bed each night, the best passer on the basketball court I’ve ever encountered. When someone did something extraordinarily stupid, he would just smile and sigh in wonder at the wackiness of life.
When I was a seventeen-year-old counselor and he was maybe twenty-five, we were walking across a playing field and he told me that one day I would be famous. I took it as a compliment then. But decades later, I visited him in Annapolis on the day of his death. Wes was not speaking anymore, just gesticulating and making unformed noises. I couldn’t really tell if he understood anything I said to him, about my meandering walk of faith, the loves in my life, but as I drove away it occurred to me that maybe there was a warning embedded in his early forecast of my life. Wes was coming from a radical vantage point I didn’t understand back then.
Religion doesn’t produce as many truly good people, like Wes, as you’d think it would. Religious people talk so much about holiness and goodness and love, you’d think they would be more virtuous than atheists and agnostics. In my experience they are not, and some religious people, like the Catholic priests who prey on young children, live very religious lives that are also very bad.
But I do think religions point people toward certain visions of goodness. Growing up, I experienced a stereotypically Jewish kind of goodness. It is chessed, loving-kindness. It is the smiling eyes of a wise rabbi gleaming at you through his beard; it is the warmth of Bubbe giving you seconds on a Shabbat meal; it is the good of a community dropping everything for a shivah, the goofy kindness of a mensch, a whole people turning like a beacon when a Jew is murdered. It is an earthy goodness, a folk goodness, and the rich, enveloping goodness of a family gathering together for a holiday meal.
The kind of good Wes was, was a different kind of good, and I associate it as a Christian flavor of goodness. It is simple, sincere, cheerful, pure, overflowing joy, and an erasure of self in the gift of love. Wes was just not thinking of himself all that much. Maybe because I grew up with it, Jewish good makes sense to me. Christian good has the power to shock. As Dorothy Day once said, Christians are commanded to live in a way that doesn’t make sense unless God exists.
Sometimes Christian good is hard to be around. It’s not of this world, and the juxtaposition jars. For example, Jean Vanier spent seven years in the British navy, starting in 1942. Later in life he noticed the way people with mental disabilities were mistreated and discarded by society into miserable asylums. He visited the asylums and noticed that nobody in them was crying. “When they realize that nobody cares, that nobody will answer them, children no longer cry. It takes too much energy. We cry out only when there is hope that someone may hear us.” He bought a little house near Paris and started a community for the mentally disabled. Before long there were 134 such communities in thirty-five countries.
Vanier exemplifies a selflessness that is almost spooky. He thinks and cares so little of himself. He lives as almost pure gift. People who meet him report that this can have an unnerving effect. Vanier walked out of a society that celebrates the successful and the strong to devote his life purely to those who are weak. He did it because he understands his own weakness. “We human beings are all fundamentally the same,” he wrote. “We all belong to a common, broken humanity. We all have wounded, vulnerable hearts. Each one of us needs to feel appreciated and understood; we all need help.”
He also understands the beauty of weakness. “Weakness carries within it a secret power. The care and the trust that flow from weakness can open up the heart. The one who is weaker can call forth powers of love in the one who is stronger.”
One of the people influenced by Vanier was Henri Nouwen, who left teaching posts at Harvard and Yale so he could live in one of Vanier’s L’Arche communities, serving people so mentally disabled that some of them were unable to even thank him.
When Nouwen left the L’Arche community to speak, he often brought patients from the community with him on the trip. Once, on a trip to Washington, he brought a man named