16 Oct In Halifax Friday night: The gift of vulnerability

If you are anywhere near Halifax Friday evening, I hope you will join me to hear a talk by Ian Brown, author of The Boy in the Moon, followed by a panel discussion about the inexplicable power vulnerable people have to teach the rest of us about life.

The event is part of a weekend of celebrations of the 50th anniversary of L’Arche, an international federation of more than 130 communities around the world, where men and women with developmental disabilities live and work with people who choose to share their lives.

The philosopher and theologian Jean Vanier founded L’Arche in 1964 when he invited two men with developmental disabilities, Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux, to live with him in a small house in the French village of Trosly-Breuil. He named their house “L’Arche,” after Noah’s Ark.

In 1996, Ian Brown, whom a Globe and Mail reviewer described as “a smart-mouthed, combative scribe,” suddenly found himself the father of Walker Brown, a devastatingly disabled boy whose very preservation required a soul-destroying degree of intense, personal care, delivered around the clock by Brown and his wife.

But it didn’t destroy Brown’s soul. Quite the opposite. Through exhaustion, sleep-deprivation, fights with his wife, a sense of failure, and financial devastation, he found himself drawn to his mysterious, vulnerable child. What was going on inside that malformed head? What was the source of this boy’s power to make Brown examine the meaning of his own life, and ours?

Brown explores these questions without sentimentality, and with total candour about the hardship Walker created for his family: “It was hard to think of Walker as a gift from God,” he writes, “unless God was a sadist who bore a little boy a grudge.” The New York Times observed that Brown’s discomfort with spirituality makes his account of the lessons he learned from Walker, “all the more persuasive, as one feels the pull of his natural resistance.”

Friday’s panel is called, “The Strong and the Fragile:  The Unexpected Gift of Vulnerability.” It takes place at 7 p.m., Friday, in the Spatz Centre of Citadel High School. Panelists will include disability rights activist Stephen Estey, who helped draft the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; L’Arche grad and UNB philosophy professor Alan Hall; and L’Arche Halifax member Katie McTiernan, a family studies and gerontology grad student focused on person-centred care and critical disability studies. I will be the moderator.  Dalhousie University’s Segelberg Dialogues on Faith and Public Policy and L’Arche Atlantic Region are co-sponsors of the ecent.