August 17, 2014
As many of you know, my vocation for the past 28 years has been to live and work in a L’Arche community. At the present time I no longer live in a L’Arche home but still am still there on a part time basis. L’Arche has given me a sense of meaning and value for my life as well as being a place to belong that I can call home. There are many ways we lived together that have made it very special. Finding L’Arche, as well as finding this church, has made me feel as though I have hit the jackpot in life and I am well content.
At present I serve as the membership coordinator for the various homes and that means especially looking with people at the goals of membership. Today I want to talk about my experience in L’Arche and describe how we try to live together and to carry out these goals.
The first goal starts out by asking a question. What is the vision, the value and the spirit of L’Arche?
When I talk to others I like to have them answer this question. If I asked you what would you say from what you know of L’Arche? I get some wonderful answers such as, it means living mutually together in a home, building relationships, caring for one another, and learning about God’s love together. There is one goal that says it in the best way for me and that is that “everyone has been created by God with a unique and sacred value.” Using this goal we try to create homes where everyone, assistants and core members alike, are invited to work toward building a sense of wholeness in their own lives through sharing their gifts and struggles and finding out who they are as well as helping each other do this.
The set of twelve goals is divided into three main areas, individual growth, living together and reaching out to the world. In talking about individual growth one of the goals mentions competency and compassion. Our community wouldn’t work very well without people learning to be competent in caring for a home and each other and doing all of the many things that the government requires of them. The first three months an assistant is in L’Arche they go through all kinds of trainings and have a large orientation book to get through as well. When we have new core members come they also have a period of learning how to live together with others and what it takes to build a community. We learn that everyone has some areas of competency and some areas where they need help to grow. Learning new ways to become competent and seeking and receiving help in other areas is all a part of being in L’Arche. Many core people and assistants alike have not done much cooking or home care and can become quite nervous but usually eventually very delighted at learning new tasks. With core people and assistants alike we need to be careful that we allow them to spread their wings and try new things. I remember when Michael Schaff got a job in a movie theater I thought too quickly about what he might not be able to do, but he showed us that he was an excellent ticket taker and could give people complex answers about where they should go to see their movie.
Compassion is another important word, both compassion for ourselves and each other. None of us has all the gifts it takes to get through this life and I am trying to learn both to accept who I am, decide what I can learn and where I need help. I am sometimes actually able to enjoy letting people help me as part of building community but it is also easy to feel incompetent. In L’Arche people are given the opportunity to tell their stories and that often helps us to feel compassion for each other. We learn that we are all human, with many difficulties as well as joys along the way. The beatitudes are an important part of our lives and we learn from them that we are blessed not just by our gifts but also by our struggles. I feel that in L’Arche I have been given many opportunities to use gifts I didn’t know I had and that I had come to a place where I felt blessed and wanted to stay and build a home for myself as well as others.
One of the goals I work with mentions helping people in the areas of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual growth. We take on a lot in L’Arche but we really are concerned with helping each of us to take good care of ourselves and develop in all ways possible. This is true for assistants as well as our core residents and we want everyone to have a full and rich life. It is not enough for people to just come to work and do their jobs, which is what our culture dictates. We want this to be a very special experience.
A way we try to help people grow and enjoy their life is through having annual mapping sessions for our core members. We had one for Fritz, Emmy Lu’s son, a few days ago. At a mapping, a person’s hobbies, skills and values are discussed and it is a reminder of the great variety of things our core members like and can do. We then talk about how life has been for the person in the past year and if they are satisfied with it. We finally go on to formulate some new goals for the future. Fritz, with help from his friend Eric, decided he wanted to go to King’s Dominion and other goals included some other trips he wanted to make. In the past some members have wanted things like a different place of work or what they call a real job. We try hard to follow up and really bring about what people want for their lives. Many of our assistants would live to have a mapping session for themselves.
Another goal talks about how we encourage each other to grow by building relationships in a spirit of trust, dialogue, mutual support, self-giving, forgiveness and celebration. I try to think of all those words when trying to build relationships. Listening to each other and sharing dialogue helps to give a sense of mutual support and the word mutual is very important. We need to receive as well as give. Both are important to all of us. New assistants often come to mainly give service but find that they have also much to receive especially from our core people. Celebrations are a very important part of L’Arche. When someone has a birthday we celebrate it by talking about their gifts and for anniversaries we share our stories of the previous year.
