Simple Life

In the life of the house, there are trips and journeys which are necessary -  for example,  when assistants travel back to their home country to get a new visa or to see family. Recently, our house leader and one assistant took a holiday like this. At the same time, an assistant returning from holiday suddenly found they couldn’t get back for personal reasons and, at the same time, we had a number of new assistants who were just learning their roles. Suddenly we were short of assistants. So from one day to another we had to change all our weekly plans, the daily routines of the house, outings and everything else. We laboured harder, longer and progressively became more and more tired and exhausted. Then, we asked for help from the Community.

We just hoped for a little bit support to help with busy times in the house, but we got so many offers of help, even from assistants from other houses who didn't know our house routines. They came to help late in the evening, early in the morning, at the weekends and some stayed overnight for several nights to help us. It was amazing to feel so greatly supported - to feel and to see that the Community come alive and take so much care of us and wanted really help us was unbelievable and overwhelming.

These tricky times generated new friendships, made old friendships stronger and deeper, introduced new friends to the house and helped us learn more and more about each other. In this time, the Bible stories I’d read as a child made a new kind of sense to me - humanity and amity growing alongside each other to overcome obstacles as a true community. It felt as though God was giving us a the chance to test and prove the strength of the bonds between us. And we did a great job! So, to all who helped or cared for us, THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH FOR YOUR GREAT SUPPORT!!

Point of view

 I remember going to Church one Sunday morning with some members of our house when I first started as an assistant. I sat next to Annie, one of our core members at church. Annie is a warm, loving lady who enjoys company though she needs quite a bit of support to stay focused on where she is and what shes doing.

I was nervous. Sometimes she isn’t aware that people are praying around her or sitting in silence and will ask many many qestions repeatedly. We’ve tried many ways to support her with this – answering her questions very clearly and simply, encouraging her to enjoy the peaceful service, explaining the importance of a prayer and the Mass for other people, but sometimes Annie doesn't understand other peoples needs when she has one. If I’m honest, I didn't want people looking at us or her when she is speaking during prayer and lacked confidence in finding good ways to encourage her to allow others to pray in silence.

I thought about different ways to help her be calm and to pray if she liked during Mass. I looked for possibilities that she could deal with herself. But I couldn't find any idea and so I hoped the best and tried to stay cool.

Annie took some of her drawing paper and a purse full of coins with her in her black small handbag. During the Mass, she showed me her paintings again and again: “look!” she said, and I said “Oh this is a nice one“. She shook her purse full of coins and smiled at me “money“ and I smiled back “you are a rich lady“. Annie asked me to help her to open and close her bag because her eyes are not the best anymore, so I closed and opened her bag again and again. During hymns we got up, sang and teetered to the right and to the left in time to the music. She laid her head on my shoulders and breathed deep for some moments. The 90 minutes passed by so quickly and at the end we went for a cup of tea in church hall, like we always do.

When I led her through the benches an older lady turned around and said to me: “You’re new? You are doing such a good job! You're a very lovely and kind person and Annie seems so gentle with you.”  I had been anxious and nervous but now felt pleased and happy that there were people who seemed to understand and accept Annie  and wished to encourage me.

5 months later, going to church with Annie is definitely one of my favourite past times, even when things don’t go quite as planned. I love spending this time with her and I’m inspired that people are able rather to see, than her disability, her ability, her warmth and her beauty.

Welcome Jacqueline!

My name is Jacqueline, I’m German and I have been a L'Arche assistant since March 2009. I live in Little Ewell, a community house in the countryside. James asked for people who want to write an article about life in L'Arche and since I read some examples he gave me, I can’t stop my mind composing new articles about this community life that I want to share with you. So I made some notes and then decided to write them down immediately before I forgot something. Every day I'm here there are more impressions of life and community that I want you to know about. The fact that I find it so easy to see meaning in my life in community tells me that I have found something in L'Arche life which is valuable and something I hope is a strength for me.

Working confidently with people with a learning disability is not a gift that everybody has, perhaps including me. But I've learned that everybody has something he or she can do as well or better than somebody else – it doesn't matter who you are or whether or not you have a learning disability, the gift is valuable and important to the people you share your life with. Whether its good and tasty cooking, good organisation or reflection, nonverbal conversation or just making funny faces – L'Arche is, as I have heard from plenty of people and have experienced myself, a place to find yourself, to loose yourself, to explore new paths, continue old ones, finding new friends and a second family, new challenges and old problems that revisit you, feeling small and growing up at the same time... but experiencing and learning from this together!

