Empty pockets (The Trinity Forum - 2012)

"This is a story of empty pockets. During a recent trip to Rome, I enjoyed an evening in the company of a group that included a young Jesuit who had spent a year in El Salvador and was due to return there soon. At one point over the course of the evening’s discussion, Father Michael described the time he had spent at one of the L’Arche communities founded by Jean Vanier. L’Arche began in 1964 when Vanier bought a home in rural France and invited two adults with mental retardation to live there with him. Some sixty L’Arche communities now exist worldwide. The guiding spirit behind L’Arche differs dramatically from the therapeutic paternalism that often structures relationships between the “normal” and the “mentally handicapped.” L’Arche is a community dedicated to the unlikely proposition that the more able should not do things to or for the less able but should, instead, live with them in covenant. Writes Vanier, “Handicapped people are teachers of . . . the strong. With their tremendous qualities of heart and lives of faith and love, the handicapped give testimony to the truth that the privileged place for meeting with God is in our vulnerability and weakness.” 

I thought of Vanier’s words as I listened to Father Michael tell a story of empty pockets. At L’Arche, Michael helped to dress and clean a profoundly handicapped young man. One day it struck him that this young man went out of his room and into his world and through his life, every single day, with “empty pockets.” 

Father Michael thought of how odd that was—no change, no wallet. “No keys,” another dinner guest and I exclaimed simultaneously, showing, no doubt, both our automotive and professional preoccupations. In my own case domestic concerns also helped to account for my outburst concerning keys—keys to one’s home being central to one’s sense of self and place. 

The real problem, Father Michael decided, was not with his handicapped brother, but, as he put it, “with me and my ideas of him and what he felt,” As Father Michael said these words he put his hand over his heart, and I mused and remarked on how the heart’s understanding of humanity is often much more generous and expansive than definitions that rely on measures of intelligence or productive capability. This led those at the table to turn to the growing eugenics enthusiasm, with its techno- cratization of birth and its tacit conviction that the world would be “better off” if “they”—the handicapped with their empty pockets—were no longer to be born, to appear among us. It is important to note that the urge to eliminate those handicapped biogenetically is a view often born of compassion. But this compassion quickly turns perverse because it is a free-floating, untethered sentimentalization, devoid of context and concrete experience or engagement with those with the empty pockets. 

As I was driven back to my room near the Santa Maria Maggiore on that becalmed, warm Roman night, I felt a spreading sorrow, which has remained with me. For I am convinced that our reigning metaphors of success and productivity, of what “counts” as definitive of the human, will more and more leave our fellow human beings with their empty pockets in the shadows, eclipsed, outside the circle of concern. Here the unbearable lightness of a certain sort of triumphalist and narrow secularism—I know not what else to call it—can be seen as exacting a terrific toll in its heady great leaps always forward, always upward, pockets full of keys, inexorably extending and deepening, not our awe and humility, but our drive for sovereign control. And I remembered one of Vanier’s warnings: “One of the dangers in our world is wanting to do big things, heroic things. We are called to do little things lovingly—to work to create community.” You don’t need full pockets to be a citizen of this polity."

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Sovereignty: God, State, Self. New Oxford Review, 1992. 

©  The Trinity Forum. All rights reserved. 2012