looking back to how my heart was opened to L'Arche...

This was a day for yard work in anticipation of autumn. Being outside during this season often evokes reflection - and today was no exception. I pondered the spirituality programming we crafted earlier this week at L'Arche Ottawa. The words Jean Vanier shared on the occasion of his 90th birthday - challenge the "tyranny of the normal" - kept returning while I cut the grass. Vanier insists that confronting our fears and sharing our stories are earthy spiritual disciplines. He also urges us to listen carefully to the wisdom of the most vulnerable among us and trust God in all things, too. This is one of the blessings I experience being at L'Arche: my heart is regularly opened to both the joy and sorrow of love.

Let me note that I know that my encounters are privileged, however, because I am a volunteer. My world is not saturated in the gritty particularities of laundry, bathing, dressing, cooking, cleaning and being the constant companion of a core member. I come and go. I move into conversation and then return to solitude. And while I strive to share my gifts fully whenever I am engaged, I also know that at this moment in my life when I am much closer to the end than the beginning, the rhythm of my limitation is right. I mostly deal in music, words, poetry, and prayer these days. They are what I have to share. Once upon a time though, I spent 18 months working as an aide to 35 boys in a private residential home for intellectually disabled youth. 

It was forty-six years ago - after successfully achieving Conscientious Objector status from my draft board during the end of the Vietnam War. As fate would have it, I was never called into alternative service. So, I left New England, wandered to the Midwest, and eventually got myself hired as a custodial caretaker in a residential institution. One of three adults per shift, we were charged with waking, washing, dressing, shepherding, entertaining, medicating, and helping each student eat breakfast, lunch or dinner before their respective classes after a grand total of two hours of "training." Each day included nap time and recess; every night included additional baths followed by story time and lights out. A small night crew presided over the roughly 100+ youth between 10 pm and 6 am. 

It goes without saying that this was trial by fire. I knew about bathing babies and changing diapers because I am the oldest son of six children. But I had no experience in washing an almost adult male covered in feces who was afraid of water. Sometimes two or three times a day. There were a ton of other things that bewildered me, too. Like the fact that it took a few exhausting weeks to gain control of my gag reflex. And another few to find efficient and tender ways to bathe a stranger's body with dignity. But by the time my evaluation came up, I had learned the basics and loved being a part of the team. This is where I learned to wash and mop dormitory floors. Clean and disinfect 10 toilets as well as a rack of showers, too. It is where I learned to sing lullabies to boys who regularly cried themselves to sleep. Or smeared excrement on the wall after a bad day. Or wet themselves in excitement. It is where I began to learn how to listen to what was being said in the silence of another's eyes. It is also where I learned something about crying myself to sleep sometimes over my inability to make things better.

After about a year, a team was selected to work with "special education" instructors from the University of Illinois. This was our first serious training besides the solidarity of comrade in arms story-telling at the close of each shift. I learned so much. In time our team began to realize that the staff-to-student ratio at our "school" was dangerously low. It also became clear in those dark days right after Willowbrook in the US, that the regular use of restraints and other acts of behavior modification were punitive rather than therapeutic. In consultation with our educational advisors, my colleagues and I lobbied the administration for change. The leadership was sympathetic but driven by an economic bottom line and conditions did not improve. More organizing among the staff took place in cooperation with the University advisors. In fact, most of the planning and strategy meetings for trying to change this institution took place in my St. Louis apartment.

As our small cadre of advocates grew more certain that radical changes needed to take place, a colleague told me he was being evicted from his home and needed a place to crash. I was young, single with an extra bedroom so he moved in with me. I was glad for the company. This co-worker was not actively involved in our organizing for change, but he seemed sympathetic. To make a painful story short, one day we agitators-for-change planned a work action to force into the open a conversation about the dangerously low staff-to-student ratio. Unbeknownst to me, however, it turned out my new roommate was a mole - a spy for the institution - and when we custodial aides arrived that morning, we were escorted out by the police. We were summarily fired and paid on the spot. To make matters worse, when I finally got home that sad night, my roommate was gone and he apparently took all of our organizing notes and plans with him.

Today, at age 66, I often confess that I have to learn things the hard way - and that was my first bitter lesson in betrayal and the tyranny of the normal! Ratted-out and fired on the same day. Without any chance to say good-bye to the boys I had come to love. St. Paul liked to say, "Now we see as through a glass darkly, later we shall see face to face." Back in the day, I was pretty green. I had to learn about human nature. About my own naiveté. About what is possible at any given one moment in time. And about how large institutions are ill-equipped in caring for people with intellectual disabilities - even when their hearts are in the right places. 

My heartbreak sent me back to college. Then into organizing with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers. Then back to college for a BA in political science before seminary, ordination, 40 years of urban ministry all over the USA, as well as travel to Russia, Central America, Eastern Europe and the UK, marriage, children, divorce, failure and new love. In ministry, wise teachers led me into training re: addiction, 12 step recovery, hospice and spiritual direction. When my secretary in Cleveland was dying of cancer and had no family and no insurance, we were able to organize a lay team to stay with her around the clock in her apartment so she would not die alone. I learned how to clean-out a reverse colostomy wound, too when a member found himself alone, abandoned

and without family after surgery. Most of all, I learned that living with a tender and open heart is simultaneously agonizing and exhilarating - and fills me with gratitude.

And now I am sitting in my study watching a young deer eat raspberry leaves in the wetlands of our backyard. I am no longer physically able to do the work I once did 46 years ago. My life has become more reflective. Like the scripture teaches, "To everything there is a season." But this is a wonderful season to be alive. I have the opportunity to make creative new music. I have been given the privilege of meeting the young assistants at L'Arche who share their energy and love with their core member friends. I have grown to cherish many of the core members, house leaders and leadership team at L'Arche Ottawa and hold them close to my heart. And I rediscovered the wisdom of Jean Vanier. His witness shows me the way of Christ beyond the tyranny of the normal. And this is blessing upon blessing.