Thérèse Vanier: Pioneer of L'Arche, palliative care and spiritual unity (sample)

Thérèse Vanier

Thérèse Vanier Pioneer of L’Arche, palliative care and spiritual unity

ANN SHEARER

First published in 2016 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd 1 Spencer Court 140 – 142 Wandsworth High Street London SW18 4JJ Š 2016 Ann Shearer The right of Ann Shearer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 978-0-232-53251-7 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Phototypeset by Kerrypress, St Albans.

Printed and bound by Imak Ofset, Turkey

CONTENTS Foreword vii Acknowledgements x About this book xi

INTRODUCTION 1 ‘A splendid influence …’

‘Preach the gospel at all times’

3 12

L’ARCHE 25 ‘Use poor means’ Little brother, big sister Enabling the gifts Love and competence ‘If one part suffers …’

27 37 41 46 52

PALLIATIVE CARE

63

‘When there is nothing more to be done …’

65 ‘TGFT’ 68 ‘The most powerful medicine’ 73 Education from experience 78

ECUMENISM 83 Prophetic beginnings

85

Becoming aware Living with pain ‘DO this …’

‘The whole inhabited earth’

89 95 100 105

LATER YEARS

117

‘A God-ward purpose’ Transforming suffering Walking together Return to Canterbury

119 125 129 135

NOTES FROM THE IN-TRAY

141

People with intellectual disabilities 143 Palliative care 145 Ecumenism 147 ‘Everyone wants to belong’ 149

THÉRÈSE’S PRAYER

154

Notes 157 Bibliography 163 Contributors 165 Index 179

Foreword Jean Vanier What a wonderful woman my big sister.

In her there was such a wealth of wisdom.

When I was just her little brother I was a bit fearful of her.

She and Benedict were the two older ones Bernard and I were the naughty little ones.

The two older ones were orderly.

We could create disorder where there should be order.

Years followed years.

When I was a young cadet in the Naval College Dartmouth far from the family Thérèse looked after me as she could.

When I founded L’Arche in 1964 she came over to Trosly for Christmas to help me and maybe see what it was all about.

And then in 1971 during the first international Faith and Light pilgrimage in Lourdes she came as a doctor to accompany a group of people with intellectual difficulties from England.

It was there that she felt a call not just to be a very competent doctor in London but to help create L’Arche communities in the UK. She took a huge and courageous step to limit her vocation as a doctor.

I went to England to help her begin the adventure.

She came more frequently to Trosly

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and I went to the United Kingdom.

She was touched by the community here in Trosly but often upset by all our inadequacies and maybe also the disorderliness.

She took her place in the International Council and now and again let us know just how upset she was by the way we did things and how we didn’t give the right support and formation to our tired assistants.

All she said was true, we needed her voice of wisdom.

We needed someone like her for L’Arche to grow wisely.

I believe she must have suffered quite a bit as the coordinator of L’Arche in the United Kingdom.

Assistants coming and going, having to depend on providence in so many ways.

This book reveals her wisdom, her great love of people and in a special way those with disabilities and those who were in the last stages of life.

Yes Thérèse was a great and wonderful woman.

She wasn’t always easy.

But through her life was revealed her beautiful heart, her great wisdom, her exceptional competence.

I loved and was very proud of my sister even if now and again I was a bit fearful of her.

This book came about because I wanted Thérèse’s spirit and wisdom to be better known outside and within L’Arche. I believe there is still much that we can learn from her approach to working with people with disabilities and to others who are too often pushed to society’s margins. She herself was sustained by a deep personal faith, but this was far from exclusive. The message of her work for ecumenism remains important, and her desire for greater unity in the wider human community is still also relevant to people of different faiths and none.

When I thought of a book about Thérèse’s life and work, I asked Ann Shearer, who knew her well, if she would write it. In discussion

ix Foreword with her and others, Eileen Glass, vice international coordinator of L’Arche, and I invited contributors to send their thoughts about Thérèse. This book is the result and I hope you will be stirred by Thérèse as she was known and loved by so many.

Acknowledgements This book could literally not have been written without its many contributors, and their enthusiasm and adaptability are in themselves a tribute to the esteem and love in which Thérèse was held. We could occasionally try each other’s patience, when my single-minded pursuit of deadlines ran up against their own busy lives. But for me, these moments were far outweighed by the particular pleasure of working together with good colleagues to build something worthwhile. My thanks to all – and a special mention to Deborah Cowley, Gyde and Rosemary Shepherd and Teresa de Bertodano for all their additional help and support.

Acknowledgement is due to Veritas Publishing in Dublin and Tim Kearney for permission to quote extensively from his interview with Thérèse in his book The Prophetic Cry. Every effort has been made to trace the origin of the photographs.

If further information becomes available, it will be included in any future edition.

About this book When Thérèse Vanier died in 2014, her funeral Mass was held in the nave of Canterbury Cathedral – perhaps the first time such an honour had been accorded to a Roman Catholic since the Reformation. In her lifetime, she was awarded honorary Doctorates of Medicine by the Universities of Ottawa and Southampton.

She opened the first L’Arche communities in Britain for people with intellectual disabilities and played an important role in the international development of L’Arche’s radical message, as well as in spreading its insights to many others involved in this area of care.

She was hugely influential in bringing a new approach to the care of dying people, pioneered at St Christopher’s Hospice in London, to French-speaking Europe and her native Canada as well. This book is about her life and work as a constant friend to people with intellectual disabilities,1 a physician and teacher in palliative care, and a tireless worker for closer unity between Christians and among people of faith. It is also an evocation, through those who knew her and her own writings, of the qualities she brought to each of these endeavours. In many ways, her work and the way she approached it still seem relevant today.

My own first impression of Thérèse, when I met her in the early 1970s in her extraordinarily active middle years, was that here was a woman with no time or energy to waste on trivialities. Like many before and after me, I’d been sent to call on her by her brother Jean.

