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Margaret O’Donnell, Victoria
Volume 38 Issue 1, 2, & 3 | Posted: April 4, 2023
I remember. I’m from the day when butter got bad press. Gone from store shelves was the golden spread with which we’d grown up. But then, decades later, new research, new funding priorities, and … more importantly, newly recovered ability by customers to trust their memory and their experience – butter is back, on the shelves and in our fridge.
I think of butter when I think of Jean Vanier. He got bad press, nine months after his death. I remember Jean Vanier. I heard him speak in 1972. He told us about Jesus, and about violence. Jesus absorbed violence in his flesh and allowed it to stop with Him. To become a disciple, he said, is to learn how to do the same.
I’m so grateful to have known Jean Vanier. He died two deaths, the first naturally, May 7, 2020, the second, by bad press, February 22, 2020. Elder Louis Frank, Sr. who has known Jean as long as I have, drove down from Ahousaht to offer support. “Put your head up high” he said, referring to the second – and now third death. “And keep it high. Be thankful that you ever knew such a person as Jean Vanier, for his entire life was given to those he called ‘little ones’.”
Thank you, Louie. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jean. I’m so grateful to have known you my entire adult life. I remember now. You taught: “Be grateful for everything, the way it is.” Bad press assures me of your eternal belonging now among the despised and the wretched.
You are a permanent fixture now, living among the poorest of the poor, in our world, and beyond time. I bet that new research based on new funding priorities is going to dislodge you from the place you now happily occupy in human history. My heart knows that what rejoices your heart is people trusting in themselves, their memories and their experience. Je te souviens, Jean Vanier.
Margaret O’Donnell founded L’Arche in Victoria in the 1970s.
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Margaret O’Donnell, Victoria
