Quote

A growing community must integrate three elements: a life of silent prayer, a life of service and above all of listening to the poor, and a community life through which all its members can grow in their own gift.

Jean Vanier

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Jean Vanier
Age: 90 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 10
Died: 2019
Died: May 7
Naval Officer
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Genève
Community
Gift
Poor
Elements
Three
Members
Must
Listening
Life
Grow
Integrate
Prayer
Integrating
Growing
Service
Grows
Silent

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A tension or difficulty can signal the approach of a new grace of God. But it has to be looked at wisely and humanly.
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Life is a succession of crises and moments when we have to rediscover who we are and what we really want.
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Each person with his or her history of being accepted or rejected, with his or her past history of inner pain and difficulties in relationships, is different. But in each one there is a yearning for communion and belonging, but at the same time a fear of it. Love is what we most want, yet it is what we fear the most.
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[Happiness] comes when we choose to be who we are, to be ourselves, at this present moment in our lives.
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A community that is growing rich and seeks only to defend its goods and its reputation is dying. It has ceased to grow in love. A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow!
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Stop looking for peace. Give yourselves where you are. Stop looking at yourselves, look instead at your brothers and sisters in need. Ask how you can better love your brothers and sisters. Then you will find peace.
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People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are poor.
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The belly laugh is the best way to evacuate anguish.
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Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.
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If we love (the poor) people, we want to identify with them and share with them.
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It is difficult to make people understand that the ideal doesn't exist, that personal equilibrium and the harmony they dream of come only after years and years of struggle, and that even then they come only as flashes of grace and peace.
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We don’t know what to do with our own pain, so what to do with the pain of others? We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness?
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To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.
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Community means caring: caring for people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: He who loves community destroys community he who loves the brethren builds community. A community is not an abstract ideal.
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People cannot accept their own evil if they do not at the same time feel loved, respected and trusted.
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The strong need the weak as much as the weak need the strong
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If we are to grow in love, the prisons of our egoism must be unlocked. This implies suffering, constant effort and repeated choices.
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One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals.
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All of us have a secret desire to be seen as saints, heroes, martyrs. We are afraid to be children, to be ourselves.
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Every act of violence is also a message that needs to be understood. (23-24)
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