L'Arche Kent from the inside

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

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 met a friend recently that I hadn't seen for a while. For me, she's always been this bubbly, talkative, slightly forgetful figure in my life. Yet she continually describes herself as shy, slightly awkward and a little quiet at times. We said goodbye and I returned to Rainbow house for supper. But on the way home I was left wondering – what 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

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 s