Tender to the World: Jean Vanier, L'Arche, and the United Church of Canada 9780228000662

Citation preview

Tender to the World

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Jean Vanier in the United Church Observer, December 1972. Used by permission of the United Church Observer.

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Tender to the World Jean Vanier, L’Arche, and the United Church of Canada

c a r o ly n w h i t n e y - b r o w n

Foreword by Jean Vanier

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-7735-5911-0 (cloth) 978-0-7735-5912-7 (paper) 978-0-2280-0066-2 (eP DF ) 978-0-2280-0067-9 (eP UB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from The United Church of Canada Foundation.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Tender to the world: Jean Vanier, L’Arche, and the United Church of Canada / Carolyn Whitney-Brown; foreword by Jean Vanier. Names: Whitney-Brown, Carolyn, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190121270 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190121319 | IS BN 9780773559110 (hardcover) | I SB N 9780773559127 (softcover) | IS BN 9780228000662 (eP DF ) | I SB N 9780228000679 (eP U B ) Subjects: L CS H: Vanier, Jean, 1928–2019. | L C SH : Arche (Association) | LC SH: United Church of Canada. | L CS H: Church work with the developmentally disabled. Classification: L CC BV4461.3 .W 55 2019 | DD C 259/.44—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

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With love to my parents Barb and Herb Whitney and to Jean Vanier

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Contents

Foreword by Jean Vanier  ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: Inversion, Pleasure, and Story  3 1  “Are You a Saint?”: The United Church of Canada and Jean Vanier  16 2  Breakfast at the Ecumenical Buffet  44 3  Just Stories?  93 4  Secret Agency and Surprising Subjects  136 Afterword: Go Be Broken, Go Be Whole  179 Notes 189 Bibliography 235 Index 255

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Foreword Jean Vanier

This book brings up deep memories of the partnership between the United Church and L’Arche. These memories are seeds of hope that rise up in me, hope for unity among all followers of Jesus coming from different backgrounds, traditions, and churches. After all, we are one in the love of God, one in our desire to realize peace and justice in the spirit of the gospel. In a beautiful way, the challenge of L’Arche in Canada was also its greatest gift: to be a place of encounter where all friends of Jesus could come together and celebrate. And the presence and support of our brothers and sisters in the United Church of Canada was instrumental to this. A seed of hope was planted at the General Council of the United Church in 1972, and then at the opening of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver in 1983. We were together in a harmony of desire and vision. And even more deeply, we were united simply by our presence to one another, our friendship. At Cedar Glen, at Naramata, and at other retreat houses across Canada, I joined people from the United Church, the Anglican Church, and the Roman Catholic Church. We prayed together, ate together, rejoiced together, and suffered together. We could respect our difference and so we were together in hope. Over the decades, the adventure that is L’Arche has been a revelation of the amazing gift of people with disabilities. So often shunned and excluded from society, they can be messengers of peace, of justice, of truth, and of the Kingdom of God. They heal those around them, guiding us to accept our own weakness and vulnerability, revealing that we are each fundamentally beloved. They heal communities.

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x Foreword

When we put people with disabilities at the core of our communities, L’Arche and otherwise, we put love and celebration back into the heart of our life together. And, as this book describes, they, in little ways, begin to heal the Church. L’Arche in Canada became a place where members of the United Church and the Catholic Church, as well as Anglican and other denominations, could come together in prayer, in communion, and in hope of unity. These seeds of hope are in me today. I am grateful, Carolyn, for your careful documentation of this fruitful relationship between the United Church of Canada and L’Arche.

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Preface

I’ve titled this book Tender to the World because L’Arche and the United Church each in their own way tender something unexpected to the world. They offer lived experiences for our communities and future. In a 2017 United Church Observer article, photographer and author Wade Davis wrote, “the myriad of cultures in the world … are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? When asked this question, the cultures of the world respond in 7,000 different voices, and these collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with the complex challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming centuries.”1 The United Church of Canada and L’Arche propose something fundamentally tender in answer to this question: visions for a community that is gentle, kind, physical, often precarious, and sometimes painful. Their responses could initiate a tender process, inviting what Davis calls “unique expressions of the human imagination and heart.” Many paths converge in this book. But I will start in 1995 at the Marshall Funeral Home in Richmond Hill, Ontario. At the time, my husband Geoff and I were part of the L’Arche Daybreak community, one of a worldwide federation of L’Arche communities in nearly forty countries where people with and without intellectual disabilities live together. Geoff and I were going to a visitation (or “viewing” or “wake”) for Helen Humphries, a sixty-three-year-old member of both L’Arche Daybreak and Richmond Hill United Church who had died a few days earlier. The funeral home was carefully designed, understated and comfortingly formal. The kindly owner in his immaculate suit greeted us at the door, inquiring with hushed tones, “Where may

