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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.

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
Find
Brother
Look
Instead
Looks
Stop
Need
Asks
Giving
Looking
Needs
Peace
Love
Give
Sisters
Better
Brothers

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This evolution towards a real responsibility for others is sometimes blocked by fear. It is easier to stay on the level of a pleasant way of life in which we keep our freedom and our distance. But that means that we stop growing and shut ourselves up in our own small concerns and pleasures.
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We work for peace every time we exercise authority with wisdom and authentic love.
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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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People cannot accept their own evil if they do not at the same time feel loved, respected and trusted.
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Every act of violence is also a message that needs to be understood. (23-24)
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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. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing.
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When people love each other, they are content with very little. When we have light and joy in our hearts, we don't need material wealth. The most loving communities are often the poorest.
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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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Love is an act of endless forgiveness.
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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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A community is only a community when the majority of its members are making the transition from 'the community for myself' to 'myself for the community'.
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Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness
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Every child, every person needs to know that they are a source of joy every child, every person, needs to be celebrated. Only when all of our weaknesses are accepted as part of our humanity can our negative, broken self-images be transformed.
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To love someone is to show to them their beauty, their worth and their importance.
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'Going home' is a journey to the heart of who we are, a place where we can be ourselves and welcome the reality of our beauty and our pain. From this acceptance of ourselves, we can accept others as they are and we can see our common humanity.
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Those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us
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I remember that throughout history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always...whenever you are in doubt that that is God's way - the way the world is meant to be. Think of that and then try to do His way.
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In the end, the most important thing is not to do things for people who are poor and in distress, but to enter into relationship with them, to be with them and help them find confidence in themselves and discover their own gifts.
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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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The strong need the weak as much as the weak need the strong
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