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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

What It Means To Be Human

A revelation from Jean Vanier. Watch this. Trust me

A reader writes:

It’s amazing, but not surprising, that your post on Jean Vanier has received only ten comments, while anything ‘gay’ receives 7-10x that amount.

Tell me about it. Listen, I don’t know how many of you watched that short clip from the earlier post about Jean Vanier, but if you missed it, please watch it above. It’s only four and a half minutes long, but this man is luminous. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone who looks so sure of himself, but also so vulnerable, so open, so humble, so illimitably kind. I’ve seen the clip twice now, and there’s something about the man and his words that speaks to me and affects me beyond my ability to explain. It’s holiness. That’s the only way I can put it. Here is a man who has given his entire life to living among and caring for the mentally disabled, in the L’Arche communities he’s founded, and he seems to me to be the richest man in the world.

We were talking here the other day about the bored decadents of the Italian film The Great Beauty. I was thinking of them tonight after a reader sent me this story from the New York Post about some posh Englishwoman and a dirty party she’s throwing in New York City this weekend. Excerpt:

Leggy models in Christian Louboutin heels and Wolford stockings glide from room to candlelit room. A dapper man in a custom suit eyes them while sipping Champagne by the mansion’s fireplace. A DJ plays in a corner. Oysters are slurped at the bar.

And then, in a matter of minutes, pants are off, bras are unhooked and a tangled web of nude revelers go at it on a bed plopped smack in the middle of the 12,000-square-foot home.

It’s just another night at Killing Kittens — the roving members-only sex club that professes to be “the world’s network for the sexual elite.”

On Saturday night, the kinky London-based club makes its New York debut. For $100 per woman and $250 per couple, the adventurous can spend hours sleeping with strangers in a swanky Flatiron loft rented for the evening. Cocktail attire and masks are required (though, needless to say, both will get shed rather quickly).

That is what it means to be inhuman.

And then there is Jean Vanier and the people of L’Arche.

And then there are we, somewhere between these poles, with a choice to make.

“This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” — Deuteronomy 30:19

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