Food and faith

Eddie Gimore, Community Leader writes:

We like our food in L’Arche, and I can still remember my very first meal in Kent. It was home-made tuna pizza, eaten with a motley crew of twenty people around the big Little Ewell dining table. I enjoyed the food and also the light banter around the table. Good food shared with a fine and varied bunch of people: I knew it was the place for me. Whenever Geoffrey draws a picture for a birthday card it is always a group of people around a meal table, and I wonder what better image there is of community.
Certainly no community gathering would be complete without food, not to mention people’s favourite dishes. A few years ago there was a plan to stop having fish and chips at our monthly gatherings to save money. There was an outcry from the core members. The fish and chips were promptly reinstated!
A highlight of my winter was going up to Edinburgh with Vince for a meeting. Vince was very generously buying me drinks and crisps on the train and it was a pleasure to sit there, two old friends eating and drinking together and enjoying the lovely East coast scenery. When we arrived at The Noust in Edinburgh we were greeted with a cup of tea (where would L’Arche be without tea!) and then shared a delicious Indian takeaway with the rest of the group. It was a good meeting!
These days I don’t often eat in the L’Arche houses, but in my family we retain the L’Arche traditions. The mealtime is a key moment in the Gilmore household, and we join hands and sing grace (to the occasional embarrassment of the children if they have friends round!). The table is always set nicely and the food is always good. The company isn’t bad either! And when it is somebody’s birthday we make an extra special effort. I enjoyed preparing Yimsoon’s birthday meal not so long ago: lots of starters, the mother of all curries, and all washed down with a bottle of champagne (well, sort of, it sparkled at any rate!) We were too full for desserts so had them the next day!

As in any L’Arche house, the preparation, the serving and the sharing of the food are ways in which we communicate to people that we care for them and that they matter. And at a birthday in particular, we tell a person that they are special and valuable, and that really we all are and that life is pretty good and worth celebrating. Bon Appetit!

If a tree falls in a forest...

Question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it….

• does it make a noise?
• do the other trees point and laugh?
• does anyone care?

I was left wondering – is she? Is she quiet just because she says she is? Or is my experience of her what really counts – if people think you’re outgoing, are you outgoing, despite what you think of yourself? Are you an introvert because Myers Briggs tells you that you are? Who is your real you?

I’ve never really got to an answer to the question; neither I guess have the psychological, philosophical and theological community so I don’t feel too stupid. Isaac Newton’s third law of Motion states that ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Without reaction, an action can’t really be said to have occurred – the reaction almost defines that action.

Something did occur to me after my friend left. If I had lived my life on a desert island, never having met another human being, would I be shy? Would I be tall if there was no Yvonne, Da Eun or Jennie Bond around me to compare my height with? Would I be male if there was no female? Who am I – really?

Isaac Newton argues that action and reaction are inextricably linked – the one defines the other. Community life similarly offers us all, able and less able, shy and loud, tall and short, an opportunity to be, to exist, to define ourselves through our relationships, to offer a place for us to act and be.

Psalm 68 states that ‘God sets the lonely in families’; he roots the lost – all of us – in community where we can find identity and meaning.

So perhaps the conclusion of all this is that without ‘community’ or society, there is no ‘me’.

‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, …as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.’

John Donne, 1624.

The God of small spiders

Whilst she was in the Faith House garden, Gillian sat and watched a spider at work in his web. The spider had built a web which stretched diagonally all the way from the side of the house to a bush, six foot from the wall. The web was a single strand of cobweb and in the middle of the strand, the spider was busy building his net of cobwebs into a structure. Gillian commented: ‘How can people say there is no God?’

Whether you like spiders or not, you have to admire their ingenuity. Wherever you walk in Autumn, you see cobwebs spanning the most improbable places – I have a spider that daily builds a cobweb over the wing mirror of my car, only for the web to be blown away every day on the way to Little Ewell.

The spider’s willingness to exploit every opportunity can be good metaphor for us.

Spiders have faith and persevere: Cobwebs gather every week in the corner of your house, only to be swept away every week in your weekly clean, yet the spider returns and builds again the following week. I have never met a spider that has complained to me that the bush and the wall are too far apart. Every new web does not promise a juicy spider, but no spider ever caught his lunch without spinning a web. In the letter of Timothy (4: 5-7), Timothy writes: ‘But you…endure hardship,….fulfil your ministry. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith’.

