps we need people who pray so that we can recognize grace does not necessarily show itself in appearances. The power of prayer is not reserved for an elite but entrusted to the poorest.
At night, lying in our beds, unable to rise, we can create a kind of silent "inner chapel" in our wounded bodies. This is how we can live and bear witness to particular graces when we are ill or handicapped.
What are these particular graces?
Saints and prophets go into the desert to hear God's Word more clearly. To be ill is to reach that desert. This is not a superiority—anyone is called to it. It is simply a kind of opening, even if on some days you would rather not have it. I have known difficult moments of rebellion, times when I did not understand. But I have always turned to God as to a Father.
Suffering teaches nothing. It is living through it with others that teaches. Then you discover the reality of those around you—the truth or the evasion in another's gaze. When you place yourself before many, you become a revealing sign of love. But I want to speak above all of the beauty of life, of our fleeting passage on this earth, where the quality of days matters more than their number. I am aware that time is finite. It would be wrong not to live it fully.
What has given you this appetite for life?
Many events and people. Hope is contagious. When you accept standing near certain people, your heart fills with it. I think of my parents, who had three children with disabilities; of believing and non-believing friends; and of the Eucharist—as a founding person and as love, a mainmast in the storm, a gift among gifts.
The paradox is that I, who wanted to sail the sea, have ended up in my wheelchair. Perhaps that is why I do not have a sailor's heart? I don't think so at all. But I am always searching for my harbor—no one can say they have found God—and it is this search that makes me happy. This is not theory for me but lived experience. I have been tracheotomized for seven years, lost the use of my hands for twenty, and my legs for thirty. With disability, with illness, I believe you must not ask why it happened but how to live. "Whys" exhaust you; "hows" build you up.
You find your vocation by listening to what others need to be happy. This is not necessarily a matter of ministry. Vocation can simply be a state of fulfilled life.
Edited by Florence Chatel, 2013
from Ombres et Lumière no. 189