I had little idea why I was there and Thérèse made it pretty clear that this interview had better be a short one. And so it was.

I was there at all because of my own involvement in promoting better services to people with intellectual disabilities. I was working first as a journalist on the Guardian, then freelance and as cofounder of Campaign for Mentally Handicapped People, as they were then known. (CMH later had a long and honourable life as

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Values Into Action, only closing in 2012 for lack of funds; a similar body, Values Into Action Scotland, still exists.) I’d met Thérèse’s brother Jean in Montreal, where we were both speaking at an international conference. I had been gripped by his message, and thought immediately that I would learn a great deal by getting to know more about this radical approach to care. And so I did during some 18 months in the L’Arche community in Trosly – though hardly in the coolly dispassionate way that I’d envisioned.

My second encounter with Thérèse was at an early meeting of the L’Arche International Council, to which I was by now a sort of secretary. One of the French delegates was speaking at philosophical length and depth about L’Arche’s mission. Thérèse, as interpreter, waited for a pause in the rhetoric to give her perfectly timed and deadpan translation: ‘Repetition of previous point.’ I warmed to her instantly. She was also the only delegate to comment on my wretchedly streaming cold. She herself found, she said with matterof-fact tact, that paracetamol helped; she had some if I would like them. Of course I accepted and with gratitude, as much for the fact that she had noticed and the sensitivity of her approach as for the pills themselves. To this day, this second meeting somehow encapsulates what I would later learn to be such important elements in Thérèse’s unique blend: a focus on the essentials, communication with and through humour, and acute sensitivity to and respect for individuals and their needs.

Over the many years since, I came to appreciate these qualities more and more – first as a member of the L’Arche UK committee, and then through meals and holidays with our friend Petrina Morris, a Jungian analyst who shared Thérèse’s house in London.

In 1979, the three of us pooled resources to construct the first international L’Arche residential ‘renewal’ for long-term assistants.

The programme was over-ambitious, and we organisers had a lot to learn as we went along. But it enshrined something important in the patterns of L’Arche, from which any ‘caring’ organisation could well learn too: the need to build in periods of rest, reflection and resource for long-term ‘carers’. One thing led to another: Petrina was the person who first set me on the path that led to my training as a Jungian analyst myself. When she left London, Thérèse and I continued to meet, though not as often as I’d have

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liked because I was then working both at home and abroad. She became particularly dear to me in her later years, when both of us had more time to muse.

We shared many things, not least a sense of life’s humour as well as its tragedies – and quite a few less attractive qualities as well. We both reacted strongly to ill-treatment of those with few obvious resources to defend themselves against power; we longed for a more just world. We took heart from small instances of movement towards it – and became impatient at those who seemed to us to be slouching along the way. We both wanted to understand more about what draws people together in greater unity rather than splitting them apart in anger and fear – and could be angered ourselves when others didn’t appear to get it.

For me, this led to an exploration into the psychological and even biological wellsprings of human empathy and mutual respect; I’ve been drawn to the work in restorative process that is gradually gentling Western justice systems and situations of conflict, whether in school playgrounds or troubled societies.2 The basis of this process could, in Thérèse’s terms, be called ‘heart to heart’ communication, and here, as so often, she went to the heart of things. For her, it was always the most vulnerable people who could show the way to greater understanding – a very real and living expression of the seemingly universal psychological truth that people grow from not from their strengths but from acceptance of their shared human weakness. It was with that ‘weakness’ that she was drawn to work in herself and others, particularly with people for whose disabilities and illnesses there was no ‘cure’. Like anyone else who is deeply vulnerable, she believed, they must communicate at the level of the heart rather than the intellect. And these ‘people of the heart’ need to find a response of the heart, as well as one which is as professionally skilled as it can be. When they do, then there is the beginning of healing – not just of the ‘cared for’, but of their ‘carers’ as well. This was as true for Thérèse in individual relationship as it was in a divided Christendom or a fractured, over-intellectualised Western world.

There were areas of Thérèse’s life where I couldn’t follow. The most important was her deep rootedness in her Christian faith; the division between her own Roman Catholic church and others was

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the source of profound pain and anger to her. I have no formal religious allegiance; for me, the divisions of Christendom are part of a larger story about how the built-in human search for a meaning beyond the mundane can be both a force for unity and one which splits apart. This deep difference between us might be thought to put constraints on friendship. But I at least never felt that. Thérèse was no narrow believer; her spirituality was of the embracing sort.

‘I know that my God transcends all and that for him all is possible’, she once wrote. ‘That is why I cannot polarise the believer and the non-believer any more than I can polarise love and competence.’3 We shared an antipathy to some of the more flowery language of faith. In our different ways we were both explorers of the meeting places between spirituality and psychology.

Thérèse was once asked what she considered the key to living an authentic spirituality in today’s world. This is her reply: I think of spirituality as meaning the spirit in which I try to live... in which people try to live. For me, there are three key elements. The first is honesty and self-knowledge, which really means integrity; some integrity between what you say and what you do. And secondly, doing it together. In a world of individualism it is impossible to live any kind of integrated spirituality on one’s own. So ... a community, network, whatever. The third element is that of companioning... You can’t be working in a group of people, doing things together, sharing things, without a mentor who can guide and listen to individuals and help people to articulate what they experience. 4 Thérèse was talking out of her own experience in L’Arche and St Christopher’s Hospice. But wouldn’t people of goodwill in myriad different settings agree?

When Jean Vanier asked me to write a biography of his big sister Thérèse, I was both pleased and honoured. There was so much in her life and work for which people felt grateful, and it would be good to celebrate this. At least as importantly, I felt that there are lessons to be learned from Thérèse which are still relevant to people who want to see a more just and caring world. But at the same

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About this book

time, although writing books is something I do, I didn’t feel up to the huge work of a full biography. I suggested another approach: a composite memoir of Thérèse based on contributions from people who had known her and felt they had learned from her.