More than this though, the spider describes a way to approach life and understand God within it. God provides the brick wall, the bush, the wing mirror, the structures that surround us. Our job, and that of the spider’s, is simply to use each one of these gifts as well as we are able, to build a life for us and our community. And in doing so, others will draw inspiration, find faith and perhaps exclaim:

‘How can people say there is no God?’

Christmas and change

When I was little, one of the worst times for me was Christmas Day morning, just before opening a stocking full of presents. The anticipation of Christmas had built and built through November and December, school had ended for Christmas, Christmas shopping had been finished, as a family we’d done our ritual family-visiting on Christmas eve, Midnight Mass was over and now here I was, staring at my Christmas Stocking and knowing it would be 365 days before I’d wake up to find another one at the bottom of my bed.

A couple of weeks ago, we said goodbye to Sebastien, an assistant in the house who returned to France and welcomed a new assistant, Jeremiah from Canada, to Rainbow. Community living is always a time of goodbyes and hellos – some assistants and core members have been members of the community for twenty or thirty years – Peter has been a member for 33 years – my age today! Others come and go in less than a year.

Changes in Rainbow are always a slightly anxious time in the house – what will the house be like without Sebastien? What will be lost? What will Jeremiah bring with him? Will he chose to really join and belong? It also reminds us that no-one should be taken from granted. As a result, you see relationships between remaining people become stronger, closer, more reliant on each other - more intimate. You begin to cherish those who have been alongside you before and during the changes and will remain after it is complete.

I’m beginning to realise that the remaining assistants in the house and people I consider important friends of mine in the house will not stay forever; at some point they’ll leave to pursue their own lives away from the community and in their place, they’ll bring more change.

I used to question whether this continual change within the house was a good thing. I appreciate that in L’Arche, because assistants usually live in the houses, the houses are that much more stable, more homely than would usually be the case; but surely for core members (people with a learning disability) who’ve seen this change continue for up to 33 years it must be unsettling, confusing and painful at times. I’m sure it is – the loss of Lisa, Roxana and Da-Eun eventually will certainly be difficult for me. But I’m also aware that the things they brought to the house, the energy, humour, deep friendships, were also gifts that were valuable when present and should be appreciated and enjoyed in themselves, rather than only at their loss. Some will keep in touch and visit regularly if they can; others will find it more difficult. But while they’re here, they give me sincere and honest friendships; they accept me as I am, with all my annoying, forgetful, inconsiderate qualities; they’re people I do love, people important to me with whom I have entirely unique relationships.

Christmas for me as a child was a strange time - incredibly exciting, full of expectation. But I guess I’m finally realising at the age of 33 (a little late perhaps), that the anticipation and hope that Christmas brings should be something cherished, enjoyed and remembered in itself, rather than bereaved after the event and remembered at its passing.

Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are changed.

Anniversary

Today we celebrated Tuuliki's four year anniversary in L'Arche. Tuuliki is House Leader of Rainbow House. She came to L'Arche aged 20 from Estonia and has been House Leader for just less than two years. Shes an outstanding House Leader, friendly, very welcoming, good fun and deeply committed to everyone who lives in the house. She is for me the main reason why Rainbow House has remained such a happy and contented place to live for all of my time here.

I was chatting recently with a friend who was reflecting on his recent birthday - he said he tended to be the kind of person who would find himself looking forward rather than backwards, on what he would be rather than where he had come from. He could never understand those who loved to reminisce, nostalgic for the past.

Anniversaries in L'Arche are important times in the life of a community. They're markers, some would say 'sign', of continuity, of the steady passing of years, but also an acknowledgement of distance travelled and of a step along a journey. For most people (other than my friend), anniversaries I guess are a chance to look backwards, at the journey you've taken, the decisions you've made, your accomplishments, your failures. But anniversaries in the context of community go beyond simply a personal experience, either of looking back or planning forwards.

