Jean, Rachel and Moy Moy left this world after making it a better place.
Jean Vanier died May 7 at 90. “Savior of People on the Margins” the New York Times headline proclaimed. He doubled down on his desire to help people, founding two worldwide organizations for people with developmental disabilities.
L’Arche has 154 communities in 18 countries. Faith and Light has 1,500 communities in 83 countries. People with intellectual and physical disabilities live in communities where they can feel they belong.
After visiting a noisy, depressing and violent institution for mentally disabled men in France in 1963, Vanier studied how people with mental disabilities were being treated throughout the world, and he resolved to create a community where they could live with one another with dignity.
He bought a run-down house 65 miles northeast of Paris, and invited two men to live with him. Raphael had meningitis as a child. He could speak only about 20 words. Philippe had encephalitis. He talked incessantly about the same things. Both were also physically disabled.
Living with them, Vanier began to understand what it meant to be human. “Before meeting them, my life had been governed largely from my head and my sense of duty. I began to live from my heart.”
It was not a given that Vanier should devote his life to people at the margins. He was born into a prominent, well-to-do Canadian family.
We’re called to move, he said, “from repulsion to compassion and from compassion to wonderment.”
The late Bishop of Bethlehem Mark Dyer knew Vanier. Perhaps from that friendship, he said the Kingdom of God is “where everybody is somebody.”
Rachel Held Evans died May 4 at 37. An Atlantic article by Emma Green called her a “hero to Christian misfits.”
She was an author unafraid to challenge conservative Christianity, wading into issues such as the role of women, science, LGBT and politics.
Her evangelical church’s activism on a Tennessee campaign to ban same-sex marriage eventually led her to leave that church.
She became an Episcopalian, saying she was done trying to end the church’s culture wars and wanted to focus instead on building a new community among the church’s “refugees”: women who wanted to become ministers, gay Christians and “those who refuse to choose between their intellectual integrity and their faith.”
Eliza Grizwold has written insightfully about her in The New Yorker, May 6, 2019, The Radically Inclusive Christianity of Rachel Held Evans.
Two of her best friends wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post: “Rachel was for Jesus; she would have gotten in much less trouble if she hadn’t believed so deeply that Jesus meant what he said. She was especially for Jesus’ table. At every conference she hosted, the table was open, especially for those told they had no business imbibing the bread and wine.”
Moy Moy Chopra-McGowan died in July 2018 at 28. She was born on the side of a road, 12 weeks premature, weighing just 2 pounds. She was adopted by Jo McGowan and her husband, Ravi Chopra. Diagnosed with cerebral palsy at 4, Moy Moy had a much more debilitating neuromuscular disease.
“Though she had once been mobile, independent, verbal [and very funny],” her mother recently wrote (Commonweal, Jo McGowan, May 8, 2019), “starting at the age of five, she gradually lost all her skills.
“Living in India, her mother started a school for her here in 1994. It grew from two children to 300. Thousands of families benefited from services in assessment, diagnostics, training, awareness, and advocacy.
“Without speaking a word or lifting a finger, Moy Moy changed the world. She drew people to her in ways we couldn’t understand or explain — things happened around her and because of her that one could only call miraculous.”
At her funeral, however, the priest clung “to a conventional, useless understanding of disability [deprived, abnormal, definitely not lucky].”
“We were lucky beyond belief,” her father said at the funeral. “Moy Moy constantly reminded us never to dismiss anyone as unable to accomplish the amazing.”