Fallen Again

The tragic and awful post-mortem shaming of Jean Vanier opens up again the question of how apparently deeply spiritual people go wrong. At least the Church is becoming accustomed to acknowledging the failures of those who were formerly trusted and even revered, but there are vitally important questions that I am not sure anyone is yet asking: not just ‘How did we let this happen?’ but ‘How did this individual do this and maintain a ministry?’ My old theology tutor at Staggers once said, ‘If I were to attack Christianity, it wouldn’t be on the basis of history – the case for Christianity is far too strong – but on the behaviour of Christians. If Christianity is true, they should be better than this.’ These scandals are a deep, deep fault line in Christianity and to stop it happening so very often we should ask not just how it's allowed to happen, but why it happens in the first place.

Did Jean Vanier succumb to temptation once L’Arche gave him the power to abuse, or did he set it up in order to have that power? Was it a conspiracy between him and Fr Thomas Philippe, or was the L’Arche idea a brainchild of two abusers who didn’t intend anything malign at all? Once people are dead we can’t ask and nobody seems to want to ask. Having asked the question before, my feeling is that people who found radical Christian communities often do so to escape their own hangups and end up trapped by them.

Christians are not, generally, unaware of their sins. Those who come through a Charismatic Evangelical experience, it seems, believe that those sins are put behind them, only to be quietly ambushed by them as time goes on. But Catholics like Jean Vanier are supposed to make confession, not just once but regularly. I wonder whether something like this is what happens:

1. You make your confession. There is some besetting sin, whatever it might be, of thought or act, that you are glad to talk about. You really intend to change: you’re not so daft you expect the sin to die off at once, but you hope that a new phase has begun.

2. Then you find yourself confessing the same thing over and over. It’s wearying. You know that confession is supposed to generate change, not excuse sin. What can your confessor say to your repeated admissions? What can you say? What’s the point of repeating this? You convince yourself it’s more dealt with than it is, and stop talking about it to spare yourself the humiliation.

3. You tell yourself that the sin is not that bad after all. Perhaps at some stage your confessor has told you that, too, to be kind and encouraging.

4. You then tell yourself, Nobody’s perfect; I have this fault, but I do good things otherwise. You use one part of your nature to buy off the other, and the good purchases you credit so you can more easily ignore the bad. It’s not just religious people who do this; it’s the kind of mindset we all have, frankly. Having stopped talking about the sin, you stop even trying to deal with it. You live with it. You leave it to God, not trustingly, but lazily.

5. You erect a mental structure that justifies the fault, and step by step you stop caring. You wall it off from the rest of your life, a life that should be integrated and whole. 

6. Perhaps you achieve even more with the ‘good’ part of yourself than you would have done otherwise. Good is a compensation measure, a subconscious means of keeping that wall high. You pray more, write about the spiritual life if you’re in a position to do so, do more and more good. But at the heart of you is that fundamental discontinuity, and depending what it is, it can be catastrophic. It’s like a bit of the garden full of rampant weeds, and within the wall the sin advances in the same way that the good side of you advances outside it. At some point the weeds are going to scale the wall, or burrow under it, and come out.

Or is it all as simple as Jesus says of the Pharisees in Mark 12, which I happened to read this morning: 'They devour widows' houses, and for a show make lengthy prayers'?