I joined L'Arche a few months after Tuuliki had become House Leader. Over the time, Tuuliki has seen me fall in love with L'Arche, has seen me change from someone determined to make L'Arche look like something I'd have built, into being hopefully becoming a little more L'Arche-shaped myself. Similarly, I've seen Tuuliki grow confident and become outstanding in her leadership. Someone able to preserve the spirit of the house whilst becoming someone willing to make decisions...to a person I consider to be a friend and a leader. My experience of Tuuliki's anniversary is only one of ten others in the house, fifty others in the community and hundreds more who've passed through the community at different times; and her anniversary means something to me as a 'sign' - of faithful commitment to friendships with core members and assistants, of continuity of relationship and of huge growth, as a woman, as a house community and as a relationship.

So today we celebrate Tuuliki's anniversary, with all its nostalgia and journey begun, all its implications for the future. In true L'Arche spirit, the Anniversary is neither about the past, nor the future; it is a moment in the present, the today - the cake we eat, the tea we drink, the card we make and the hugs we give -so today we celebrate her presence, her belonging to us and our belonging with her. Happy anniversary Tuuliki!

Routines

Tomorrow, I'm helping in Rainbow house. I work Monday to Friday as Assistant Coordinator but the house is low on assistants (Lisa is on holiday and we have a vacancy to be filled next week) so I'm helping out in the morning. Its been 6 weeks since I helped Pete and Damien in the morning and went out shopping with people from the house. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm guessing if I go with Damien, we'll head off into Canterbury, balloons, postcards, leaflets from Whitefriars Shopping Centre and finish with McDonalds. I'm not psychic - its been a similar routine most Saturdays since I arrived 20 months ago.

Routine...we use the word in L'Arche a lot. Morning and evening routines are the things that core members do to go to bed or get up in the morning. Assistants are asked not to vary them too much so that the core member feels in control of whats happening, knows whats next. For Damien, routines seem to mean something a little more.

Damien is a young man, 24. Hes great fun, likes doing fun things like McDonalds, zoos, sailing, horse riding. But its strange, he seems to get quite apprehensive over NEW potentially fun things. Offer him the cinema with as much popcorn and coke as he can carry, or a postcard and he'll go for a postcard every time.

I'm the opposite - routines for me mean I stop thinking, stop being aware of time passing. If I find a routine, I DO feel secure (I still drive to my office the same way as on my first day even though I know theres a shortcut) but my brain feels redundant. I stop noticing the countryside, stop thinking about the day, my mind wanders off.

Damien has a box on top of his wardrobe - its an old shoe box that someone decorated with wrapping paper - pictures of mad spiders and happy worms, that kind of thing. Its where he keeps the postcards that he buys, that we then write together each evening. Its sort of his diary box. Every night, though particularly when hes tired, Damien will end up staring at this box, at the mad spiders. When hes stared for a while, he'll start to count them, showing me each spider. He looks delighted by them and really keen that you see them too. So I wonder if Damien is the fortunate one in this life with routines. He notices things I miss - the different details of the same object remain fascinating to him even though hes totally familiar with them. The same details continue to bring enjoyment even though hes shared them with me a hundred times.

In L'Arche, beyond the morning and evening routines, every week, every day is in some ways a routine. On weekdays, after everyone is up, had breakfast, made their packed lunch, climbed on the minibus, the assistants start their cleaning routines - the same floors, the same toilets, the endless washing up, the never ending hoovering. Its all routine. Yet, you ask any assistant - I mean ANY - what makes life special in L'Arche and they'll all tell you -its their recognition, their appreciation of each moment in each day. Time doesn't pass idly. In some way, the routines with all their familiarity, bring enjoyment and recognition of the importance of moments that are passing.

Damien I think is on to something.

Welcome

Welcome to a blog of life in the L'Arche Kent Community. Life in a L'Arche Community is in many ways inseperable from life more generally, so I apologise now if my blog overspills. But maybe it should. No man is an island etc., and that goes double for communities. Apart from Island communities I guess.

I've been in the community for about 20 months now. In some ways, like the Army, I was born into it - my brother used to live in Little Ewell house in Barfrestone (Kent) 17 years ago and my sister was in the L'Arche Bognor community about 10 years ago. Like the Army, my time also taught me to peel potatoes - lots of potatoes! As a house assistant in an international house you quickly learn to cook for many and potatoes are the United Nations of international cooking. Unlike the Army, I also learned to rattle a tambourine, bake a cake and blow up balloons. But more of that later.

Welcome anyway. I'm not entirely sure how to write this blog, so I guess I'll just focus on what happens today, yesterday and tomorrow and try to make sense of it as I can. Feedback always welcome, so long as you're kind.