Vanier & Bikram
A Strange but Illuminating Comparison
It was not long ago that the disclosure of Jean Vanier's sexual abuses lurched disturbingly across the news, accompanied by various attestations of disbelieving grief. Vanier, an author and speaker, had been widely esteemed as a paragon of virtue, a model for the Christian life, and an important voice in recovering a lost sense of community in the West. Most importantly, perhaps, he was the founder of l'Arche, a network of homes for people with intellectual disabilities. What has now been revealed is that, in the background, Vanier was manipulating staff and volunteers to engage in sex acts rationalized by a strange and creepy spiritualization. To describe the situation as distasteful is an understatement.
It is bad enough when a patron saint of community was, in the background, victimizing women; it is worse when an advocate for vulnerability and honesty perjures himself on these counts. In this, Vanier's pattern of sexual activity has a discomfiting pedigree. In Becoming Human (1998), his most famous book, Vanier credits Father Thomas Philippe as a key model and influence on his life. Philippe was similarly condemned for engaging in acts of sexual manipulation under the guise of facilitating "mystical experiences." At the time, Vanier denied all knowledge of Philippe's activities. This, it now appears, is patently untrue. He was a fellow practitioner.
I was mid-way through Becoming Human when this news broke, and it rendered the second half of the book decidedly uneasy reading. "Weakness," Vanier writes, "recognized, accepted, and offered, is at the heart of belonging, so it is at the heart of communion with another" (40). It is now difficult to read these words and not detect an unpleasant affiliation between weakness and sexual predation, between acceptance and pressurization, between belonging and unwarranted intimacy. If weakness is to take its place, as Vanier argues, as a foundation for belonging, does it necessarily mean leaving a back door unlocked for sexual indiscretion?
A Nose for the Weak
An encounter with a strange and unexpected parallel brought clarity to this situation. I sat down one night to watch the 2019 documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator. Bikram Choudhury is a highly charismatic and successful figure, chiefly known for a network of yoga studios that bear his name. Bikram's Hot Yoga is a uniquely intense and challenging routine, performed in conditions of extreme heat. The documentary covers Bikram's origins, rise, and the development of his businesses. Parallel to this rise, however, we learn that much of Bikram's personal narrative is fabricated, that his credentials are sketchy, and, most importantly, that trailing him is a growing number of accusations pertaining to the harassment and rape of his students.
At the surface level, there is an obvious comparison between Bikram's and Vanier's sexual exploitation of followers. At a deeper level, however, I detect an uncomfortable link between weakness and belonging. "People," one of Bikram's victims testified, "found this yoga sometimes at their most broken." They were hungry—hungry for fitness, for health, for beauty, for youthfulness, for a sense of personal integration. To such people Bikram offered an answer: the weak and unhealthy approached him eager for the insight of an "Eastern" guru who could guide them toward greater health and some immaterial form of spiritual integration. "The young women," another victim said, "who want to believe in something so badly—he sees it." Bikram manifested a nose for the weak, and, consequently, "those are the people he targets because they're vulnerable." In brief, the yoga student approaches the master with weakness in his or her hands, pining for a relationship with the guru that creates a sense of strength, belonging, and wholeness. For Bikram, it was precisely through this starting-point of weakness that the potential for sexualization began.
In Becoming Human, it is not difficult to see how -Vanier spiritualizes, even romanticizes, weakness. Early on he writes that "trust is a beautiful form of love" (28). At first the phrase struck me as absurd—I trust the chair I'm sitting in at the moment, but I have no love for it. It only became clear what he meant when, later, he discussed the implicit trust of one of his disabled members—the trust that another would care for him, that another would look after him. This kind of trust perceives the weakness of the mentally disabled as an opportunity for love. It is in this sense that vulnerability, in Vanier's thinking, is the gateway to community. This is a trust that is the business of entrusting oneself to another. To acknowledge, embrace, and embody weakness in this sense is the beginning of true community. Furthermore, Vanier argues, we largely fail to experience it because we refuse to be weak: "We create barriers to protect our vulnerability" (106).
There is, indeed, something beautiful about trust so described. But when we step back, the dynamics become strange, and even—in light of new information—creepy. In this description of trust, Vanier is powerful, while the "other" is weak. Without a balancing counterpoint, this kind of trust can implicitly emphasize my power relative to another's weakness. It is this dynamic, I believe, that establishes the architecture which sustains acts of abuse, so that the language of weakness, of trust, and of vulnerability begins to carry significant and unsettling double entendre. "Trust is a beautiful form of love." Be vulnerable with me. I'll trust you with my secrets. I'll be vulnerable with you. Trust me with your secrets. Let's remove that barrier. Let's keep this our secret.
Guru Personality & Power Dynamics
In his 1996 book Feet of Clay, -Anthony Storr surveys the lives of a series of modern gurus—David Koresh, Jim Jones, G. I. Gurdjieff, Bhagwan Rajneesh, Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and others. Storr, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, documents a variety of characteristics that are common to guru-personalities: narcissism, immense self-confidence, popularity, isolation. In each case, the guru reinforces his personal identity by means of his followers. Narcissistic, isolated, and largely friendless, these figures approach others as the weak who require their strength.
Jeremy M. Rios is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of St. Andrew's and an ordained minister with the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada. He has written or co-authored five books,including, with Jerry and Claudia Root, Naked and unashamed: A Guide to the Necessary Work of Christian Marriage (Paraclete Press, 2018). His academic work focuses on theological anthropology in the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Charles Williams. Jeremy and his wife have four children.
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