So this kaleidoscope of a book came about: a mixture of fact and anecdote, together with Thérèse’s own words. I hope this approach conveys the story of her work and at least something of the qualities she brought to it. It draws on the memories and reflections of more than 40 contributors, whose brief biographies are given at the end, as well as on Thérèse’s own published writings and the bundles of unpublished papers she sent to L’Arche UK towards the end of her life. (Further, more specialised papers are with St Christopher’s.)

The book is divided into three sections, which reflect the three main areas of Thérèse’s work: for people with intellectual disabilities, principally through L’Arche, in palliative care and in ecumenism. Her search for integrity between what she said and what she did sustained every area of her life and work; that is what made her a lodestar for me and I suspect for others too. So these sections are also each a reflection of the woman herself. They are prefaced by an ‘Introduction’ to Thérèse: a biographical sketch which is illuminated by contributions from some of those closest to her. They are concluded by an account of her last years. Finally, there is a short reminder that there is still much work to be done in the three areas with which she was most concerned. Ever one to favour action over words, I hope she would have approved of that.

INTRODUCTION

‘A splendid influence …’

Thérèse Marie Chérisy Vanier was born on February 27 1923 in Camberley, Surrey. It was only when she was approaching the age of 50 that she embarked on the work for which she is most remembered. But in many ways, this work was the culmination of a life of service into which she’d been born. Her mother Pauline was the only child of a Quebec Superior Court judge. Her father Georges was a soldier and diplomat who ended his years as the greatly-loved Governor General of Canada, the first FrenchCanadian to hold that office. Both parents were deeply inspired by their Roman Catholic faith, and a life of prayer and public service.

And from the start, Thérèse carried a reminder that service could also demand sacrifice. The ‘Chérisy’ in her name was the village in France where her father had lost his right leg during a bloody battle of the First World War. Although she spent most of her adult life in England, Thérèse’s early years were hardly settled – an inevitable reflection of both her father’s career and the times in which she grew up. She was born in Camberley because her father was there at the army Staff College.

By the time she was five, she had lived in England, in Canada, where her father took command of his regiment, the Royal 22nd, and in Geneva, where he became Canadian military representative to the League of Nations. By then, she had also acquired three siblings: Georges (known as Byngsie), Bernard and Jean (‘Jock’ to the family and the Scottish nannies). Early in 1931, the family moved to London, where their father became First Secretary to the Canadian High Commission. Their eight years here amounted to the longest spell they spent together anywhere – and even here, the children, in the way of their class, were all away at boarding school before it ended. Perhaps it is not so surprising that of the five Vanier children, three devoted their adult lives to the creation

Introduction 4 of community: Byngsie (now known as Benedict) as a Trappist monk and Thérèse and Jean as builders of secure homes for people with intellectual disabilities.

The war brought an intensification of disruption, separation and anxiety, to the Vaniers as to countless others. At the end of 1938, Georges had been appointed head of the Canadian legation in Paris, and he and Pauline moved there early the next year, leaving the four children to see out the school year at their English boarding schools. In the rising European tension, Pauline and the children, together with her mother, Thérèse de Salaberry Archer, went for their annual holiday to the Normandy seaside, and there they still were when Germany invaded Poland and war was declared. The family remained in the countryside through the uncertainties of the coming months, billeted with an increasingly unwelcoming distant cousin. In April 1940 they returned to Paris, only to flee the city with so many desperate others when German tanks approached the French borders the following month, leaving Georges behind to close the Canadian legation. Pauline, her mother and the children got places on a British destroyer which picked up a cargo ship headed for England. And so, five days later, among 300 people with 60 lifejackets between them, in a ship weaving through bombs, they landed in Wales. Finally Georges was able to rejoin them in London, and the children almost immediately left for Canada with Mrs Archer, while Georges and Pauline remained in London until recalled.

Thérèse was now 16, and through the years of her growing up there had been glimpses of characteristics that people would continue to remember. She sounds to have been very much the responsible first child, approved by her London day school as ‘a splendid influence’.1 Jeanne Bisgood, her dear friend for 75 years, met her first when she arrived as a boarder at the Holy Child Convent at Mayfield in Sussex. ‘She was a tall, quiet, 14 year old.

She had a natural dignity and was more mature than most of us at that age.’ At least one other girl, a year below her, remembers that dignity too.2 But behind that initial impression, there was another side. ‘As I got to know her’ says Jeanne, ‘I learned to appreciate her nice sense of humour and her unostentatious spiritual qualities.’

Thérèse didn’t share her friend’s enthusiasm for sport, but her

5

‘A splendid influence …’

height put her into the second school netball team. Her talent as an actress earned her a leading part in two productions, one of them as St Thomas More. During the summer term of 1939, Jeanne remembers,Thérèse and all her family went through days of extreme anxiety when her eldest brother Byngsie was in danger of dying from a ruptured appendix. ‘I think that it was during those days that our developing friendship deepened and was cemented.’

The two girls were looking forward to a year together in the sixth form when war broke out. For Thérèse, instead of the predictabilities and small excitements of school, there was all the disruption of an evacuee’s life in France. While the boys went to the village school and ran their mother ragged, Thérèse took her turn at teaching the catechism to the local children. Once back in Canada with her brothers, it was her job, as her father instructed, to make sure the boys brushed their teeth.3 In time their parents joined them and Thérèse’s fourth brother and godson Michel was born in 1941. The following year, now 19, she decided, to her mother’s horror, to join the Mechanised Transport Corps in London. This civilian women’s organisation provided drivers for official agencies, including ambulances, in Britain and the Middle East; Thérèse was sent to the Free French Cadet Training School in Worcestershire, where she became secretary and driver to the commanding officer.4 Jeanne Bisgood remembers taking a train to meet her in Worcester, after years of meeting only by letter (and the occasional bar of Canadian chocolate). ‘It was a Sunday and we could not find anywhere to lunch and finally fetched up in a very dreary cinema café. Hardly the reunion we had been hoping for.’ When the two managed to meet in London as the war went on, they for a time fared rather better than this. General Vanier, now back in London as Canadian Minister to the Allied Governments, used to take them to Ciccio’s in Kensington for an Italian meal.