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xii Preface

I direct you?” We could hear roars of laughter echoing down one of the elegant hallways. “We think that way,” we responded. The dignified funeral home owner’s lips twitched with amusement. It was not his first encounter with the L’Arche process of grieving, and he said something he likely rarely uttered at work: “Enjoy.” Around Helen Humphries’s casket, the room was packed with people. They had come from far and wide – people of all ages, people of many nationalities, people with a wide variety of physical and intellectual abilities, eager to share their best Humphries stories, of which there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply. We laughed, we cried a bit, and we gathered around Humphries’s casket holding hands to pray. On our way home, we thought about all the ways the evening upended social expectations. A physically small woman with Down syndrome brought together a remarkably diverse group of people to celebrate her life and grieve her death, uniting people in prayer from differing faith traditions. How does one stubbornly eccentric, socially marginalized person bring that kind of unity? Further, while L’Arche is in social services terms an “agency,” the memorable stories echoing down the hallways had all recounted hilarious, unexpected moments of Humphries’s own unique agency. We knew Helen Humphries’s power well. The aunt of L’Arche Daybreak co-founder Ann Newroth, Humphries frequently managed to invert power relations and assumptions, combining a righteous dignity with a playful sense of humour. When we had first visited Daybreak in 1989, we stayed for a few days in the house on Church Street where Humphries lived with six other people. I remember watching my intellectual husband skipping up and down the living room with Humphries, singing improvised sheet-folding songs. I hadn’t seen Geoff look so completely relaxed since before we had begun graduate school. We moved into the house on Church Street the next year, living with Humphries and six other housemates. Of the four people with intellectual disabilities in the house, three were members of the United Church of Canada. We lived and worked at L’Arche Daybreak for seven years. By the time we moved to L’Arche, we had completed Ivy League doctorates in English literature. L’Arche has a curious way of attracting over-educated people. Reflecting back on the scene at the funeral home as we returned from Humphries’s visitation, we found ourselves musing about the cultural theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and others

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Preface

xiii

that we had been exploring in our doctoral theses a few years earlier. Analyses of social inversion, communal times of festivity such as carnival, the complexity of seemingly simple places such as a marketplace, the significance of people and activities pushed to the margins of society – all this seemed intriguingly suggestive of what we were experiencing at L’Arche. But tantalizing as the connections were, we also couldn’t see how to put it together. We didn’t want to reiterate stereotypes of people with disabilities as clowns or carnivalesque grotesques or childlike fools, or even somehow prophetic gifts sent to enlighten so-called normal people. Our experience went deeper than that. It wasn’t just that we were wary of stereotyping our friends, people of courage and character whom we were growing to admire greatly, it was also that our L’Arche experience was highlighting something in the gospels for us. Despite years of faith leadership, we had not really paid attention to the delight in social inversion that is so intrinsic to the Christian faith. We began to listen differently to the Magnificat where Mary rejoices that God has cast down the mighty and lifted up the lowly. The incarnation is the eternal Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, especially the Beatitudes, insists that those whose situations might seem hopeless or pitiable are actually blessed and active in the world. His parable of the banquet hinges on the unexpected shift to inviting those at the margins of society to come and feast. At the end of his life, Jesus shocks his disciples by taking the position of a servant to wash their feet. Even the resurrection itself inverts death into life. These gospel stories are held in common throughout the Christian church. We discovered something previously unnoticed in those stories as we lived in L’Arche. Then there was Bill Van Buren’s turkey joke, which never ceased to fascinate me. “How do you keep a turkey in suspense?” he would ask visitors. The good-hearted, awkward, overly eager visitor would respond, “I don’t know, Bill, how do you keep a turkey in suspense?” “I’ll tell you tomorrow!” Van Buren would snort and walk away laughing loudly, leaving the visitor bewildered – did he just call me a turkey? And leaving me pondering what I had seen: an amusing inversion of expectations, hilarity. How would cultural theorist Michel Foucault analyze the apparent power shift in that exchange? Would Jacques Derrida call this suspense? It was another of the unexpected pleasures of L’Arche: the pleasure of overthinking.

