Something about l'Arche

Now I want to talk about l'Arche - or at least something of my own personal experience of it . If you don't know about l'Arche here are some links:http://www.larche.org/home.en;  http://www.larche.ca/,  http://www.larchevancouver.org/.


In 1973 I went to live at the first l'Arche community in Canada- Daybreak in Richmond Hill just north of Toronto. There I met some truly wonderful and interesting men and women many of whom were in some sense, people who had been cast aside by our society. After a year at Daybreak - living and working together with my new friends pretty much 24/7 - I went with Peggy to open a new community in Burnaby B. C. We had been offered a very big but most welcome house, by the United Church of Canada. It had at one time been a home for unwed mothers but was no longer needed (that I guess is another issue) and was offered to us for $1 a year, furnished and with food still in the larder!


Starting almost as soon as we arrived in 1974 we went out to what was then one of the largest institutions for people with intellectual disabilities. There were many, many women and men who had been there for long years, housed in crowded facilities with almost nothing to do but sit and rock back and forth. This was common in those days in part because these were people who were pretty much at the bottom of the list of caring. In the end, we met a number of people who would, I think, have liked to come to our new community but we were only able to take two at that time: Ken and his friend Rick.

Both of these men had what is usually called Down Syndrome. The staff had told us that Ken would likely not live for more than a year because of a heart condition but we decided that whatever his future, we would ask him to come if he wished. He was interesting, had lots to say and would be a good foundation member. (He is still alive in 2011!). Rick was a man of few words - none really. In all the years I have known him, he has never said a word but in spite of that, there is almost never any doubt about what he is saying with all the other ways he has of communicating. So these two men plus  Bill who had been living with his brother, Geraldine who had been living at home and Iris who had been living in a group home were the founding members. Many more followed but these were the ones upon whom the community was built.

In my earlier post I spoke about the kind of life experience living in community is on forming each person. That was just as true of l'Arche as of a Carmelite community. We were with each other living as a family - the core members like Ken and Rick and some assistants who came to join and to share the life. We lived through a great many growth pains, both personal and communal. We grew together, we struggled together, we fought together. But we also celebrated together, prayed together and played together. It was, I believe, a grace-filled life together, a place of welcome and a small light in an often dark world.

When I left to go to the monastery I left with great sadness. Most of my friends could not understand why I went or what I was going to. And yet, over the 30 years I was away I often heard from Ken especially, because it was almost as if he had a vocation to keep in touch with all those who had come and gone over the years. I would receive a letter (thank God for a post office which was prepared to do a bit of deciphering) which might say no more than: 'Dear Judie, I am fine how are you? I miss you! Come back to Canada. Love from your friend Ken'. He would sometimes give me a bit of news about others whom he knew I would want to hear about.


When I returned and was able to visit them all in 2009 I was so touched by the welcome I received. It filled my heart with gratitude. But added to that was what I saw as a real growth in maturity and responsibility of the core members - the men and women who had come from institutions and homes and, not to forget as well, loving homes. Over the years many assistants had come and gone and it was the core members who were the steady heart of the community. And in that particular community, it was Ken who had become the holder of the community's memory of the past. It was Ken who had kept all the people who had come and gone in his thoughts and who was  the wise and stable man at the heart of it all. 

This is not to deny at all the contribution of all the other men and women who form the heart of the community. There are some of the most interesting people I have ever met there; unique and wonderful. Nor is it to deny that we are talking about flesh and blood human beings, so we are also speaking of suffering, anger, woundedness of spirit - just as you would find anywhere. But here were people whom we had discarded as useless who have turned out to be a richness of humanity it is impossible to value.

About life in the monastic community

I said in my last post that I wanted to share about my friends in l'Arche. But then, I felt that before I do that I want to say a bit about my sisters in the monastic life. They were my companions over 30 years; their friendship, the joys and difficulties we shared, the sorrows we experienced, the insights that formed us have helped me to be, for better or for worse, the person I now am.

One of the things visitors, friends, strangers ask about the monastic life is, what do you actually do? When they are told that the vocation is primarily, to pray for our world, they go on to ask, couldn't you do something more useful like nursing or teaching or working with the poor? And the answer is, no. 

There are two things at work here: the first is the idea of 'call' and the second is the belief that prayer is, in and of itself, useful. Each sister feels 'called' to this specific form of life, feeling that here in this monastery, in this community is where she belongs. Obviously, if you cannot see any value in prayer and in communal living then you will not see any value in this kind of life.

