Welcoming Madness Into Community

I was struck last week by the beauty of a couple I saw. And, because I’m a deeply strange person, I went up to them and said so.

Sitting at a coffee shop in North Seattle, two people walked in on a Friday morning, laughing lightly and smiling. Not an intense smile, but a deeply felt one. The way they looked at one another and the gentleness with which they seemed to move around one another probably would not have caught my attention most days. In fact, I’m sure I probably miss more beauty in the world than I see.

But I did not miss them.

I crossed the six feet that lay between our tables and asked if I could interrupt for a moment. Since I had already interrupted, I suppose there was little choice on their part but to find out what I wanted. I said, “Are you a couple?” They nodded. “This is going to be weird, but I want to tell you that I find the two of you beautiful. For whatever reason, just now as you walked in, I was struck by your beauty, and I just wanted to tell you. That’s all.” They thanked me, I shook their outstretched hands, and I went back to my seat as they smiled at one another.

I would be lying if I said that these moments never happen in my life, although I resist the temptation more often than not. Like I said, and has been established through plenty of other evidence, I’m a bit of an odd person.

But this day I was feeling very rooted in my madness. Why? Because of a wonderful interview I had just finished listening to between Krista Tippett and Jean Vanier.

Jean Vanier is the founder of the L’Arche community, a collection of intentional communities centered on people with physical and intellectual disabilities. The communities are amazing places of dignity, welcome, and wisdom. Coming out of the Catholic tradition, they have become in many cases spaces for pluralism.

Affirmation of diversity and inclusion has grown considerably since Jean started these intentional communities with two men from a French asylum for the mentally ill. Nonetheless, we still have miles to go before full welcome and mutual inclusion is realized. In this interview from 2007, Jean Vanier’s reflection on people’s deep desire to be loved above all stood out:

“Mr. Vanier: I come back to the reality of pleasure and to the reality of what is my deepest desire and what is your deepest desire? And somewhere, the deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen as somebody of value. But not just seen — and Aristotle makes a difference between being admired and being loved. When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together. So really, the first meeting I had with people with disabilities, what touched me was their cry for relationship. Some of them had been in a psychiatric hospital. All of them had lived pain and the pain of rejection. One of the words of Jesus to Peter —and you find this at the end of the Gospel of Saint John — “Do you love me?”

Ms. Tippett: “Do you love me?”

Mr. Vanier: Thus, the cry of God saying, “Do you love me?” and the cry of people who have been wounded, put aside, who have lost trust in themselves — they’ve been considered as mad — and all the rest. Their cry is, “Do you love me?” It’s these two cries that come together.”

This question, “Do you love me?” is one of the most vulnerable questions a person can ask, and one of the most shattering questions to be of us asked by another. It’s a question that certainly is core to, if not the core of, what it means to be human. We ask it our whole lives.

Those of us who work in creating community often proudly extend “welcome to all” as a guiding principle and convening cry. It is a welcome that, in essence says to the stranger, “yes, we will love you here.” But do we know what we are saying when we make that invitation? And more importantly, will full welcome be made to “all” of the person and people we invite?

A couple of weeks ago I joined a group of people for a conference in California. The convening theme was “Chaos, Community, and Compassion” and was attended by mostly white folks above the age of 50, with a smattering of youth, people of color, and young adults. As our time together unfolded, it became clear that there was significant tension between some of the older white people and some of the younger people of color. It was made evident when one of the younger people of color expressed what I interpreted as skepticism that the surface-level welcome to his presence did not extend to his deep pain and perhaps others like him. When he practiced vulnerability, some of the older white people experienced his actions as unwarranted, ungenerous, and even aggressive. In response to the man, some of the white folks cried out for peace and understanding. They asked why we could not simply love each other. In effect some said, “I don’t even see black when I see you.”

This exchange is not unusual, and there is more to unpack here than I can in this meditation. But the reason I bring it up in this context is to remind us of the complex messiness that we invite into community whenever we say, “you are welcome here.”

We are not only welcoming the elements of people we typically celebrate; like warmth, intelligence, creativity, and hope. We are also inviting people’s trauma, disappointment, despair, depression, and madness. Community that expects health, healing, and wholeness as a condition of participation is both delusional and impoverished.

It is delusional for the simple reason that human beings of the sort we have on earth do not come to community to live out previously established wellness, but to live a life pursuing it with others. Community is the mutual loving of broken people who may never heal, find health, or experience wholeness.

Many community practitioners will tell you that much. But what many of us do not realize is how impoverished our communities are by trying to contain, rid, or otherwise marginalize experiences such as trauma, despair, depression, illness, and madness. When these experiences are seen as the parts of community we hope to leave behind we often miss the beauty and wisdom found only in those. It narrows our ability to see beauty in unknown spaces.

Welcome must include love for the whole of “who we are”, not only “who we could be.” “Who we could be” is wonderful and worthy of pursuit. But it doesn’t come from the marginalization of who we are now. We must love our anger, love our madness, love our failures as they are - for they may never be anything else.

Loving my madness transforms my relationship to the world. It gives me the foundation to speak love into everyday places, like coffee shops. And for the couple I told they were beautiful, the love of my madness became an affirmation of their personhood. We were each richer because of it.

What madness, despair, anger, or trauma do you struggle to love? What preconditions for welcome does your community put in front of your “other”?