These outings ended when Georges moved with Pauline to Algiers as Canadian representative to de Gaulle’s provisional French government. But the two young women, both now in the armed forces, continued to meet until Thérèse went to France towards the end of 1944 and subsequently to Germany. She was now a Quack (Canadian Women’s Army Corps), learning, as her father wrote to

Introduction 6 Byngsie,‘all the secrets by which one may disable permanently even strong men! Fair warning to disrespectful brothers!’ She had passed out top of her officer training class, with the highest marks ever awarded, and been voted by the other cadets as the officer under whom they’d most like to serve.5 By the time she was demobbed in 1946, she had reached the rank of Captain and received six awards, including the Croix de Guerre.

‘We live from one day to another’, Thérèse had written to her grandmother in Canada three years earlier, ‘without thinking or reading very much – doing our little job as well as we can. I have the impression that our generation will live for quite a long time like that, but perhaps as we grow older we shall learn to see things in perspective by thinking less about ourselves and more about other people.’ This was certainly a family expectation, as Pauline had underlined in response to the news of Thérèse’s CWAC achievements and brother Jock’s accolade from his naval instructors as ‘a very promising young officer’ who seemed to be ‘a natural leader with considerable influence’. ‘What a family!’ wrote Pauline.

‘Our Lord has certainly been good to us all. And he will certainly expect a great deal from you after endowing you so plentifully and so richly … You will always remember that you will have to give, you who have received so much.’ 6 Back in civilian life, Thérèse decided to become a doctor. This meant a year of catching up on basic chemistry at the Sorbonne in Paris, where her father had been Canadian Ambassador since 1944. She then trained at Cambridge University and St Thomas’s Hospital in London, and after working there in casualty, general medicine and paediatrics, moved to haematology. She spent two years at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, and another two at Tufts’ University in Boston with research fellowships in paediatric haematology. In 1962, she returned to St Thomas’s, where she stayed for the next decade, apart from a year’s secondment to the paediatrics department of Makere medical school in Uganda. She combined teaching with clinical work and between 1965 and 1972 was Senior Lecturer and Consultant Clinical Haematologist – the first woman to become a consultant physician in that stronghold of masculinity.

7

‘A splendid influence …’

And then, to the surprise and even shock of many who knew her, she resigned – and it is with that decision that this book really begins.

But first, who was the woman who made that decision? The question is not easily answered. Even Deborah Cowley, a family friend over very many years, found this. ‘Others will agree, I am sure, that Thérèse was a difficult person to know well. She was so self-effacing, spoke little about herself and seldom shared her most private thoughts.’ In this, and much else, she was without doubt her dignified, soldierly father’s child rather than her outgoing, charming and emotionally fragile mother’s. Some people detected that from the start: ‘She’s the Major all over!’ said one early visitor to the baby.

And her mother may have intimated something of the same. ‘Poor little thing’, she wrote in her journal during her pregnancy, ‘you have a mother who loves you tenderly already, but who is a little bit afraid of you. But with such a father, I’m not afraid of seeing you come into this world.’7 This may have been more than the anxiety of a first-time mother.

Both fear and confidence were borne out when Pauline, exhausted by five pregnancies (including the miscarriage of her first) and multiple house moves, had a prolonged and painful ‘neurasthenic’ breakdown after Jock’s birth. Thérèse was then five. In accounts of the children’s early years, given that those of the Vanier kind lived in the nursery rather than with their parents, it is Georges who is remembered as the one who played with them, told them stories, delighted them by giving them hatpins to stick into his artificial leg. Here’s one vignette of family life, reported by nine-year-old Byngsie to his mother, who was back in Canada to be with her dying father. ‘It is 6 o’clock now and we are all in the sitting-room with Daddy. Bernard and Jock are playing with the Meccano and Daddy is reading poems to Thérèse. The one he is reading now is called “Cyrano” by Rostand.’Thérèse herself remembered the long letters her father wrote when he was (as so often) away: ‘especially for me, each letter included an account of a talking rabbit or some other character he had invented.’ It was from her father too that Thérèse got her intrinsic sense of humour, which could range from the wryly self-deprecating to the extravagantly zany, and which was so much part of the way she communicated with others. 8

Introduction 8 The world saw the public Georges Vanier, the one who drew some 36,000 people to file past his coffin as he lay in state, the one whom Lord Mountbatten called ‘the greatest Canadian of his time’.

For Lady Diana Cooper, a family friend, this had been ‘the dearest man ever to be given to a generation craving something finer and nobler than themselves’. ‘Thérèse always spoke of her father with much affection and great admiration’, says Deborah Cowley. ‘She shared his deep faith, his profound love of humanity and his strong sense of service. When she decided, during the early days of World War II, to offer her services at the Front, she was consciously or unconsciously showing the same sense of duty that motivated her father more than two decades earlier. I have little doubt that her father’s exemplary sense of service was a strong influence in Thérèse’s own career path.’ From him too she learned what a work ethic could mean. She remembered telling him proudly when she was working as an administrator for the CWAC in Paris, that she never left her office until her in-tray was empty. ‘“Is that so?” he asked with raised eyebrows. He worked extremely hard and his own “in” tray was never empty.’ And ‘We can all find time to do what we want’, he told her when they were discussing his devotion of half an hour to prayer on even his most crowded gubernatorial days. Man of action that he was,Thérèse’s medical career, at its peak when he died in 1967, made more obvious sense to him than the choices of his other children. At the end of his life, the years seemed to drop off him when she visited.9 Thérèse was certainly very aware of her mother’s many contributions not just to her father’s life but to that of the family – more so perhaps than Pauline herself, who carried a painful burden of self-castigation. ‘Dear Ma’, wrote Thérèse in 1965, ‘when you feel yourself lapsing into an inferiority complex, remember a number of things: when different people meet they leave a mark...

