PARADOXICAL

(Excerpts from Celebrating the Gift of Community by Dorothy Garrity Ranaghan, Word Among Us, Sept. 2004)

Jean Vanier is the French-Canadian founder of L’Arche (French for “the ark”), an international association of 130 communities in 30 countries that serves individuals with developmental disabilities. Established in 1964, L’Arche is strikingly different from similar groups because the ‘disabled’ are not considered clients but core members. Hinged on the “folly of the gospel”, the beatitudes, L’Arche is all about “living with”, and not just “doing for.” Their “caregivers” are called assistants, and they work and live with the core members. Some assistants have made a commitment to be permanent members of he community, with some opting for celibacy.

L’Arche Canada Charter


Strength in Weakness

Vanier and L’Arche believe that strength does not come through independence but in community, and that the strength of each L’Arche community is to be found in its weakest, most vulnerable member. In the last book written before his death, Fr. Henri Nouwen describes and delights in this central truth. Nouwen was a renowned, revered theologian and author of many books on Catholic spirituality. After an exhausting year teaching at Harvard, he moved to Daybreak, the L’Arche community in Toronto, to test what he had come to feel was a call to find the “downward mobility of living with the poor, and not the ‘upward mobility’ of the academic world.”

He was assigned to do the daily personal care of the most profoundly disabled member of the house. Adam was mentally challenged and used a wheelchair, someone who might previously have been thought of as “useless”. But it was Nouwen who felt useless. Intellectual discourse, lectures, and teaching had been his life. All were useless here. What was needed was skill at very physical tasks in caring for another grown man, in bathing, feeding, and intimate personal needs. He felt helpless. In the language of L’Arche, he discovered “that we are all handicapped.”

In his rhapsodic, love-filled book written on the death of Adam – Adam, God’s Beloved (Orbis) – Nouwen reveals that in learning to love and serve Adam, he came to a new reliance on God and understanding of his own role in loving and ministering in, with, and as Christ.

When you first encounter L’Arche’s concept of the centrality of the weakest members, it can be jarring. In my own experience, I thought I knew all about community life. I have lived in a different kind of community for over thirty years. It is an ecumenical, charismatic, covenant community. However, when I went to visit the L’Arche community in Rome, where my daughter, Susan, was an assistant for three years, I was jolted when she said, “Luca has such a charism for community.” I simply could not fathom what she was talking about. Luca didn’t look like any member of any community I had ever known. Luca is a young core member of L’Arche who is blind, unable to walk, and mentally disabled.

Seeing my confusion, Susan simply said, “After dinner, just watch.” Dinner itself was a fun, if slightly rowdy, affair during which I noticed that Luca must have had a very good sense of smell. Though bind, he was quite deft at knowing where the meat platter was and could spear some for himself. After dinner, he was placed in the center of the room. During recreation time Susan nudged me and said, “Watch, he becomes a love magnet.” That was what she meant by a charism for community, and it was quite evident. Both assistants and core members took turns showering him with affection, including him in conversations and songs, even lifting him out of his chair and placing him next to them on the couch to join in whatever activity was going on at that moment.

Luca’s laughter and delight was contagious. He was loved. He was at home…

***

More Jean Vanier quotes:

"Weakness and vulnerability in a person, far from being an obstacle to union with God, can foster it. It is often through weakness, recognized and accepted, that the liberating love of God is revealed.”

“I think as a young man I had overdeveloped my intellectual and rational capacities or my powers to control and to organize, but I had underdeveloped my heart. So I have been led little by little to understand this relationship of love, of communion.”

posted by Resty Odon  # 10:35 PM