why i keep going to L'Arche Ottawa...

Last night, as I pulled back into town after a few days in community with L'Arche Ottawa, I stopped to purchase some red wine. In general I like to shop with local merchants rather than in the national chains because most small vendors have built their businesses through one-on-one relationships cultivated over decades. And while there is a place for the giants - we have become well acquainted with some of the clerks at our regional Wal-Mart, for example, after entering the era of reduced income in retirement - I am committed to shopping locally whenever possible.

The person on duty last night is genuinely friendly. And kind, too. Over the years I have enjoyed chatting with her whenever I can - and last night the store was empty so we had time to speak about our work, our families, and our faith traditions. Once again I was awakened to how the presence of the holy is always hovering just beyond the obvious in the most ordinary circumstances. Like St. Paul put it: "Now I see as through a glass darkly, later I shall see face to face." My hunch is that every time I listen to another - or my own heart - carefully, my awareness of the sacred comes into focus. That has been a slowly ripening truth in my life that has found increased clarity through my small participation with L'Arche and the insights of Jean Vanier. 

In an extended reflection written by Fr. Christian Salenson, L'Arche: a unique and multiple spirituality, he notes that L'Arche is "primarily an experience!" It is also a unique type of embodied encounter: simultaneously vulnerable, profound, life-giving and unforeseen. It is "eruption that you do not control." Fr. Salenson goes on to say that these eruptions and encounters are never about charity, but rather about mutuality, parity, and the in-breaking of the kingdom of God where "the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the blind see, the dead are risen up, and the good news is announced to the poor."

The quality of the encounter can be measured not in terms of what I hope to bring to the other, but my openness to receive... it does not depend on what I have brought... but what I have received... The washing of the feet (by Jesus shortly before his journey to the Cross) is the paradigm of this. Only those who allow their feet to be washed, and in so doing enter into this dependence and vulnerability, can move forward on the pat of self-giving. Even Jesus... learned that lesson from Mary of Bethany who introduced him to the total gift of his life! She gave him the gesture of giving that Jesus used with his apostles.

For a moment in time last night, chatting over the counter at my local package store, the veil was lifted and a customer and a merchant honored the holy in one another with tenderness. That doesn't always happen to me while buying red wine. Sometimes I am too busy to really notice the other. Or they are harried after a trying day. Or other customers are crowding the cash register. Or I am simply not embodied or grounded. Last night, however, after six hours of riding in the car and reflecting upon my time at L'Arche, I was open to what I often fail to see.

Like my first night in community at supper: it was a birthday dinner for one of the L'Arche assistants as well as a long standing volunteer. It was light hearted and simple. When the meal was winding down, after gifts and cake and ice cream, I had been asked to lead a few songs with my guitar. That is one of the ways I connect at L'Arche. So I started to play "La Bamba" and it was like a spark ignited a room full of candles. I played a few other tunes, too including "Good Lovin'" by the Rascals, "I've Just Seen a Face" by the Beatles and "Country Roads" by John Denver. My friend John, seated beside me, had kindly taken out his phone and pulled up lyric sheets so that we wouldn't be impaired by my forgetfulness. And for about 45 minutes we sang and laughed. And then some of the core members started to dance. It wasn't their first time dancing, of course, but it hadn't happened in a long, long time. And for those few moments there was clarity mixed with groove in joyful abandon. It was kingdom time, or, as some prefer, kindom time. Unplanned. Unexpected. Thoroughly moving and life-giving.

L'Arche is not God's kingdom. It is human. Sometimes broken and often very demanding. And it is a way of living that is counter-cultural. People are not treated as products or a means to an end. Around the dinner table at the end of each day there is laughter. And time to be real. Conversation and celebrations take place, too. There are frustrations and anger, to be sure; times of failure and sin, too. Still, I find that the way Fr. Saleson puts continues to ring true:

L'Arche is primarily an experience... and this notion is very original. It would be more logical that an institution that takes care of people with learning disabilities should define itself primarily as an institution, equipped with an educational project and the necessary human resources that must be managed with authority, etc... (So) it takes courage and determination today to stick with that position. The current social context is more one of the empire of regulation, of organisation, of management as we like to say, but the risk - and it is more and more widespread - is to kill from within the whole human dimension of a project. In many places, in some shape or form, we often see seeds of conflict taking root between the values of human experience and those of the enterprise: profitability, security, organisation, regulations... and personal experience is disregarded...

L'Arche - at its core and at its best - simply asks "each person to come as they are. The person is foremost..." I keep thinking of the old song by Nirvana.

I need to be a part of this community. My soul needs this. I know I have a few gifts to share, but of equal or maybe even greater importance, I know my own emptiness, too. Someone asked me at Tuesday evening's dinner why I kept coming back to L'Arche Ottawa from Massachusetts? "Certainly there are places closer to you, yes?" (Sometimes the border crossing guards ask me the same thing!) All I could reply was, "I have visited other communities. And there are some that would be more convenient. But my heart has been touched and opened here... so like St. Paul in his travels, it appears that I need to go to another land in pursuit of the way of Jesus. I don't fully know why. I just trust that it is true." Now we see as through a glass darkly, indeed. The founder of L'Arche, the late Jean Vanier, put it like this in the daily reflection from L'Arche Canada:

I know a man who lives in Paris. His wife has Alzheimer's. He was an important businessman -- his life was filled with busyness. But he said that when his wife fell sick, "I just could not put her in an institution, so I keep her. I feed her. I bathe her." I went to Paris to visit them and this businessman who had been very busy all his life said, "I have changed. I have become more human." I got a letter from him recently. He said that in the middle of the night his wife woke him up. She came out of the fog for a moment, and she said, "Darling, I just want to thank you for all you're doing for me." Then she fell back into the fog. He said, "I wept and I wept."

Me, too.