Life in an 'enclosed' environment is very demanding when you are living together 24/7 . You are living with between 10 and 20 other women whom you might not have chosen to live with, whose backgrounds are widely different and whose temperaments are as varied as any other walk of life. The sisters I have lived with have come with many life experiences. Most have carried responsible jobs, one or two have been married, a number have advanced education. There are artists, poets, musicians. There are women from all classes of society and a variety of cultures. 

I believe that what makes all this work is first of all, a common sense of goal - the community is there to do, in secular words, a job. Secondly and more important perhaps, is the sense that part of that work is to try to be the presence of love in our world. Because that is what God is: love. So in these small, fragile communities of women love is really worked at. However difficult for instance, a clash of temperaments may be, each one works to resolve difficulties, to ask or give forgiveness - though it may take time. Each one tries to be a sister to all the others, not just some. Each one tries to appreciate the gifts of the others even when one might want to be consumed with jealousy. 

Each community is meant to be self-supporting so there is remunerative work to be done in the times between communal and individual prayer. There is a time of socializing in the evening for an hour (I am talking here about a specific form of contemplative life, that of the Discalced Carmelites). There are times of celebration and most of all this is embedded in a constant, deep and nourishing silence. It is a full life and for those who are called, a fulfilling one.

One of the other questions people ask is: aren't you running away from life by hiding in a monastery? I hope you may see from the above sketch of community living that it would be hard to run away from such constant presence of other human beings. It can seem a bit like pebbles in a tumbler, rubbing against each other, eventually, hopefully, polishing each other to their fullest beauty.  It is a wonderful and difficult school of learning to love. And because love is the most important 'quality' of our God it is the most important way each has to be a follower of Jesus.

I wanted to share this because I want to honour the sisters I have left behind. They are living out for us all, a demanding and unappreciated life of prayer. I think we will all discover someday how those small lights shining in our world, have made our lives and our world a great deal better .

About human dignity in the midst of horror

I wanted to write a bit more about my experiences of India as I recall them after all these years. It was, as I said before, a transforming time for me - it changed my whole life in just about every way possible.

I spoke in my blog- maybe the time before the last one - of our arrival in Calcutta and the profound collision it was against my western, well-to-do life. We visited Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying, her home for abandoned children, her home for anyone who had no one and nothing. I could not have imagined life at this level. It was not ever anything I would have met in the normal course of my life in Canada. And yet here were human beings who perhaps for the first time in their lives were being loved and cared for.

But I wanted to share just one experience that has stayed with me because it seemed to me to hold  all the variety of what we saw in the poorest of the poor. We had gone to Madras on the train...in itself a most un-North American journey: food of distinctly uncertain origin to be bought through the window from people walking up and down the platform; toilets that consisted of a hole in the floor (no seat, nothing), blankets for rent that may or may not have been clean by our standards.  But this is a diversion.

When we got to Madras we met with some of Mother Teresa's sisters and they had asked us if we would care to go with them on their small van to a group of lepers for whom they changed bandages and did what they could. We of course said yes, though with trepidation.

We drove to what appeared to me to be a railroad siding. There were no trees only dust and flat and heat. The people who lived in this little community had erected small metal roofed shacks - ovens, I would think, in the heat. I presume that running water and electricity were not any part of this. It was clear that the arrival of the sisters and their van was an important event for them - possibly the only medical attention they were getting.


As we arrived and the people saw that there were 3 visitors they were so very welcoming. Out came something for us to sit on - old kitchen chairs, now backless, which they put in the only shady place there was - under the overhang of the roof of the building at which the van had stopped. I was so moved by this. Why should they pay any attention to us? why should they share with us from their very meagre household furniture? Why should they welcome us at all for their lives were clearly, miserable in the extreme. 


It was this small attention to the strangers in their midst that touched me profoundly. Here were people, rejected totally by their society, in dreadful physical condition - missing noses, missing ears, missing limbs which had just been eaten away not surgically removed and more and more and more. 

For the first time in my life, I began to ask myself how we can allow people to live like this. But it was also the first time in my life that I realised that, for the most part, however dreadful life is, there is an amazing sense in each person of their dignity as human beings; as people who are worthy - whether anyone else thought so or not. I saw it later when I went to l'Arche with people who had been terribly rejected but in whom there was a dignity that touched me to the very core of my being. 


In further blogs I would like to introduce you to some of my l'Arche friends and to try to explore this incredible sense of human dignity that for me, points to the God who loves.

The beauty of age

The other morning I walked down to the building where my brother and sister-in-law live. It was to my mind, just about the most perfect day I could imagine. The sky was brilliantly clear, the air was crisp and not too cold, the colors were radiant: yellows, oranges, reds in trees and flowers even and green grass. Wonderful. 