What Daddy is today and what your children are today is, in larger measure than you apparently realise, your doing.’10 If there’s a hint of impatience to be read into those economical words, Thérèse worked hard to master it. Alain Saint-Macary, who knew both women well, remembers how attentively Thérèse looked after her mother from the moment that Pauline, now 75, moved from Canada to live in Trosly:

9

‘A splendid influence …’

As the eldest child and only daughter, she did this with both discretion and her characteristic efficiency. She helped her mother move into Les Marroniers, she visited regularly, particularly during holidays, and especially for the month of August, when the L’Arche community was away. Her patience and competence did a lot to bring security to her mother, who could become very anxious. I remember especially several times when her brother Bernard was invited to dinner.

Artist as he was, he always arrived extremely late. Mme Vanier couldn’t bear this – she quickly became anxious, and imagined the worst. Thérèse, generally extremely punctual herself, hid her own irritation and drew on a treasury of patience to try to calm her mother down.

Even that treasury, however, could sometimes get depleted. As one of Pauline and Thérèse’s August visitors, I always felt delighted and privileged to be there. But I can certainly remember more than one tightening of Thérèse’s jaw and banging of kitchen pans. It doesn’t take much to see her as fuelled by the energy of Athene, ancient Greek goddess of war, peace, and practical wisdom, born from her father’s forehead rather than her mother’s womb. Athene’s owls swooped over her from the start: the symbol of the Staff College was an owl and children born to its members were known as ‘owlets’. And I still have the CWAC uniform button bearing Athene’s head that Thérèse gave me when I was writing a book about the goddess.

Like her father, Thérèse made a strong impact by her very presence. People speak of her tall and graceful bearing, her patrician beauty, her air of quiet dignity, her calmness, natural authority and immediately evident competence. Alain St Macary, who knew her not just through life in Les Marroniers but as a colleague on L’Arche’s International Council, characterises her like this: Thérèse was a great lady – through her physical appearance, her attitude, her natural leadership and her courtesy. For me, one of the words that characterises her is ‘moderation’ (sobrieté). She was economical in word and action, neither saying nor doing anything superfluous. This moderation,

Introduction 10 coloured with a lot of humour, inspired respect. She had a depth, and spirituality close to that of Charles de Foucauld.

These days, when we talk a lot about ‘human ecology’, Thérèse remains a model.

And here is Michael Kearney, a young medical colleague at St Christopher’s Hospice: What I remember of Thérèse is her quiet dignity and certain gentle sadness, her beautiful presence, her profound respect for everyone she met, her capacity for deep listening and her modelling that sometimes it’s OK to be alone and be silent with our patients. And I remember her quirky humour.

She conveyed too the sense of a very deep introversion, and together with that indefinable sadness, this could make her appear distant.Teresa de Bertodano, who knew her far better than most for over 40 years, sees her like this: I felt that she was sometimes closer to the dying than to the living. This is not to imply any withdrawal or lack of engagement with life but rather that Thérèse’s deep identification with her dying patients created a sort of reserve around her.This was perhaps necessary in order to enable her to maintain her accompaniment of those making their final journey. Within her personality there was also an impersonal respect for her office – her medical expertise.

In this too, Thérèse was like her father, who was always insistent as Governor General on the dignity not of his person but of what he represented. Thérèse brought her own qualities to this perception. ‘It was combined’, continues Teresa, ‘with humility and with a simplicity of approach which was anything but naivety and contributed to a perfection of judgement.’ This was a combination, she feels, which also characterised Queen Elizabeth II. She never told Thérèse that, but suspects she might have taken it well. ‘She was very detached about her own qualities – and knew that people often had what she called the “defects of their qualities” as well.’

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‘A splendid influence …’

A visitor to St Christopher’s Hospice once told Michael Kearney that Thérèse reminded her of a swan gliding down a river, as she moved with such silent grace through the turmoil of it all. Michael asked her how she did this. She laughed and said, ‘But no one sees just how fast those little feet are paddling under the surface.’

‘Preach the gospel at all times’ For those who saw only the gliding swan, Thérèse could be aweinspiring. Those who caught glimpses of what lay behind the façade could be awed indeed. Teresa de Bertodano suspects that her lack of self-regard prevented Thérèse from being aware of the extent to which people could be frightened of her. But so they could be, especially when they caught a touch of that temper for which her father was also known. To his staff, he was H.E. – most of the time standing for His Excellency, but sometimes for High Explosive. Mostly his anger – and hers – was battened down under a cold glare or tightening of the jaw. But it was not unknown for him to let out a roar or her to slam out of a room with a banged door behind her. Pain made her angry, says Teresa, injustice always touched a nerve. Highly competent, efficient and self-driving as she was, she was also angered when other people seemed to lack her urgency to do something to alleviate an obvious suffering. And she became quite cross when people (including herself) seemed to fall short of her standards of competence. Hazel Bradley, who knew her closely through many years, remembers an early meeting when Thérèse invited her to show slides of her community in India to the one in London. ‘One slide was fuzzy. I stumbled for the English word and used the French flue [chimney] instead. An irritated voice reprimanded me and I felt chastised. Thérèse could be quite scary.

She had very high standards!’

But where she detected suffering, Thérèse responded. Here, for one instance, is the experience of the artist Catherine Goodman, who arrived aged 18 on her doorstep, with a very clear purpose and need.

