Tom Harpur 4-Book Bundle. Tom Harpur
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before, and so the sense of discovery would be the same for writer and reader alike. The response of management was a very enthusiastic “Go!” So, about a week and a half later, I set out once more, feeling like the most fortunate man alive. Looking back, I realize just how fortuitous it was that my days as a full-time working journalist at the Star came just when newspapers were still at the height of their powers, so to speak, and the current cost-cutting, survivalist mode had yet to arrive. It gave me on-the-ground insights into the contemporary religion scene that few writers could ever afford to have.
There are today more than 130L’Arche communities for people with developmental disabilities all around the world. But in 1964, when Jean Vanier began his work, he little thought about numbers or the world fame he would one day garner. The son of the former Governor General of Canada, Georges Vanier, Jean had a brilliant career ahead of him as a professor at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, having earned his doctorate at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Returning to France, however, he found himself deeply moved by and concerned about the plight of intellectually challenged persons, who were for the most part shut away in institutions. He accordingly welcomed two men from such an institution to come and live with him in the tiny village cited above. His unique “ministry” is now so widely recognized and well known that there is little need to enlarge upon it here. The message he has distilled, however, and the theme he has so eloquently articulated in his many books, TV interviews and lectures has always resonated powerfully in my own life and thinking. Vanier has found that these often despised and neglected men and women have a message for every one of us. In living with them, he found he was being taught much more than he had tried to give to them. While most of us spend much time and energy trying to pretend that we are strong, successful and free from any kind of weakness, the disabled cannot hide behind any pretence. Their weakness is out there for all the world to see, and so they often have an unusual honesty, an ability to see through posturing and sham of any kind. When we see their courage and their ability to persevere in spite of often dreadful incapacities, they bring a challenge and a spark of hope to us in our lesser struggles. The spiritual impact can be profound. That’s why young people on every continent have responded so enthusiastically to Vanier’s message through the years. It is why so many international honours have been and continue to be showered upon him. It’s why he is such a sign of hope himself. I considered it a great privilege to be able to spend time with him at L’Arche, to observe him interacting with the larger community there and to sit in on a couple of “sharing” sessions with the men. Those who can handle tools have a variety of productive tasks to accomplish. There is a lot of laughter and a quiet joy running through it all.
Casa Materna (“a mother’s house”), situated in Portici, a small suburb of Naples on the Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi, had come to my attention through some neighbours in Toronto who were longtime, enthusiastic supporters of its cause. The large, rambling villa and school, with the Mediterranean lapping on the shore and the Isle of Capri off in the dazzling distance of the bay, was first founded in 1905 by an Italian Methodist minister, Rev. Riccardo Santi. He had a vision of providing home and a “mother” for homeless street urchins whose parents were either missing or so poverty-stricken they were unable to care properly for their youngsters. Santi at first used his own home as a centre, but eventually, with generous help from the U.S. navy stationed in Naples and a growing network of charitable donors in the U.S. and Canada, the Portici property was purchased, and classrooms, workshops and a large, productive garden were added to the original building.
When I visited Casa Materna, I found once again the indelible signs on every side of what even one person’s apparently impossible dream can accomplish when the central message of every world religion—active, practical, oftentimes heroic compassion—is lived out in the crucible of human suffering. In the children’s faces, hope and its companion, unquenchable joy, beamed forth whether they were in the classroom or at play. Thinking of the hardships both adults and students alike had faced there through the years—the two world wars with their resulting desolation, the lean times when the leadership of the country necessarily changed, the prejudices of an overwhelmingly Catholic majority of Neapolitans against this rare Protestant enclave—made one realize again that next to compassion, endurance is an essential element of any attempt at fulfilling the will of God.
The Kingdom of God, or however one expresses that spiritual reality in her or his own tradition, comes about not by words but by courageous, patient doing. Today some of the children who were themselves nurtured and educated as a result of Santi’s dream have taken over a new program for the needy children of Naples. Called Imparare Giocando, “learning through playing,” it is part of a larger successor to Casa Materna, now known as the Italian Children’s Mission. Significantly, the U.S. navy remains involved and deeply committed in its support.
Flying from sunny southern Italy to Krakow in December was a metaphor for leaving a democratic country for one still very much under the heel of Communism. There was, in spite of the enormous sense of pride and vindication felt by ordinary people in the street over the election of their fellow countryman as Pope, a pall of what one can only call glumness as palpable as the fog at the airport on our arrival. It reminded me of the atmosphere in Cuba when I had first visited there, a year or so earlier.
The churches were packed on Sundays and at other times—a far cry from the situation today, not only in Poland but increasingly throughout Europe—and there seemed to be considerable quality of life in the devotion of parents to their families, the way people seemed to enjoy walking together in the public gardens, or the clusters of elderly men watching chess matches near the historic city walls. But overall, the mood was heavy. The Solidarity movement among the workers was still almost two years away. Freedom of speech was severely restricted. There were plenty of fresh vegetables in the large open-stalled marketplace in the city centre, but if the fare at the hotel was anything to judge by, the joy had gone out of cooking some time ago.
I had to remember why I was there. It was important to get and to communicate a feel for the background of the new leader of the world’s largest Christian denomination, and to inform the readers of the newspaper that as all the great spiritual wisdoms of the world have taught, heaviness endures for a season, but “joy cometh in the morning.” In all the great mythologies it is at the moment of greatest darkness that the first light breaks through. As history went on to prove, Wojtyla’s confrontation with the Communist darkness through his support for Solidarity played an important part in the eventual dawning of a new day of liberation. In Krakow too I found the seeds of hope.
One of the places I had always dreamed of travelling to was Iona, a tiny, windswept island three miles long by about a mile wide, set in the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. As Dr. Samuel Johnson said, “A man is little to be envied whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.” My feelings for that ancient, mystical centre of Celtic Christianity began very early in my life. My father’s heart was never far from the British Isles, and he loved to read to us about St. Patrick and the other missionary saints of old, particularly the Irishman St. Columba. He had filled my head with stories of their exploits and adventures. Columba was the Christian son of an Irish nobleman, and through his founding of a monastery on Iona in 563 he helped keep the flame of faith alive when it was flickering and in danger of going out in England, Ireland, Scotland and parts of northern Europe. One of my best memories of being with my father was just after my graduation from Oxford. He and my mother, together with my younger sister, had flown over for the ceremony. Afterwards, during a visit with relatives in Ulster, we took the opportunity and drove to Glencolmcille in Donegal on the rugged northwest coast. The Gaelic name means “the glen of Columba” and it is one of the wildest spots on earth, with the North Atlantic breakers crashing relentlessly upon the rocky shore. Seeing it, I was held spellbound because it was from this dangerous cove in 563 that St. Columba (a saint in both the Church of Ireland and that of Scotland) had set out with twelve companions to travel to the already sacred island of Iona. Knowing something myself of travelling in rough waters by canoe, it was nevertheless hard to conjure up the huge challenge of shipping out into such waters in a frail craft, a coracle, a round boat made of skins tightly stretched over a frame of willow poles.
I was reminded of that day and of so much more when, following the few days in Poland, a hired photographer and I drove from Glasgow up through the Scottish Highlands