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xiv Preface

After seven transformative years came our journey out of L’Arche. It is important to understand that L’Arche is not perfect. Like the Church, L’Arche blesses many people and has also hurt people. Looking back, I am glad we left when we did although it was painful. But the important thing is that when we no longer lived as a daily part of a specific L’Arche community, we had to rise to the new challenge of how to “live L’Arche” everywhere. What does L’Arche offer that is accessible to everyone? This study is in part the fruit of this journey, one that may resonate with others. As I write that, I am reminded of a comment made by our friend Peter Rotterman. Rotterman was the second person with an intellectual disability welcomed at L’Arche Daybreak in 1969, which made him one of the founding members. Witty and funny, Rotterman liked to offer an unexpected twist. He and I were working together in 1997 packaging books to send to a L’Arche event in Pennsylvania, and we noticed that “journey” was the trendy word. We carefully counted out two dozen copies of Jean Vanier’s new book, Our Journey Home, writer and priest Henri Nouwen’s new book, Bread for the Journey (“Save room for dessert!” quipped Rotterman), and a big stack of L’Arche brochures, titled “Journey with L’Arche.” “I hope everyone will like MY new book, coming out next week,” announced Rotterman. “What book is that?” I asked. “It’s titled Don’t Bore Me with Your Journey!” chortled Rotterman. His joke was clearly the fruit of many decades in L’Arche. In 2009, a chance comment by United Church minister Doug Graves got me thinking about it all again. Graves represented the United Church of Canada on a small, select group of Church leaders who met regularly with Jean Vanier and the leaders of L’Arche International. I was interested that the United Church was held in such high esteem in L’Arche beyond Canada. Then Graves started to list connections between L’Arche and the United Church of Canada. For example, I had not known that L’Arche began in Vancouver because in 1973 the United Church gave L’Arche its large, newly built Home for Unwed Mothers. To me, it seemed deliciously ironic if “the pill,” so strongly resisted by the Roman Catholic Church, had resulted in the beginning of a L’Arche community (United Church minister Gordon How, who arranged the property transfer, later explained to me that it was more complicated than that). As Graves mentioned more United Church interactions, I realized that many of these stories were held only in people’s memories.

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With support from a United Church McGeachy Senior Scholarship, I launched a research project tracing the relationship between Jean Vanier, L’Arche, and the United Church of Canada to consider how this history could be significant to the United Church today. This book thus focuses on what the United Church can learn from its relationship with L’Arche. That summer I asked a United Church minister from Halifax, “Have you been involved in the new L’Arche community?” “No,” he replied, “That’s a Catholic thing.” Because Jean Vanier is such an exemplary Roman Catholic, most people who know of L’Arche assume the communities are Roman Catholic. But for thousands of United Church members across Canada, the connections between L’Arche and the United Church run deep. For example, in a 1967 film documentary about Jean Vanier and L’Arche, the United Church’s Peter Flemington asks Vanier if he knows that he is featured in the church school curriculum of “Canada’s largest Protestant denomination.” Looking at the film in 2015, that was news to me and it took some digging through old boxes in church basements to discover that an interview with Jean Vanier had been added to the third printing of a United Church 1967 New Curriculum church school book. Perhaps I read it as a child. Many people remember Jean Vanier’s address to the United Church’s 25th General Council in 1972, and later that year thousands more read a summary of it in the United Church Observer.2 The more I discovered, the more fascinating it became as both a slice of Canadian history and a series of spiritual stories. I became aware that the United Church’s long history with Vanier and L’Arche in Canada has been important to both, but that history is mainly unacknowledged and unrecognized. Certainly the experiences of people at the time were completely unrecorded. Further, there was some danger that over time this shared history could become romanticized, and significant stresses and difficulties between L’Arche and the United Church might be forgotten. As I gathered stories of a relatively small denomination’s interactions with the relatively insignificant movement of L’Arche, I began to think again about why these stories felt so resonant. Like my musings after Humphries’s death, I wondered: can one stubbornly eccentric church or community create unity among widely diverse people? Furthermore, for the United Church there is another layer. Remember Wade Davis’s “fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive?” For as long as I can remember, the United Church has been focused not only on what it means to be alive but also on the

