Order and Disorder

The passage of life itself suggests a constantly recurring pattern of movement from order to chaos, from chaos to order, again and again.

Birth, adolescence, and old age are all passages that are filled with anguish. Finally there is the ultimate corruption and disorder that death brings. Throughout our lives there is the disorder created by sickness, accidents, loss of work, loss of friends – all crises that destroy our agendas, security, and carefully laid plans. Such disorder demands a gradual re-ordering of our lives and the period of transition such a crisis represents is not an easy one to live through. It is a time of loss, when we have yet to receive something new. It is a time of grief.

In human beings, there is a constant tension between order and disorder, connectedness and loneliness, evolution and revolution, security and insecurity. Our universe is constantly evolving: the old order gives way to the new order and this in its turn crumbles when the next order appears. It is no different in our lives of movement from birth to death.

Change of one sort or another is the essence of life, so there will always be loneliness and insecurity that come with change. When we refuse to accept that loneliness and insecurity are a part of life, when we refuse to accept that they are the price of change, we close the door on many possibilities for ourselves; our lives become lessened, we are less than fully human. If we try to prevent, or ignore, the movement of life, we run the risk of falling into the inevitable depression that must accompany an impossible goal. Life evolves; change is constant. When we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while but, inevitably, there is an explosion; the groundswell of life’s constant movement, constant change, is too great to resist.

And so empires of ideas, as well as empires of wealth and power, come and go. To live well is to observe in today’s apparent order the tiny anomalies that are the seeds of change, the harbingers of the order of tomorrow. This means living in a state of a certain insecurity, anguish and loneliness, which at best, can push us towards the new.

Too much insecurity, however, can also mean death. To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder. In this way, we discover the new. Those who have the eyes to see this new order, as it arises, will often be considered too revolutionary, too modern, too liberal. Dictators everywhere have clamped down on movements for liberation; those who lead are always so certain that anarchy will arise if they do not govern with a firm hand. In reality, leaders are frightened of sharing or losing power. They too are frightened of change. They want to control everything. Those who see the coming of the new order will frequently be alone, persecuted.

But how do we learn to read the signs of evolution and to where it is going? We can only help the new to evolve, if we have certain clear principles. Here are five principles that have helped me.

First: all humans are sacred, whatever their culture, race, or religion, whatever their capacities or incapacities, and whatever their weaknesses or strengths may be. Each of us has an instrument to bring to the vast orchestra of humanity, and each of us needs help to become all that we might be.

Second: our world and our individual lives are in the process of evolving. Evolution is a part of life but it is not always easy to determine the good and the bad in something that is evolving. How to maintain the old and prepare the way for the new? It is not a question of rejecting the past but of letting the past flow into the present and letting this process guide us as to how to live in the future. It is a question of loving all the essential values of the past and reflecting on how they are lived in the new. These values include openness, love, wholeness, unity, peace, the human potential for healing and redemption, and, most important, the necessity of forgiveness. So, everything that permits and encourages the flow of life and growth is necessary.

Third: maturity comes through working with others, through dialogue, and through a sense of belonging and a searching together. In order to evolve towards greater maturity and wholeness, we humans need a certain security; only when we have attained this can we advance in insecurity with others towards the new.

Fourth: human beings need to be encouraged to make choices, and to become responsible for their own lives and for the lives of others. We need to be encouraged to evolve in order to become mature, and to break out of the shell of self-centredness and out of our defence mechanisms, which are as oppressive to others as they are to ourselves. In other words, we humans need to be rooted in good earth in order to produce good fruit. But for this we need to freely risk life in order to give of ourselves.

Fifth: in order to make such choices, we need to reflect and to see truth and meaning. Reality is the first principle of truth and meaning. To be human means to remain connected to our humaneness and to reality. It means to abandon the loneliness of being closed up in illusions, dreams, and ideologies, frightened of reality, and to choose to move towards connectedness. To be human is to accept ourselves just as we are, with our own history, and to accept others as they are. To be human means to accept history as it is and to work, without fear, towards greater openness, greater understanding, and greater love of others. To be human is not to be crushed by reality, or to be angry about it or to try to hammer it into what we think it is or should be, but to commit ourselves as individuals, and as a species, to an evolution that will be for the good of all.

Each one of us needs to work at searching for truth, not afraid of it. We need to strive to live in the truth, because the truth sets us free, even if it means living in loneliness and aguish at certain moments.

Perhaps this search for the truth is a process of letting ourselves be enfolded in truth rather than possessing truth, as if it were an object that we could possess, that we could use against others.

The truth will set us free only if we let it penetrate our hearts and rend the veil that separates head from heart. It is important not only to join the head and the heart, but to love truth, also, and to let it inspire our lives, our attitudes, and our way of living. The truth of religion and morality shows itself when they liberate us and give us a deep respect and compassion for others.

This process of searching for the truth demands an openness; it demands an evolution of thought, for individuals and entire societies, as the whole world changes and we discover new intimations of what IS. There are unchanging principles, such as the call to people of love and not of hate, which govern our lives. We need to integrate our experiences into these principles and let these principles enlighten our experience.

Such an evolution in thought can mean searching and groping in the dark, sometimes in anguish, thinking through old ideas, formulating them in new words and new ways. Philosophy, anthropology, theology, and those sciences that tell us what it means to be human can be dangerous if they become ideologies that dictate reality; instead , they need to be understood as the means by which we humbly listen to and marvel at reality.

We must not try to return to the past, but instead launch out into the future – to understand each other and what it means to be human, to understand what is happening in the world – in order to become more fully human and to work for peace and unity. It is only as we begin to integrate such a sense of reality more fully into our being, as we thirst for that which gives meaning to our lives, that we discover the fundamental meaning of loneliness: a cry, often a painful cry of anguish, for more respect and love of others, to be even more enfolded in truth, held in God. Such a cry could bring a new wholeness to humanity.


Jean Vanier