These are the first two booklets in a series of resources for group reflection and personal engagement. They are well-crafted, elegant, and affordable.
"The Fear of Loving" offers an unconventional analysis of love—not specifically about handicapped or marginalized people, but about love in general. Within each person lives a "child" worthy of being loved, yet between us and that child stands a wall built from misunderstandings, disappointments, and past hurts. To love truly, we must tear down this wall. But here lies the book's originality: "we must also respect the space that people need around them." The lover must act with great humility, never imposing his love; and once love is established, he must be faithful to it.
In "The Handicapped Person in Society," the author maps out with clarity and simplicity the nature of social relationships in our world—relationships based on values like beauty, success, money, and efficiency. He defines the marginalized person with equal clarity: one who, for whatever reason, fails to meet these standards and therefore goes unloved, carrying a shattered image of himself. At some point, all of us find ourselves in this condition. The answer, Vanier reminds us, lies in the scale of Gospel values: simplicity, love for who we are rather than what we own, poverty.
Both booklets are clear and simple—but with that simplicity that comes from deep human experience. For the reader, they can awaken a sense of utopia, of something "beautiful" that we speak of but struggle to live. This matters especially for those unfamiliar with Jean Vanier, founder of Faith and Light. Vanier writes from what he has witnessed and lived himself in the communities of L'Arche, where handicapped people and their assistants seek to live together in the spirit of the Beatitudes.
M.B.