When I was volunteering in a hospital in Kerala, South India, I came by chance on a book by Jean Vanier and it immediately

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‘Preach the gospel at all times’ struck a chord. I was deeply concerned about my younger sister, to whom I’m very close. She has severe autism and was so distressed when I went away that she’d completely stopped talking. I decided, as one does at that age, to write to this author when I got back and ask for his help. Somehow I found his address, and Jean replied that although there wasn’t much he could do, living as he did in France, I might get in touch with his sister in London. So I did. And for the next four years, Thérèse was a constant support to my family, both in herself and through her suggestions of where we might go for help.

Facta Non Verba, urges the Mayfield school motto: Actions Not Words. And for all she was very gifted with them, words alone were of little value to Thérèse. One of her favourite sayings was one attributed to St Francis:‘Preach the Gospel at all times - if necessary use words.’ She could have a low tolerance for people who seemed to think words mattered more than the way a life is lived. She had more than one run-in, for instance, with the renowned spiritual writer Henri Nouwen. He stayed for a year in Les Marroniers, her mother’s house in Trosly, and in her view took the place over. For her, recalls Teresa de Bertodano, he was ‘the best organised egoist I have ever met’. The Great Cheese Row erupted between the two of them when Henri let loose his ripely oozing camembert all over Pauline’s fridge. This culminated in Henri complaining to Jean that Thérèse had been unkind about his cheese. ( Jean just found all the fuss incomprehensible.) Later, Henri moved to Daybreak, the L’Arche community outside Toronto. While there, he had his gall bladder removed, and phoned Les Marroniers, eager to convey every detail of what he’d gone through. It was Thérèse who answered and she gave him short shrift: ‘You don’t need a gall bladder, Henri. A gall bladder is surplus to requirements. I will pass you to my mother.’

And then, the other side – that deep respect for others and their needs. For Thérèse, this was where everything needed to begin; this was the guide to action. In a tribute to her father in the Reader’s Digest, she ends by quoting a letter of sympathy from the Canadian novelist Gabrielle Roy. Georges, it said ‘possessed the gift of making

Introduction 14 each one feel he was their personal friend. He managed to convey this impression for the simple reason that it was true, every human being was precious to him.’1 That, said Thérèse, was how she would like him to be remembered. And that, perhaps, was the greatest of his inspirations to her.

There are very many stories of Thérèse’s small kindnesses and attentions – exactly the right card at exactly the right moment, a meal, a bed for the night offered without question and without fuss. For some, like her much younger cousin Gyde Shepherd, Thérèse’s loving-kindness was consistent over very many years and inspired great love in return. He still remembers the Biggles adventure Cousin Ti gave him when he was 11 and spending a homesick Christmas in Paris, far from his Canadian home. She welcomed him on his way to Oxford University in 1967, and was there again, as ‘sister and mentor’, when he returned from Canada after his mother’s death to finish his degree. She gave him moral support when she was in Boston and he at Harvard – and practical help too when he was getting his dissertation together. She was a fixture in his life and that of his wife Rosemary, he says.

From what wellspring of thoughtfulness did you draw to prompt such timely missives of humour, affection and encouragement, sent to us and to how many others over a lifetime, somehow always at just the right time? How were you able, always, to be present at our sides, to be there?

In 1995, Thérèse stayed with the Shepherds when she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa. After she returned to England, Rosemary received a parcel from her.

It contained an elegant box, the very one in which her honorary degree had been presented. Inside were an exquisite scarf and another honorary doctorate, a Doctorate of the Heart of Life – from the University of Life – written in fine script and illustrated by Ti with a hand-painted ‘logo’ of a verdant tree. The citation reads:

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‘Preach the gospel at all times’ In recognition of her concern and constancy of building love and unity in her family and in her world: unity and good food (and wine) at the family table and unity and good humour at the Lord’s.

Rosemary Findlay Shepherd understands and practises the art and science of the heart, she has enabled countless others, not least her husband, daughter and sons and grandpersons to enjoy life and achieve many things.

My degree was conferred on the 6th of December 1995, the Feast of Saint Nicholas, and signed by H. Heartsease, Chancellor; L. Lifegift, Rector; B.B. Pinturicchio, Dean of Arts (the subject of Gyde’s thesis); and none other than I. Newton, Dean of Sciences.

So you can see what I mean by Ti’s unique, affectionate and generous sense of humour.

It wasn’t only her family who benefited from Thérèse’s singular way with gifts of attention and concern. Jo Lenon, later coordinator of L’Arche International, remembers first meeting this ‘caring, intelligent woman who was uncomfortable in the limelight’ in 1975. Four years later, she, her husband Pat and their three young daughters travelled from Canada to England to join the first L’Arche International renewal programme for assistants. At one point in their journey, Pat’s passport and the family’s tickets and travellers cheques were stolen. It was Thérèse who immediately arranged a place for them to stay in London, complete with food in the fridge, while they sorted themselves out. Over the years, Jo and she met at different L’Arche gatherings. ‘She always asked about our family, expressing interest as our daughters grew. I soon experienced her capacity for listening: listening to the whole and listening to the individual with great kindness.’

The two of them met again at a L’Arche Spirituality meeting in Trosly in 1994.

Thérèse wore a lovely off-white wool cardigan with pockets, and I complimented her on this. She’d made it herself, she said, just what was needed in the damp stone buildings of

Introduction 16 Trosly. A year later we met again. She handed me a package – and in it, to my great surprise, was a sweater exactly like hers which she had knitted for me. I was stunned, and so grateful.

What struck me most is that there was no fanfare about the package. When I thanked her, she just said in her modest way ‘I hope you enjoy wearing it.’

Thérèse: so generous, kind and hidden.

First the listening and learning from it, then the action: this was the basis for Thérèse’s relationships, whether private or professional.

Jim Cargin saw this over many years in L’Arche.

Both by character and medical training, she had an outstanding capacity to listen, look reality unflinchingly in the eye, and then commit herself to seeking a way forward.