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xvi Preface

question of whether it is “dying.” I am not kidding. Already by 1971, while I was entranced by my pristine hardcover New Curriculum church school books and the United and Anglican Churches were considering union with each other, a United Church study predicted that there would be no members left by the mid-1990s.3 This book makes no effort to predict what will happen next for United Church membership statistics, nor do I offer practical tips for church renewal. What I will observe is that, as Jean Vanier said to the 25th United Church General Council in Saskatoon, “Frequently we ask ourselves the wrong questions.” *** Jean Vanier died on 7 May 2019 as this book was in proofs. A flood of tributes erupted, enough to make the 1972 United Church Observer statement, “If you don’t worship him you don’t know him,” look tame. In the late 1990s, I asked him if he was a saint, and he looked pained and said, “Nobody knows me.” I think he was saying that if you do worship him, you didn’t know him. Hagiography can be its own form of marginalization. Vanier had an ambivalent relationship with his own complex personas. He intermittently tried to deconstruct the stand-alone mythic hero by emphasizing his human struggles, his dependence on God, and his place as part of a community. Even his writing challenges simple notions of the individual authorial voice, as drafts of his books and prefaces were often written by others at his request, based on his talks or on conversations. He was, as one of his collaborators Janet Whitney-Brown observed, primarily an orator, and thus efforts to transform his speaking voice into text required choices analogous to representing a three-dimensional object in two dimensions. From the beginning of L’Arche in 1964, Vanier’s connections and specific historical contexts allowed his particular gifts to flourish while his ideas took root and spread far and wide. Jean Vanier’s legacy is thus not one story of saintly perfection, but instead can be found in thousands of stories around the world of people taking up his compelling vision to reconfigure structures of privilege and celebrate diverse communities across every kind of divide.

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Acknowledgments

This book would never have reached completion without the kindness, good cheer, and intellectual acuity of Geoff Whitney-Brown. My heartfelt thanks and lifelong love! Jean Vanier died before seeing this in print, but his spirit can be found throughout. The cover design by David Drummond, using Jean Vanier’s hands from the 1972 United Church Observer photo, delights me. A United Church of Canada McGeachy Senior Scholarship allowed me to travel and complete my original research. The University of Victoria’s Centre for Studies in Religion and Society provided office space, library access, and colleagues. I am grateful to everyone in the United Church and L’Arche who shared their time and stories. You are all part of this book. My thanks to everyone at McGill-Queen’s University Press who worked on this book, especially Kyla Madden for encouraging me to revisit my McGeachy research, and for her wise counsel along the way. The United Church of Canada Foundation provided a publishing grant to MQ UP . I will be forever grateful to my parents, Barb and Herb Whitney, and to my children, Janet, Monica, and David, for their faith in the value of this project and for many joyful meals together. I hope all my readers – and all who will never read this book – find pleasure in continuing to build tender societies of peace, mutuality, and goodwill.

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Tender to the World

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introduction

Inversion, Pleasure, and Story Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for God’s people to dwell together in unity. (Psalm 133) What is the secret that allows L’Arche to exist? I’ll tell you: pleasure! (Jean Vanier writing to Julia Kristeva, 15 July 2009)1

This book explores big questions. To paraphrase Wade Davis, what does it mean to be human and alive in community? In more practical terms, what transforms and sustains communities? The apparently narrow lens of overlooked stories about connections between the United Church of Canada, Jean Vanier, and L’Arche reveals that communities can spring to life when something unexpected erupts to challenge the familiar, that communities are sustained by experiences of pleasure, and that transformative experiences are negotiated and held in memory when people share their stories. Some stories in this book are historical and involve particular places and people, while others recount connections on the level of ideas or inspiration. Some of these stories are encouraging, some are delightful, and others are awkward or painful. What makes these stories so profound? As a literary scholar interested in the social and cultural meanings of stories, I argue that the interest lies in their dynamics of transformation and the intriguing pleasure of surprise. This book analyzes ever-changing relationships by exploring inversion, pleasure, and story. In brief, inversion is the first movement of transformation.

