Celibate Chastity in Solidarity with the Least of Christ's Members: Lessons from L'Arche

Chastity is a communal virtue … The mental and spiritual health of a community depends largely on the way its members live their most personal lives as a service to their fellow human beings.

Henri Nouwen, "The Road to Daybreak," Spiritual Journals

The virtue of chastity blossoms in friendship … with one's neighbor. Whether it develops between persons of the same or opposite sex, friendship represents a great good for all. It leads to spiritual communion.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Par. 2347

Introduction

At the height of the AIDS crisis, Chris Glaser, bestselling Christian author, gay activist, and then Presbyterian director (1977–1987) of the Lazarus Project, stayed with his Catholic friend, mentor, and former teacher Henri Nouwen (1932–1996) at the L'Arche community commonly called Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Glaser studied with Nouwen at Yale Divinity School in the 1970s, when the famous Dutch-born, priest-psychologist belonged to that faculty from 1971 to 1981, prior to his appointment at Harvard Divinity School in 1983 and his encounters with L'Arche and Daybreak in the mid-1980s. Travelling back and forth daily between Daybreak and the site of the AIDS Consultation in Toronto, Glaser came to the clear realization: "The model of healing L'Arche offers might be used in ministry with people with AIDS. Healing is understood in its biblical context of restoration to God's covenant community, the household of faith. And healing is recognized as mutual and reciprocal: the ones who may appear as most in need of healing may also heal those around them."¹

In this briefly expressed insight, Glaser emphasizes the limited application to AIDS patients and their caregivers of lessons of compassion learned in L'Arche, the international ecclesial movement dedicated to the care of the mentally handicapped and disabled.² This paper affirms Glaser's idea, and expands

Photo courtesy of Kimon Maritz on Unsplash.

upon it to argue for a much wider and deeper application of the L'Arche model to the Christian vocation. In the process, I challenge some of Glaser's own notions about how gay and lesbian Christians—indeed, all Christians—are called in love to follow Christ and to be healed in the process.³

Glaser loves and honors the spiritual legacy of Nouwen, who befriended him and other gay men;⁴ but Glaser fails to grasp the profound implications of celibacy for Nouwen, whose spirituality gained its final expression in L'Arche at Daybreak, where he lived during the last decade of his life. The biographies by Michael Ford, Michael W. Higgins, and Kevin Burns make it clear that Nouwen struggled painfully with same-sex attraction, yet surrendered that struggle again and again to Christ the Bridegroom.⁵ Nouwen, one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century, found his own deepest identity not in his homosexuality (important as that was to his personhood), but in his priesthood and, even more fundamentally, in being a "child of God."⁶ Finally, through his fidelity to Christ the Son, Nouwen came home to himself in being and becoming a compassionate, spiritual "father" for others at L'Arche.⁷ Nouwen's free decision for celibacy—taken early in his life and steadfastly maintained both as a condition for priesthood and as a free choice available to him as a homosexual—contained within it the promise of this immensely fruitful reconciliation of sexuality and spirituality, which he experienced, finally and effectively, albeit still imperfectly, amidst the "little ones" (Mt 11:25, DRA) at Daybreak.

Glaser admits, "[Henri] strongly believed in celibacy as a vocation."⁸ In his blogs, Glaser publicly supports gay marriage, the ministerial ordination of men and women who have same-sex lovers, and increased access for heterosexuals to contraception as a putative means of reducing the number of abortions.⁹ By contrast, Nouwen never publicly professed his homosexual orientation, despite mounting pressure upon him by Glaser and others to do so,¹⁰ in part because he feared that such a public gesture...