Whether the patient be a vulnerable individual approaching the end of their life, or a fledgling, slightly crazy community like L’Arche, or even an absurdly divided church, Thérèse’s approach was characterized by the same basic insight: the starting point for any effective treatment is to listen honestly to the patient’s experience and thereby arrive at an accurate diagnosis of symptoms. So the key was never to shy away from the pain, but always to face up to it, in the deepest respect for the sufferer. Such honesty was a real gift. For me – surely like many others – one of her major life-long lessons was about discerning the difference between real hope and fanciful illusion. During my term as Regional Coordinator in the UK and later in Poland, I regularly used to meet with her.

She was ever a patient listener with a gift for seeing through any smokescreen, cautioning with gentle insistence, ‘Jim, nothing is gained by pretending that things are better than they really are.’

In this learning through listening, it was the ‘people of the heart’ who were Thérèse’s greatest teachers. This is the constant theme of the many public talks and retreats she gave over the years: these ‘unlikely givers’, through their very vulnerability and dependence,

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‘Preach the gospel at all times’

can teach what it is to be human, and restore balance in an overintellectualised world. Many of these talks are preserved in the bundles of papers she sent to L’Arche UK towards the end of her life. In them, she very often tells stories about vulnerable people she has known – but as the starting point for her reflections, rather than as an illustrative add-on. First the encounter, and then ‘that set me thinking …’. In those envelopes and folders too, there are probably, sheet by sheet, almost as many photos of and messages from core members of L’Arche communities as there are typewritten texts.

These core members are the people with intellectual disabilities who are the communities’ very justification and glue. And, as Thérèse often emphasised, the communities came into existence and spread, just as did the palliative care movement, not simply because these movements responded to the needs of vulnerable people, but because they met a need in those who cared for them as well. There was a mutual need for healing.

For her, as she wrote in an undated fragment among her papers, this ‘healing’ meant ‘something about the need to know that I need to change’: In many disabled and very ill people I come across, this healing is a healing of the heart; it has little to do with healing of a disrupted body or a malfunctioning brain. Healing of the heart has a lot to do with acceptance of what does not, cannot change, as well as changing what can. It has to do with peace and rest, trust and hope....

I know that as a doctor I have had to learn how to be with people I cannot cure, for whom I can do little. This is a challenge which comes from people with all sorts of disability; they ask us to use parts of ourselves which have little to do with DOING. ... So blessedness is the sharing of a feeling of helplessness, recognition of our own poverty, of being vulnerable. Once we become vulnerable, we are in some way disabled too; we are close to our own poverty. [This] meets the poverty of others and this is a healing process – if you like, a meeting of equals.

Introduction 18 ....People who are disabled also have great power to heal in another way – they can bring us the comfort that we can be human, be unique, child of God and bringer of gifts even if mind or body or emotions are not working too well. And of course, that is often our fear: ‘Can I still be human, be loved, be myself, if I recognise and allow others to recognise all the weakness, all the handicap that is in me?’ ...But maybe the greatest blessedness is just being part of God’s kingdom. Because Jesus said that if you are poor, the kingdom of God is yours – he did not say will be yours.

Now here is a great mystery: as you live your poverty, you are in God’s kingdom. You are where he is. You are part of the horror and at the same time the blessedness of the cross – of God’s kingdom come to earth. No wonder God loves the poor – they are a part of that huge mystery of love and suffering into which God stepped when he became man.

Not many people, perhaps, knew the depth of the struggle with that ‘huge mystery’ in Thérèse’s own life. Deborah Cowley had known the Vanier family since her own husband-to-be was attaché to the Governor General; she had met and corresponded with Thérèse over many years. But even the Cowleys knew nothing of Thérèse’s suffering until they arranged to celebrate her 75th birthday by fulfilling one of her dreams and taking a train with her across Canada. Waiting one day for a connecting train, they were having a picnic in a park.

Quite voluntarily, Thérèse began to speak about her long and harrowing fight with depression. I was stunned to hear this, since I had always seen Thérèse as the most even-tempered person. I could not imagine that she had faced what she called ‘so many lows’ over her lifetime. She never mentioned this again. On reflection, this revelation made her many significant accomplishments all the more laudable.

Thérèse reminded Deborah that Pauline had suffered from depression right up until her death – ‘so it was possible that she feared this would be her lot for years to come’. In that, she was

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‘Preach the gospel at all times’

prescient. But even here she managed find a recourse to humour. She once suffered a bad bout while staying with Gyde and Rosemary Shepherd – and later sent them a copy of Eeyore’s Little Book of Gloom. ‘Nobody minds’, this begins. ‘Nobody cares. Pathetic, that’s what it is.’ ‘We knew at once,’ says Gyde, ‘that your disarming sense of humour could be both balm for your anxiety and reassurance for those of us who tried to give you an ear in return.’

If Thérèse was reticent about her own suffering, she wrote a great deal about that of others – and the possibility of its transformation through heart to heart relationship and the discovery of meaning.

‘I’m sure suffering has meaning, the suffering of Christ undoubtedly has meaning’, she said in a rare interview. ‘What one can’t do is go around telling people what the meaning is. But when people discover the meaning by what they do with their own suffering, then you need to celebrate this and say “Come and see”.’2 One story of the transformation of suffering and death into life was particularly dear to her. When Little Ewell began as the first L’Arche community in the UK, it had been offered a gift by Lucile Wilson, a Vanier family friend.This enabled Thérèse to commission two icons for the community’s chapel, depicting The Resurrection and The Raising of Lazarus. This second story was also the one she chose to be read at her funeral. In it, Jesus waits for two days after he hears of Lazarus’s illness before he decides to go to the house in Bethany, just two miles from Jerusalem. The disciples are strongly against such a dangerous journey, when the Jews are already seeking his death. But go they do – and Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead.

What was happening during those two days of delay? Thérèse once asked.

I think we can at least wonder whether it was a time of transformation in Jesus, in the humanity of Jesus. He was putting off a decision to face this return and the probable death of Lazarus and of course ultimately his own death.