What went through my mind as I walked was a sense that this almost perfect beauty was like a gift to hold on to before the grey and blear of winter set in. It is a bit like the hope and lift of the heart you feel when you see the first signs of Spring's very different beauty.

Then, I suppose because it is what some people my age think about, I found myself contrasting this prelude of glorious if slightly fading beauty before the grey of winter, with middle and old age. Middle age is, or can be, in so many ways a beautiful time. One is, if well, still fit enough to do what one wants physically and mentally. There is, hopefully, a certain wisdom that makes life a bit more peaceful and sometimes, as a gift, there can be quite, quite brilliant understanding and appreciation of the beauty of life. All this of course, is subject to the qualifications of life experience - a bit, possibly, like the difference between a tree that is quite beautiful but whose colours are modified by blotches of some sort and a tree that has remained relatively unscathed.

Then, slowly we move into old age - the wintery season of our lives as Karl Rahner would put it - when we are losing our leaves and feeling less full of the energy that propelled us earlier. We become - many of us - increasingly less agile and more dependent and sometimes distressed by all this. And yet, and yet... isn't there a magnificent, stark beauty in the winter trees? You can see their shapes and the strength of their trunks and guess the depths of their roots. So perhaps, however badly we may feel, we could also see beauty in age - it is after all, its own part of the journey. We tend sometimes it seems to me, to see the frailty, possibly the crankiness, the wrinkles. But why can't these be beautiful? They are after all, the fruit of a life lived and every single one of us, if we do not die young, will arrive there in the end. Maybe we lose a lot of the enjoyment of life when we too narrowly define beauty.

More about transforming experiences

What do you think you would do if someone offered to expose you to the worst kind of poverty and suffering you could ever imagine? Add to that exposure the worst, most indigestible food, death, flies, mosquitos and racism? How would you feel?

In 1972 with an offer of just those things my friend Sue asked if I would like to go to India with her to visit the communities of Mother Teresa and Jean Vanier in order for her to get material for a book she was commissioned to write. Naturally, I said, ‘Not on your life’! However, less than 24 hours later, knowing however faintly, that this was one of those life-changing decisions and knowing that, however frightening it would be, it was something that I must do, I phoned her and said ‘yes’, I would go.

Years later Sue said that she had no idea what possessed her to ask me because we hardly knew each other. The moment she had raised the question, she said to herself, ‘what on earth have I done?’. But of course, it was too late for her to take the question back and in fact, too late for me to have said ‘no’. So we, and a young woman who was to take the photos were irrevocably committed to this life-changing adventure.

In March of 1972 (I think it was) we boarded a plane at Toronto airport. Outside, there was snow and indeed, the treacherous remains of an ice-storm. Many hours later - I have forgotten how many - after stops at Rome, Cairo (my first experience of being frisked) we landed in Mumbai (it was still Bombay at that time). Here, we changed planes and began a flight across India to Calcutta.

About half-way into our flight there was a stop. I cannot now remember the name of the place but I imagine we were meant to be there. This was long before the kind of security we know so well at airports but none the less, it was my first experience of the new life into which I was entering for the next few weeks. The plane landed on a tarmac but not at a terminal. We were allowed to get out and stand on the tarmac if we wished - which we did. I pulled out my camera and began to take a photo of this new kind of hot and dry country. Almost immediately, there was a very frightening and very large, gun being pointed at me and words spoken which I of course, did not understand. Finally someone suggested I put away my camera - that was the offending activity. Needless to say, I very quickly did as asked and all was well. I have no idea what it was that I should not be trying to photograph but it was the beginning of some very new lessons in the art of survival.

Finally, more or less on time, we arrived at Calcutta airport. Here again, we had to cross the tarmac (this was also before the time of those lovely gizmos that get you right into the terminal). The heat - especially in contrast to what we had left behind us in Toronto was intense though not unbearable. Once we had found our luggage and enquired about transport to our hotel we began the next stage of this amazing journey.

The bus that took us from the airport was, like much of the transport in India at that time, a bit old and a bit ricketty but it worked. Here, as we drove somewhat erratically through the streets of Calcutta we were assailed by a world I could not have imagined. We drove through streets past families who clearly were living on the pavement, past buildings whose poverty I could never have imagined, we inhaled a smell which I found throughout the areas we visited which I now identify as cooking fires (from these same street-dwelling families). There were people everywhere, walking, riding bikes, driving incredibly old cars. There was noise such as I had never experienced before: cries, talking, selling wares, children shouting and animals - mostly mooing. The animals were of course,  cows. These bovines are sacred, cannot be interfered with so they might just stand in the middle of the road until they chose to move. Cars whipped around them, often enough onto the other side of the road into oncoming traffic until they could move more or less back into their lane. The driving was, altogether, breathtakingly dangerous and yet, I gather, not particularly fatal.