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Tender to the World

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, both the United Church and L’Arche were actively shaped by a series of social inversions. Pleasure might be the experience, but not always! I make no effort to idealize or romanticize either L’Arche or the United Church. Pleasure, as used by Vanier in his letter to Julia Kristeva quoted above, is closely related to Aristotle’s understanding of happiness, the pleasure of living responsibly as a valued member of one’s society. The third term is story. Story is a medium for communicating, listening, and interpreting, an accessible way of grasping the lived experience of transformative dynamics. Story is not limited to verbal communication. As the United Church’s Lois Wilson points out in Chapter 1, “It’s harder without words. There are other ways of ‘being with’ other than words.”2 Community is foundational to the United Church, literally. A Church-wide remit voted on in 2017 stated: “We believe God is inviting us to change radically and renew ourselves so we can engage fully and authentically with diverse communities in a changing context.”3 The United Church approved that “communities of faith” replace “pastoral charges” or “congregations” as the basic unit of the United Church. The remit specified, “Communities of faith would include any community of people based in Jesus Christ that gathers to explore faith, to worship, and to serve.”4 Clearly, “community” means more than an institutional category. Communities of faith are the basis of the continuing United Church of Canada. Jean Vanier, after decades of living in community, provides an important caution: “The time when a community feels it may be dying is not the time to change externals.” Instead Vanier asserts, “This is the time for inner renewal, for a renewed trust in personal relationships; it is a time to stay close to the poor and those in distress.”5 The United Church’s commitment to becoming an “intercultural church” may offer a path to this kind of inner renewal through personal relationships, asking, “What social and material arrangements enable all minds, bodies and souls to worship, grow spiritually, and contribute to the community? The radically accessible faith community includes Christians with disabilities as active, self-identified members in the body of Christ whose vulnerability make the church whole, for ‘difference is how God says beauty.’”6 We could consider the call for “alliance-building” in the 2015 “Theologies of Disabilities Report” to the 42nd General Council as initiating a tender process, tendering a call for practical help to meet a need:

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Introduction 5

Alliance-building through action is key for the work of social transformation. The ethicist Janet Jakobsen argues that without attention to forming alliances in a context of difference, movements for social change tend to reproduce the very dynamics they criticize in the dominant society. She contends that alliancebuilding must engage diversity and complexity within and among groups. Only then can movements for change avoid reproducing the barriers of we/they thinking and instead form working relationships for the creation of ‘spaces where differences need not imply hierarchy and domination.’7 A problem with convincing pronouncements like this is that it is hard to get beyond the words. What does it mean to “form alliances in the context of difference”? What is the “alliance-building through action” that “must engage diversity and complexity within and among groups” to avoid reproducing hierarchical we/they thinking? The hundreds of commissioners at the 2015 United Church General Council might well have wondered, “Sounds great, but where do we start?” In this book, I suggest that the mutual relationship between the United Church and L’Arche is already an alliance in these terms. L’Arche and the United Church have a half-century of history as allies, creating “spaces where differences need not imply hierarchy and domination,” yet neither has paid attention to the significance of this long relationship, either in the past or going forward. Curiously, neither L’Arche nor Vanier are mentioned in the “Theologies of Disabilities Report” that proposes alliance-building between the church and people with disabilities and their allies. In 2018, a United Church minister active for years in both L’Arche and a regional United Church Intercultural Ministry Network admitted that he had never heard of the United Church’s “Theologies of Disabilities Report.” Similarly, a United Church minister who recently served L’Arche on an international level was also unfamiliar with the report. On the other hand, L’Arche leaders invited to address United Church gatherings are also usually unaware of their shared commitments and vision for society, linked already through a long history of connections between their communities. To be honest, both the United Church and L’Arche have a history of producing well-crafted documents that are widely ignored. As a scholar, it is tempting to assume that Jean Vanier’s writings have

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Tender to the World

continually shaped L’Arche culture and experience, or that United Church documents such as “Mending the World” (1998) or the more recent “Theologies of Disability Report” (2015) influence the life and choices of United Church communities. However, even the writers themselves admit that few members of the anticipated audience read the documents. Often these kinds of writings prove more popular and influential outside of their respective organizations. Further, both L’Arche and the United Church have become increasingly decentralized since the 1990s, so centrally produced studies or reports are even less likely to impact local communities. In this study, I include key documents and writings of L’Arche and the United Church, recognizing that they are often more aspirational than descriptive. You may find that the most multi-layered and thought-provoking research is found in people’s stories. That was what motivated my research. The documents will remain in archives and libraries, but stories held only in people’s memories risked being lost. t h e p l ay e r s : t h e u n i t e d c h u r c h o f c a n a d a , j e a n va n i e r , a n d l ’ a r c h e