Could it be that his fear was transformed into self-offering creative love? Is it possible that such an inner movement was taking place and that the power of this self-offering creative love was such that it restored Lazarus to life? I don’t know, but I think we are free to wonder.3

Introduction 20 The transformation of fear into self-offering love was part of Thérèse’s own journey. She once spoke of her own ‘resident alien’, the parts of herself that she didn’t like and preferred not to recognise. She spoke too of the losses, anxieties and childhood fears hidden in the unconscious – all those vulnerabilities that make the vulnerability of others so hard to relate to. She borrowed the phrase ‘resident alien’ from the father of a severely disabled son, who said he experienced this young man and the rest of the family as coming from different countries, each ‘alien’ to the other. She knew that it’s when we can live ‘in mutually responsible association’ with our own ‘resident alien’ that we can find compassion for those who now seem alien to us, in the work of mutual healing towards a common humanity. 4 To enter into the mystery implicit in accepting our own suffering, using it actively, enabling it to be passion, means entering the mystery of a God who is love. I think many of us touch the edge of this mystery as we accompany dying people in their journey. We witness it with deep respect and awe. I believe it is at this particular interface of suffering transformed by love that God is to be found. It is the interface where compassion is enabling many to find God – God of a thousand names – as they find meaning.5 In a talk that Thérèse gave to St Christopher’s in 1993, she spoke a little of her own ‘darkness’. In it, she said, prayer was both impossible and irrelevant. But through it came something new and more ample than before. With the help of a psychotherapist, a priest and a GP, she says, ‘there came a time when I recognised that, after all, I did have a core to my being. That had been there all the time, buffeted by the experience but rock-like.’ This, she said, was what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘immortal diamond’.

I am all at once what Christ is | since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd. | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond Is immortal diamond.

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‘Preach the gospel at all times’

From this core in herself, she said, seemed to come a much wider, deeper sense of what and who God is - ‘an opening out onto the universe’.6 Thérèse’s Values 15.12.90 (or some of them – would not go to the stake for all!)

Life (as in ‘Choose life’ and ‘In Him was life’) Respect (for ‘the other’ and consideration of their feelings) Justice Reconciliation – particularly in building bridges Competence and compassion in caring Faithfulness in commitment Solitude All these in the context of Recognition of my need for God Salvation through the poor Matthew 25 at the heart of the gospel.

Many people would recognise the Thérèse they knew in this handwritten list, tucked in among her papers. They might wonder which parts of Matthew 25 she meant. Was it the story of the wise virgins with their well-trimmed lamps and their foolish sisters who ran out of oil and were shut out from the marriage feast? Was it the parable of the talents and the punishment of the servant who failed to set his to work? Or perhaps it was this: Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me …

Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me.

Of course Thérèse didn’t live up to her values all the time. Of course she could be snappish, peevish and sometimes heedless. Her

Introduction 22 deep introversion didn’t always make for easy communication. She was certainly aware of how difficult it could be to live lovingly with others. When Hazel Bradley had been 20 years in L’Arche, and had few illusions on that score either,Thérèse sent her a series of handcoloured Peanuts cartoons to commemorate the anniversary. In one, little Linus is waxing lyrical about his love of nature, of birds, and fish, and animals and plant life too. ‘I love without reservation!’ he cries.‘I love without qualification! I love without even thinking!’

Charlie Brown just looks impassive.

This is far from meaning that Thérèse had given up on the possibility of love. She often quoted Tielhard de Chardin’s belief that the human race was on an evolutionary path towards it.

Theoretically the transformation of love is quite possible.

What paralyses life is a failure to believe and a failure to dare.

The day will come when, after harvesting space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harvest for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.7 In her own search for an ever-greater unity – between ‘herself ’ and her ‘resident alien’, between her words and her actions, between love and competence, heart and head, spirituality and psychology, between people of faith and across fractured societies – Thérèse brought an integrity of purpose that could be inspiring.

For John Stitt, the first chairman of L’Arche in the UK, the word that describes her is quite simply ‘shining’. ‘Somehow she just shone, and when one was near her, one just brightened. It was, of course, her faith shining through – faith in the Jesus who was alive to her and with whom she now resides. Such people are rare and when found must be treasured.’

‘You have sought truth and given life’, says her cousin Gyde.

‘But even more fundamentally, you have sought the unity of reconciliation for us all, without which we cannot find universal peace and justice.’

Balfour Mount, the ‘father’ of palliative medicine in North America, still remembers a fleeting glimpse of Thérèse with a patient, more than four decades ago. ‘She conveyed to me, and

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‘Preach the gospel at all times’

undoubtedly to her elderly companion, the true meaning of love shared, the embodiment of the Nazarene’s mandate. Here was the union of science and the art of medicine in action.’

Nicholas Hudson, the Roman Catholic bishop who visited Thérèse as she was dying, remembered then a thought she once shared at prayer-time in the L’Arche community in London. ‘ “We ask God all the time for help,” she said. “But how does he help us?

Well, the answer is: through us! He helps by working through us!”

“Thérèse, your whole life has been a testimony to that,” I thought to myself. “Your whole life has been about helping people – or better, about God helping others through you!”’

Sylvia Lear, a core member of L’Arche in London, knew her after her retirement, when she visited regularly to do the community’s mending. For her, she was simply ‘the lady who comes to do the stitching’.

Once when Thérèse, now L’Arche Regional Coordinator, was visiting the community of Little Ewell, she had a conversation with Jane Barclay, one of its core members. She asked her what she found really good and really hard about living there. Jane thought for a while and then said: ‘I find it very difficult to love everybody.’

That, responded Thérèse, was exactly her own problem. What did Jane suggest they did about it? ‘We just’ said Jane, ‘go on trying.’

In the end, this book is about just that: the ways in which Thérèse went on trying.