making a sacrament of time: l'arche ottawa during lent 2019

One of my deepest joys takes place every time I visit my community at L'Arche Ottawa: I get to know a friend a little deeper. Some of these friends are people with intellectual disabilities, others are part of the family of core members, a few are assistants within the community, and still others are community servant leaders and/or those who have remained connected with L'Arche as volunteers for decades. It is a rich cadre of colleagues all of whom are learning how to live more tender and authentic lives. In so many ways, the L'Arche community helps me become my best self - and share my gifts without reservation.

Do not think for a moment that I romanticize or idealize this community. There are problems. There are challenges. There are disagreements and hurts. L'Arche is human and all humanity is beautiful and flawed, creative and confused, holy and wounded, vibrant and exhausted all at the same time. L'Arche often reminds me of the words Phillips Brooks, Episcopal clergy person at Boston's Trinity Church, wrote in 1868 after visiting Palestine: "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight." ("O Little Town of Bethlehem") Hopes and fears, as well as joys and sorrows and serenity and struggle, are alive and well here. What makes this community sacred for me is their commitment to live into the promise of each moment - not perfectly, not consistently, but honestly and tenaciously - so that time itself becomes a sacrament. That is key: time itself becomes a sacrament.

Paradoxically, the sacramental nature of practicing this spirituality takes time to absorb and honor. Like trust, it requires patience and presence and cannot be rushed or manufactured. In unhurried moments around the dinner table - or in passing a candle around a circle and speaking what is in our hearts - we slowly reveal ourselves to one another. We laugh. We weep. We hold another in silent respect. And over time we find ourselves loving one another. Not all at once, but incrementally. This has been my experience and I am not unique: as I have come to love my friends at L'Arche, I have experienced their love for me and a willingness to love those parts of me that I rarely consider lovable. Love begets love. Jean Vanier describes this in one of his most insightful texts, Community and Growth:

Those who come close to people in need do so first of all in a generous desire to help them and bring them relief; they often feel like saviors and put themselves on a pedestal. But once in contact with them, once touching them, establishing a loving and trusting relationship with them, the mystery unveils itself. At the heart of the insecurity of people in distress there is a presence of Jesus. And so they discover the sacrament of the poor and enter the mystery of compassion. People who are poor seem to break down the barriers of power, of wealth, of ability, and of pride: they pierce the armor of the human heart builds to protect itself.

L'Arche communities have discerned that God's grace is both hidden and revealed in the small, ordinary moments of our lives. That means we must claim a new relationship to time. What is considered ordinary - events like setting the table, cooking a meal, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, sharing a birthday party, gong to a funeral, being angry and having an argument - become places where Christ can be born within and among us. You see, this is a spirituality that is incarnational, embodied encounters and experience, rather than a collection of abstractions or dogma. Sometimes our encounters are painful. Often they are unplanned and unexpected. Frequently they are joyfully and humorously humbling. And always, the revelation of the holy within our humanity invites us to trust God's love more deeply and let this love increase our capacity for compassion. 

It is slow going. The poison of our culture's addiction to various bottom lines - pristinely balanced budgets, multi-tasking, sanitized beauty, professional success, wealth, power, prestige - is insidious. It egularly threatens to seep into the slow pace of living that L'Arche communities require. How could it be otherwise, right? We are surrounded and saturated with pressure to succeed. To become big. Important. Powerful and useful. To which L'Arche says: there is another way to live. It is counter-cultural. It is slow. It is small. I think of it as the embodied spirituality of tenderness. St. Paul spoke of it as the foolishness of the Cross where we choose to die to darkness and selfishness so that we might be renewed in compassion.

The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are become whole, it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is (there authentic, life-giving wisdom?) Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? Look, since... the world did not know (and trust) God through knowledge, God decided, through the foolishness of the Cross, to bring true health those who believe. (Some) demand signs and (others) desire intellectual power, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to some and foolishness to others, but to those who are the called, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. And God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Just look at yourselves, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are...

In traditional theological terms, this is the Paschal Mystery. Fr. Richard Rohr has recently been calling it the rhythm of creation wherein death brings about new and resurrected life. The 12 Step movement speaks of it as a serenity born of knowing how to accept what cannot be changed in our lives and changing what is possible. Jean Vanier put it like this:

Little did I know that I was on the road to an amazing discovery, a gold mine of truth, where the weak and the strong, the rich and the poor would be brought together in community to find peace, where those who were rejected could heal and transform those who rejected them.

Unplugging from the late, great American Dream machine is essential. Turning off the insistent advertising and noise of the consumer culture is crucial, too. And making peace with silence and tension helps. Vanier noted: "There is nothing more prejudicial to community life than to mask tensions and pretend they do not exist or to hide them behind a polite façade and flee from reality and dialogue. A tension or difficulty can signal a new grace. But it has to be looked at wisely and humanly. It must be talked about with a third person or an external authority." This takes practice. And self-awareness. Too easily we project our fears and angers onto others when we need to clean up our own mess. How did Jesus put it in Luke 6: 42? "How can you say to your neighbor, ‘Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye." Writing about his own transformation at L'Arche Daybreak, Fr. Henri Nouwen said:

Why all (of my inner) resistance? Why the powerful attraction to the

darkness? Jesus says, “Everybody who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, to prevent his actions from being shown up; but whoever does the truth comes out into the light, so that what he is doing may plainly appear as done in God” (John 3:20–21). That is an answer to my own question. I do often prefer my darkness to God’s light. I prefer to hang on to my sinful ways because they give me some satisfaction, some sense of self, some feeling of importance. I know quite well that moving into God’s light requires me to let go of all these limited pleasures and no longer to see my life as made by me, but as given by God. Living in the light means acknowledging joyfully the truth that all that is good, beautiful, and worthy of praise belongs to God. It is only a truly God-centered life that will pull me out of my depressions and give me hope. It is a clear path, but a very hard path as well.

Over the past few years of being connected in loving friendship with a few dear souls at L'Arche Ottawa, I have been able to name some of my own inner darknesses. I have experienced being loved beyond those wounds, too and given the chance to share my love as well. I know it would be 100 times more challenging if I could be in community more than a few days each month. But, as the Serenity Prayer has taught me, I must accept what cannot be changed. And certainly for the time being, my rhythm of life is just as it should be. When I am at L'Arche, it often seems as if St. Paul were speaking directly to me:

Love never ends... prophecies, they will come to an end; speaking in tongues, they will cease; knowledge (and what you think of as wisdom), it will come to an end, too. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

As I move reluctantly and with hesitation towards Holy Week and Easter, having sensed that I wasted a lot of time during Lent rather than resting in silence, my time at L'Arche gave me a new perspective. This year's Lent was not very prayerful. But it was filled with love - and what's better than love? Love never ends. Love is the alpha and the omega. Love is what Lent is all about. Driving home after three days that became clear - and I am so grateful. Next week we will head to Brooklyn to celebrate the Trisagion with our family. And that is the right way to be, too.