Kindred Spirits

Jim Wallis: We're very happy to have you with us, Jean. We feel a kindred spirit with you and l'Arche, and you're often in our thoughts and prayers. Could you tell us what you feel is at the heart of l'Arche and what are some of the struggles your community faces?

Jean Vanier: It's good to be here. I have followed you from far away through your magazine. It demands a lot of energy to be creative in the struggle for bringing things together. Keep going. We need you.

We have now 70 l'Arche communities. In all of our communities, the people with handicaps are really at the heart. They are a real gift. They evangelize us. They change us. They call us forth. They call us to humanity They teach us how to celebrate. But there are always struggles. One is the struggle to live our community life. I don't think we can live without Jesus. I don't think we can see the value of the wounded person unless we are in the dynamics of the gospels, the Beatitudes—blessed are the poor.

So how do we find the right spiritual support? That is a big institution for a lot of our communities. Where do we find the spiritual nourishment?

We could get very caught up in the busyness of doing things, in the crises in the homes, in working with psychiatrists and psychologists. We could get caught up in all this and forget the real reason why we're there—which is to somehow create community with the person who is handicapped, to create a body. That's what community is—a body in which the handicapped person is the most important. So there's the question of spiritual nurturing, and the answer is not entirely clear.

Another big area of concern is handicapped people who are aging. That's no small reality. In my own community, the mean age is now 37. In 10 years it will be 47. And in 20 years it will be 57. You begin as a dynamic community with everybody working in pottery and that sort of thing. But what happens when you move into a situation where you almost become a nursing home? How are we going to make these transitions?

There is also the question of nurturing. How do we get the churches interested and to see what we're doing as valuable? We have meetings where we get together with all the priests, the pastors, and the ministers in a particular region. But it's still not a high priority for them to really see the wounded person as a value. To really believe in the words of Christ, "Whoever welcomes one of these little ones in my name welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me welcomes the One who sent me."

I think our culture remains deeply ingrained with an idea that some people are cultivated at the top, and the others at the bottom are more or less forgotten. Those at the bottom take a lot of time.

They take a lot of money. Is it really worthwhile putting a lot of money and energy into them? So we're struggling with that, trying to bring interest into the churches. And it's coming a bit.

We find the same difficulty in a country like Honduras. The tensions are immense between those who are pro-Nicaragua and those who are pro-America. We're in a slum area near Tegucigalpa. In one of the homes, we live with three people who are handicapped—Regina and Patricia and Carmen—and in another home are six or seven people with handicaps. We have a little school where maybe eight other children of the area come. And then there's a workshop for some others.

For ourselves as well as for others, what is the value? People can see a value in struggling against the Americans or for the Americans or winning the war. But just to make our community, school, and workshop work—how do we find a value in that when there are no results?

For example, Claudia is blind and autistic. In the first three years, she progressed slowly. Now she's great, she's beautiful. But, you know, there's no graduating ceremony. Rafaelito was in the hospital and can't walk. He's just going down gradually. He could almost walk at one time, but his body has grown in a strange way, which means that he's really "top-heavy." He goes through great crises of anguish, and he demands a lot of attention. So we can enter quite quickly into the situation of doubt, because the results are not great.

After 10 years of struggle, where are the results? There's a witness, there's a context, there's love, but where are the results? We can all be tortured at one moment with doubt.

What is the value? To believe. To believe that just living this life of community is what Jesus wants. It's a tiny witness.

Wallis: Living without results. We can identify with that. You feel as if you're working so hard on all of the things that people regard as so creative—like the Witness for Peace in Nicaragua, the Pledge of Resistance, and the sanctuary movement. But you look at what is being done to change policies and attitudes and behavior, and the human suffering just mounts and mounts and mounts. You feel as if you're living with no results. That creates a tremendous amount of frustration, fatigue, and doubt.

On the other hand, you have to live with the danger of success. At the same time that l'Arche is accomplishing tiny things, you are widely admired. The success of recognition, admiration, and adulation is in some sense as spiritually dangerous as the lack of results.

I find us living with those two realities. People sometimes write me letters and ask, "How do you deal with all the success?" And I look around me and say, "What success? What have we actually been able to change?" And most of the time I'm not feeling very successful. Yet there is a certain kind of success, certainly in what l'Arche has done, in having a witness, having the word, having something that people find good.

Vanier: I agree with what you're saying about the dangers of success. As I look to our communities, I just see people who are tired and struggling. I see much more pain in our communities than I see adulation. Where I see the danger is in fearing to take risks. Somewhere the fundamental motivation and trust in God wanes.

There is the danger of the ghetto mentality, in the sense that we're so busy that we only know what's happening in our own community. I sense a very great need—and I'm not sure we're attentive enough to it—for the crisscrossings of communities. Things that you say can awaken us; things that we say can awaken you. We have to see what's happening in the wider church, or the wider reality of humanity, and see the questions you are bringing up.

Joyce Hollyday: One of the tensions I feel very strongly is how to say no to so many demands and needs. It's the problem of being so busy that we begin to feel the lack in the life of our community with one another.

How do you deal with that issue? Do you say no to people? How do you not become so overwhelmed and caught in despair because there's so much need and there's so little we can really do?

Vanier: I think the danger is not the fact that we don't say no but that sometimes we can become insensitive to needs. You have only so many beds in the house, and once you've got them filled up the demands are still immense. So in a way there is actually a danger of a hardening of the heart with respect to the immensity of the need. That's what I sometimes see in myself. You feel it when you've had the third phone call from a mother saying, "I just can't stand it. My 7-year-old son is going through a crisis, and every place says no."

