L'Arche Kent from the inside

Laurie is an assistant in Cana house in Eythorne. Here, she reflects on the role of tea in L'Arche, community and world peace:  "A lot can be said about a cup of tea. Since coming to England in May from Canada , I have shared more cups of tea then at any other time in my life. I am learning a lot about the power of a cup of tea. Tea brings people together. It calms, soothes and provides comfort at the end of a day and    provides a consistent, warming start to each morning (though personally    i still need to drink at least 2 cups of coffee to get going in the morning!). When everything else seems unclear, there is a profound kind of certainty that can be found in a cup of tea. I know that no matter how many mistakes I have made in the day, no matter how tired or distracted I am, if I put a tea bag in a cup and add hot water, it   will   become a tasty beverage!  Beyond the comfort and ordinariness of tea, I have also discovered that tea h...

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...

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 fo...