There's no St. Christopher's medal to protect passengers on the dashboard of Jean Vanier's little red car, although perhaps there should be. With only its headlights and a full moon to light the way, the car creeps along the frosty country roads near Trosly-Breuil, an hour north of Paris, where he has lived for the past 44 years in the first of the many communities he has built for the disabled.
As Mr. Vanier inches along, various irate French motorists swerve past honking, but the 80-year-old at the wheel is supremely serene. At the age of 13, he crossed the Atlantic in mid-war, unaccompanied, and was later an officer on a Canadian aircraft carrier, and once nearly drowned. He has spent most of his life in the company of the pained and desperate. What's a little highway aggravation compared with that?
Finally, he spots his destination and pulls into the parking lot. This is La Petite Source, one of the foyers (group homes) that make up L'Arche (The Ark), the international network of communities for people with intellectual disabilities that Mr. Vanier founded in 1964.
Marie-Claire and Benjamin, two of the residents of La Petite Source, are waiting for him outside, coatless, in slippers. (The community prefers to keep members' surnames private.) Benjamin runs over to give Mr. Vanier a high five and tells him, in French, that although it's his free night — he could be visiting family, or another foyer — he decided to stay when he heard who was coming to dinner.
Mr. Vanier claps him on the back with a huge hand and laughs. "You have made a great sacrifice, Benjamin."
Inside, Fairuz, the Franco-Lebanese woman who has run this foyer for 22 years, brings a pot of vegetable soup to the table. At the heart of L'Arche is the notion that mentally handicapped people and volunteer caregivers live together. And at the heart of that is the sacrament of mealtime — it is France, after all.
There are three volunteers, a priest and six residents at dinner. They are intrigued to hear that Mr. Vanier has been chosen as the nation builder of the year by a newspaper halfway around the world because of the work he has done with people like them.
Mainly, though, there's village gossip, world news and good-natured jokes about who has a crush on whom. Mr. Vanier inquires after Jean-Francois's mother and hears, from the end of the table, that Michel would like to go to Berlin. He has known Michel for four decades and lived with him for some of those years, since removing him from a dire local psychiatric hospital.
"Do you know any German?" Mr. Vanier asks.
Michel pauses for a moment and says, "Danke schön."
Food is plentiful but reverence is in short supply for a man many regard — to his quiet but intense irritation — as a living saint. When Mr. Vanier pulls out an over-full date book in order to find time to meet with the priest, a volunteer named Stephanie begins to hum the theme from Mission: Impossible. Benjamin joins in.
After dinner, the entire household gathers to pray and read from a children's book of Bible stories — tonight, there is a passage about Jesus's love for "les faibles," the weak.
Later, as Mr. Vanier leaves, the residents gather outside to wave goodbye. He fears that one day the frailties of age might make his visits not a pleasure for them to anticipate but a burden for them to endure. But that's a worry for another day.
A seed sprouts
From Mr. Vanier's tiny front yard, you can see where L'Arche began — the derelict house he bought at the age of 36 in order to live with Philippe Seux and Raphael Simi, two mentally handicapped men from a nearby institution.