Finally, the buildings we passed became a little less poor though many had a rather neglected look. Many were relics of the time of the Raj and simply had not been kept up. Then, as we got close to our hotel we found ourselves on broad boulevards with all the modern shops you might expect to see in any major city. The bus eventually drew up to the Grand Hotel - a hotel which in fact, lived up to its name. It was elegant, old India, even air-conditioned and much appreciated by us. For by now in an amazingly short time, we had been assailed with sights and smells and noises and heat as if we had landed on another planet.

Why you might ask were we staying in the Grand Hotel when we had come to experience the poverty, death, disease and general dark side of India? It had been Mother Teresa’s suggestion because she, rightly, understood that we would not be able to cope if we lived with her.

The time we had in that amazing city was full to the brim with the contrasts of our world: deep unimaginable poverty and suffering and great wealth such as we experienced in our hotel. It was a shock to the system of course but all the better for that because that sadly, is the world we live in isn’t it? Like the story of Lazarus and the rich man in the bible as Lazarus lived against the wall of the rich man’s property and was never even noticed. There were Lazarus’s everywhere we went.

I will not write in detail - I will save that for another time but I want to try to explain the transforming effect of this journey. For the first time in my life I touched a literally awesome combination of desperate suffering and joy. Joy? How could that be? I do not know exactly but I do know that in the midst of the suffering: hunger, disease, lonely death on the streets, abandonment of children - in the midst of that we met amazing human generosity and and care. We met people sharing out of their meagre possessions in order to help another who had less. We met hospitality and kindness. We also from time to time met people who did not like us because we were white. The first time I had ever experienced the kind of prejudice which black people and Indians had faced constantly in our world. What an experience that was and it opened my eyes to yet another human reality that was never any real part of my life experience.

I do not want this to make light of the suffering which is real and horrible but I knew that one of the most transforming parts of this journey was that I learned first hand some of the wonderful goodness of human beings in the face of terrible adversity. This was the beginning of a transformation in myself and in the direction I would take with the remainder of my life. I learned something of what the poor have to give to the rich and about the real richness of life. Time and again we met people whose misery should have crushed them and it did not. It deepened my faith and my hope and made me want to spend the rest of my life trying to find that core of joy.

More about longing

I don't normally want to copy stuff from a book here but I was reading something this morning that spoke about longing and being in a way that made me want to share it here. The long quote that will follow comes from a book called The Quest for the Living God by Elizabeth Johnson. In it she is discussing the work of a wonderful German theologian of the 20th century called Karl Rahner. I hope it won't be too 'dense' to follow. It really is, or so it seems to me, worth pondering. It is about our quest to find meaning, to find answers, never to give up our search for what our life is about, where we are heading and what is driving us. It is at its simplest, it seems to me, about the meaning and power of human curiosity which is part of the very fiber of our human nature.

Here is the excerpt:

Following Rahner's train of thought we started with the [person] who asks a question...In every question we ask, we transcend the immediate point and reach dynamically for something more. Even in the most mundane inquiry we go beyond the matter at hand toward the next thing and the next and ultimately toward...what is infinite...This same pattern can be traced again if we start not with the human mind and its desire to know but with the human will and its experience of freedom. Freedom is not something one has, like a motor in a car. Rather it is being persons present to ourselves ...able to some degree to transcend forces and objects that might predetermine who we are. Freedom [includes] what one is in the worlds of family, community, business, politics, work of all kinds and who one ultimately is in acceptance or refusal of the infinite and mysterious horizon of one's very existence. Here too we experience a never-ending dynamism of desire to seek and receive that propels the spirit forward. Every act by which a person loves another , for example, deepens the ability to give and receive yet more love in a widening circle of relationship which defines who we are. In every aspect, human freedom, like reason ...keeps on transcending beyond everything it grasps.

Once one grasps this pattern of human self-transcendence one sees that this single basic experience is present in a thousand forms. Not only do we curiously question and freely love, but we desire happiness, we know loneliness, we doubt, resist injustice, we plan projects to benefit others, we act responsibly, we remain faithful to conscience under pressure, we are amazed at beauty, we feel guilt, we rejoice, we grieve death, we hope in the future. Undergirding all these personal moments is an immense and driving longing. At root we experience that we are oriented to something more.      Let us not for the moment, say what this 'more' is. It is something like a horizon that opens up the landscape and beckons us onward, encircling our lives though we can never reach it.