Dottie Bockstiegel: I think it is important to realize, when we see our limits, that we can only do so much. There are ways, through prayer, of being with people and trying to give people hope even though we personally can't do something.

Vanier: Could you tell me a bit about how you nurture your people?

Joe Roos: I think a very important part of nurturing ourselves is our worship. We come together as a community along with those who work very closely with us in our ministries and with other friends. Coming together in worship can really break through to our need for God in a way that is hard to recognize sometimes.

I don't know if it's coming closer to God's word or because of being with sisters and brothers. I don't know if it's coming around the table to share the bread and the wine. Or maybe it's all of those things. But at least in my experience that's something that is really helpful.

I was going to ask you that same question. That nourishment, that turning back to the well, reaching down, and drinking water— how does that happen?

Vanier: One of the greatest ways of nurturing is a retreat or "interlude" for handicapped people. Normally it's on a one-to-one basis. An interlude is a sort of renewal program for people with handicaps.

We touch very fundamental questions, like, "Why am I handicapped?" "What is a handicap?"—you know, those questions that are almost taboo. "Was I loved by my parents?" "What is my relationship to them now?" "What happened in the institution?" "Why did I come to l'Arche?" These are some of the questions which are almost too explosive to be brought up in daily living, if they're not handled with care.

We just had a retreat a few weeks ago with maybe 30 people in all, 15 with handicaps. There was one particular assistant, one of our house leaders, who had hit his limit. He was on the point of departure. But he came back so refreshed, and he said, "You can't believe the honesty, the truth, the beauty in what these people were saying—the pain, the acceptance."

One of our communities in the north of France took a weekend retreat not too long ago. One of the men who was up there had been in my community—he's a very simple man. They were talking about a text of the Apocalypse, where Jesus knocks on the door. And Jesus will dine with whoever opens the door. This man said, "I know what I'll eat when Jesus comes to dine with me. We'll have pancakes. We'll have muffins. We'll have cider." And then he said, "And Jesus will say something. He'll take me in his arms, and he'll say, 'You are my beloved child.'"

So there are those moments when the assistants, who would never have dared say a thing like that, hear these really prophetic statements. There is a sense of the presence of God.

What seems to nourish the most is when there is a direct experience of the presence of God, the presence of light, a prophetic utterance from people who are so little and so broken.

Although this doesn't happen on a daily basis—perhaps once a year—it nonetheless happens. It is a very marked and profound experience when people seem to experience that God is present in another person who in so many ways appears devalued and is driving us up the wall. Such moments bring deep conversions in people.

Wallis: One of the difficulties we've always had is an inability to find disciplines that seem to work for us activists in our diverse ministries. Especially with the onset of children in our community, it just doesn't seem to work for us to, for example, get up in the morning at the same time and go to one place together to pray. Living in a low-income neighborhood is a very real discipline that drives many people away from us, as does our commitment to economic sharing. Those are not always the most life-giving disciplines.

Are there things in the community life of l'Arche over the years that have proven essential to your sense of nourishment?

Vanier: One of the things we sense really helps assistants is what we call "accompaniment." Young assistants will come to our community full of enthusiasm and a desire to serve. And then within some number of months, they touch their point of pain. They're fed up. They're angry. So there's a period of disillusionment, and it happens everywhere.

We see that if these new people are well-accompanied, if there is somebody walking with them and meeting with them every month, they will be able to say, "We all go through this. It's all right, and it's really important." And they can verbalize what they're going through. They can say they're fed up. This is the phenomenon of touching your pain.

Also almost every community or every home has evening prayer. And we find nourishment in the way we celebrate. In a community in Liverpool, there were a lot of wounded people. And they started washing each other's feet and developed a whole liturgy around it. Now on Maundy Thursday, in many of our communities, we talk about how God brought us together, and then we wash each other's feet. The whole month before Christmas we're preparing for its arrival. And we also celebrate birthdays. A lot of assistants will tell me that the feast was so great that they feel totally refreshed.

I think we're discovering something in l'Arche: the meaning of celebration. It's not just a prayer, but a celebration in which we laugh, we sing, we dance, we let out all the tension. We eat well, we have wine, it takes time. It's well-prepared, we're dressed up. And it will last. We really, really have fun, and we laugh from the guts. And there's a fantastic liberation in celebration which is a holy act, not a liturgy in a sense, but a holy act. We're celebrating that we are a body and giving thanks to God.

We give thanks in the way we dance. Each home has its own traditions, its way of celebration. One of the essential nourishments is the quality of celebration, which is a religious act and a very human act. We are also learning how to "live" meals well—just the ordinary meal—so that the meal becomes a little wedding feast, a celebration of unity.

Millie Bender: There seems to be something about attentiveness that is at the heart of everything we've said about nourishment, whether we're talking about time on retreat, or time in prayer, or celebrating a birthday, or taking time just to hear from another and sense Jesus in that person. I've been working a lot in our own community with the quality of our life and what nurtures us.

Vanier: What we're talking about is attentiveness, attentiveness to the moment of what is given. I think if there's too much success, we're no longer celebrating. We'll celebrate victory, which is something very different from celebrating bonding. Maybe the less success we have, the more we have to be attentive to the present and the celebration of bonding. Just as we are, in our brokenness, our pain, our lack of success, we celebrate that we're united together. And that is our comfort, our joy, and our gift.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine. When this article appeared, Joe Roos was managing editor and Joyce Hollyday was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine, and Millie Bender and Dottie Bockstiegel were pastoral leaders of Sojourners Community.