«This film is for everyone who lives with loneliness, anguish, guilt. You are more beautiful than you think! I hope you discover tenderness — not the urge to judge or control another person, not even the wish to do them good, but something else entirely: the true, deep encounter between two human beings who recognize each other as fully human, each bearing a unique and original inner beauty.»
This is the opening embrace that Jean Vanier offers us in the documentary Le Sacrament de la Tendresse, recently available on DVD after screenings and discussions in France. Though still subtitled only in French, it offers a moving opportunity to meet or rediscover the founder of L'Arche, who died on May 7, 2019, and to see that tenderness he spoke of so often made real in his long and fruitful life. The film alternates between sections of an extended interview conducted by filmmaker and journalist Frederique Bedos around 2014 — when L'Arche was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary — and visits to several communities around the world: Trosly, Bethlehem, and Calcutta. The project took three years to complete. In one of the special features on the second DVD, Bedos explains that the original plan called only for an extended Vanier interview. But Vanier, holding small figures of sheep made from felted wool in Palestine, asked her instead to show the universal love that L'Arche extends across the world, and to visit communities like the one in Bethlehem.
Those familiar with Vanier's books, lectures, and constant calls to communion and community will recognize many of the themes discussed in the interview. Yet the film gains depth from materials that may be less well known: old photographs of young Jean embedded in an animated album, clips from a 1975 film by Peter Flemington (If You're Not There, You Missed, Religious Television Associates) that capture his contagious, liberating laugh (imagine how many people have arrived at L'Arche and fled with their hands in their hair!). We see photographs from the early days of communal life, and the recent, plain-spoken remarks Vanier made when he received the prestigious Templeton Prize in 2015. Parts of the interview not included in the main film appear as bonus material and cover the first part of his life: his family, his time in the Navy, university, the difference between a clan and a community, the role of conscience in his personal journey.
We follow his steps toward the choice that took him so far from the path he had walked until 1964, when he went to live with Raphael and Philippe, who until then had been confined to a psychiatric institution. He moved them into a poor, dilapidated house that the three of them worked to repair together. That humble beginning set the tone for how the three would build their life as a community, each experiencing things previously closed to them: choosing wall colors, selecting furniture, deciding what to cook and eat — and sometimes cooking badly. But Jean too discovered new things about himself. The communication with his two companions had little to do with politics or philosophy; it was made of glances, games, jokes, and tears. Jean, already an officer and professor, "a serious man who said serious prayers," found the beauty of recovering the child within himself — something, he acknowledges, he had needed.
The three communities visited in the film are deeply meaningful and show the diversity and shared vision at the heart of the L'Arche federation that grew from that first experience. One of the Palestinian assistants speaks of the "L'Arche way of life" — places where the quality of relationships comes first, and where even in the most difficult cases, the community seeks to foster each person's growth in freedom. We witness celebrations, ecumenical gatherings in Bethlehem and Calcutta, the serious and dignified work of workshops where each person contributes to community life (in Bethlehem, the felted wool creations support 60% of expenses not covered by foreign donations). We see people with intellectual disabilities facing the camera with no pretense, fully conscious and able to communicate even without many words. Trosly is the home of the first community, a training ground for all that would follow. Calcutta and Bethlehem emerge as places where the wounds of humanity press upon us beyond disability alone. These were places Jean cherished, where he testified, moved hearts, and called others to transformation. An assistant at the Indian community speaks at the film's beginning of what it must have meant to meet someone who freely chose to "lower himself," to care for the poor while abandoning the comfort and power his birth had guaranteed. In a place like Calcutta, where caste determines destiny, such a choice would mark many hearts.
This work inevitably carries fragility, and many questions arise: How can such fruitful but unworldly aspirations be sustained, especially across nations and populations? We hear this concern in Jean himself, see it when he marks L'Arche's fiftieth anniversary and receives the Templeton Prize, as he speaks passionately against the tyranny of normalcy and all its illusions and false needs. Yet in these days when new winds of war blow across the never-peaceful Middle East, to hear men and women who have remade their lives — choosing not to pursue power and success at any cost, but to be strengthened by love for the other — bears witness to the hope that guided Jean, hope to be signs of the Kingdom proclaimed to us. May this film — itself a small miracle, made possible by countless hours of volunteer work and supported by benefactors and independent production and distribution companies — make visible that path, open to each of us, toward discovering tenderness, which is the image of the Father's own. A tenderness that, far from tyranny, loves the other's freedom deeply; seeks it out and sustains it in that genuine human meeting called for at the film's opening — a meeting that, beginning from the deepest visible wounds in some among us, brings to light the hidden wounds in all of us. An encounter that finally sets us free, beyond the walls imposed by society, nations, religions, and our own fragile hearts.