Assuming responsibility for each other and our home is also an important goal. Being a part of a community means that we all share this responsibility. We care for our homes, cook our meals, as well as help to create an atmosphere of joy and well-being. We regularly talk about our faith at times of sharing each week as well as how we are doing as individuals. Many of our core members have been mainly receivers of care and they learn to enjoy giving care in many wonderful ways such as giving great greetings, hugs and blessings.
Another goal mentions treating each other with welcome and respect. Some of our core members are real pros at this especially Hazel whose greeting makes you feel as though you are the most important person on earth. Respecting each other is not always a simple thing to do. Living together, it is easy to find things that annoy us or to get into little groups of people that get hostile to others. So we try to work hard at including everyone and being honest and vulnerable with each other. Our core members often don’t read so we assistants are the only models they have for how God wants us to treat each other.
One of our goals suggests that we build our knowledge and understanding of the worldwide family of L’Arche and participate in solidarity efforts to support the family.
L’Arche is 50 years old this year. It has grown in 50 years from a small home in France to almost 150 homes all over this world. It has had an amazing journey and was fed by the awakening of many people that all people indeed did deserve to live with a sense of value and purpose. When we started L’Arche in Washington DC I was working at Forest Haven, a place outside of DC for over1000 residents with intellectual disabilities. They were mainly housed in large dorms and given just very basic care. I remember my first day in that job. I walked into a large building filled with rooms of about 10 residents mostly lying in beds. They could not walk or talk or care for themselves in most ways. I wondered how I would relate to them. Slowly I got to know them and developed an empathy for them. I began to work with them in a therapy room to help them use their bodies more freely. One day when I was returning them to their room I placed them in a small circle in their wheel chairs so they could see each other. The person caring for them in that room said, “No that’s not how I want them. Put them by their beds. The furniture looks better that way. That’s what they were for her, a part of the furniture and that is what they have been for much of the world.
Jean Vanier came to Georgetown university and gave a lecture there about his work and concern for these people and it sparked a group of people, including me, to come together to see if we could start a L’Arche home in DC. In 1983 our first home on Ontario St was opened. I was on the first board and in 1986 I began a vocation as the home leader. At that time I was the only assistant he could find so for a while it was just me and the guys. We weren’t perhaps too well organized but we had a good time together. We even manned the Potter’s house on Friday nights for quite a while. We now have 4 homes, two in DC and two in Arlington and in a year or two will open two more homes in DC. In the area of solidarity we find many ways to connect with many other L’Arche communities sharing our hospitality with them and visiting other communities. Ever two years we have a Regional Gathering where almost everyone from the regions comes together for a gathering. We have three regions in our country and a total of about 17 communities. There are many other groups trying to start L’Arche in this region as well as in others. Once people come to visit our homes and see the quality of life that is there they realize that that is what the want for their own children and friends. The explosion of new L’Arche communities over the past 50 years has been very impressive.
Each year we have a gathering to raise money for L’Arche communities in other parts of the world where funding is not so easily obtained. We have a talent show of our many local gifts and sell food and services to others. It has become a wonderful tradition and we hope you will join us some time at this event.
Now I would like to say a little about what I believe L’Arche has to say to 8thDay. We are different in many ways but have some similarities. We have a diversity of people in our church with a great variety of abilities and concerns. Although most of us don’t live together, we consider ourselves a community and try to learn to know and enjoy each other. We have a regular worship service to plan and carry out and work on many other activities through leadership and mission groups so we do need competency. We also need compassion for ourselves and for each other. We each have a story to tell and it is important that we understand our own story and learn each other’s stories so we can create an atmosphere of compassion for all of us.
In 8thDay we don’t try to take on the level of caring for people’s physical and emotional growth as we do in L’Arche but there are ways we can support and help each other in these areas. Certainly our spiritual and mental growth is an important part of life in 8thDay and our worship, classes, retreats and other events all contribute to this.
As we do regularly in L’Arche, we need to ask ourselves what it means to be a part of this church. Do we enjoy this experience and are we being nourished? Do we, or should we, have responsibilities as well? Kate Lasso has just written a great survey to help us answer those questions and you will all be invited to take this survey both for yourself and for the community. We want this to be a place where we can all feel welcome as well as nourishment and find a way of service.
I will close by repeating the first verse of Psalm 67. God be gracious to us and bless us. God make your face shine upon us, that your ways may be known on earth. As we shine our faces around this room and bless each other then perhaps we are helping God’s ways to be known on earth. AMEN