On the world stage, the United Church of Canada, as a uniquely Canadian church, has always been a marginal player. Founded in 1925 as an extraordinary experiment in church unity, Canada’s Methodist, Congregationalist, and most of the Presbyterian Churches joined to create a new national Protestant church, established by an Act of Parliament. By 1928, the United Church Year Book identified the new church as “a Uniting as well as a United Church,” anticipating “a still wider union.”8 The Evangelical United Brethren Churches joined in 1968. Of course, each of those dates simply marks the culmination of years of dreaming, scheming, intrigue, hope, prayer, desire and maneuvering. For most of a century, the United Church of Canada has worked to build a diverse Christian community of worshippers unique to Canada. Like most mainline churches, it reached its membership pinnacle about the time L’Arche began in 1964, but remains the second largest Christian denomination in Canada, after the Roman Catholic Church. The first L’Arche community was begun in France by Jean Vanier. Born in 1928 into a Canadian diplomatic family, son of Canada’s first French Canadian and first Roman Catholic governor general and

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Introduction 7

winner of the 2015 Templeton Prize, Jean Vanier was a philosopher, a speaker, and the founder of L’Arche.9 In an era before group homes or community living, people with intellectual disabilities lived either with family members or in large institutions. Visiting several French institutions in 1963, Vanier was moved by the residents’ cry of loneliness and anguish as well as their cry for friendship, for love, and for community. A priest he had met years before, Père Thomas Philippe, had been Vanier’s spiritual mentor and was now chaplain to a small institution for men with intellectual disabilities in the small village of Trosly, France.10 After some months of discernment, Vanier decided not to continue teaching philosophy at University of Toronto’s St Michael’s College and instead pursue a more radical lifestyle, ­choosing to live in France with people with intellectual disabilities. L’Arche officially began on 5 August 1964 when two men with intellectual disabilities, Philippe Seux and Raphaël Simi, said yes to Vanier’s extraordinary and unprecedented invitation to move out of their institution and create a family-style home together in a run-down house in the tiny village of Trosly, 75 kilometers northeast of Paris. In 2014, founding member Philippe Seux recalled how it began: “Jean Vanier took me out of a center where I had been placed by social workers. It had really been desolate there … When I came to L’Arche, there was no electricity, none. We used candles for lighting, it was fun! There were no toilets or showers, but I felt like I was exploding with joy – phew! – I was so happy to be there.”11 L’Arche also began with a failure. On the first night, the house also included another man from the same institution named Dany and a friend of Vanier’s named Jean-Louis Coïc. By the second day, it was clear that Dany needed more support than the unstructured little household could offer, and Vanier sadly returned Dany to the institution. Jean-Louis Coïc quickly recognized that the new community’s way of life did not suit him, but he stayed for several weeks supporting the others until more assistants arrived. Vanier, Seux, and Simi carried on.12 The second country where L’Arche began was Canada. In 1969, Steve and Ann Newroth with Bill Van Buren opened L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, and it immediately became an ecumenical community. The Newroths were Anglican. Bill Van Buren arrived from the Lawson School for Retarded Children, whose staff told the Newroths that Bill’s church affiliation was the United Church of Canada. Half a century after the first Canadian L’Arche community began, L’Arche has become an international federation of more than

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Tender to the World

165 L’Arche communities and projects in almost forty countries. Still, on a global scale L’Arche recognizes itself as a small seed, a “sign” offering an interfaith model of community and social engagement along with a theology of disability and, most importantly, an orientation of the heart, a way of being. Throughout this book, you will find that people connected to L’Arche sometimes refer to “core members.” According to L’Arche legend, many years ago members of L’Arche with intellectual disabilities voted to call themselves “core members,” because they form the core of any L’Arche community. Theologian John Swinton aptly describes L’Arche as “an international network of communities in which people with intellectual disabilities live with people who do not share that life experience.”13 As United Church member and ordained minister Northrop Frye might have observed, the United Church and L’Arche are metaphorically similar. Both are carried by a social imaginary that is far larger than their size. Both are influential internationally. To offer just two examples, Lois Wilson, the first female moderator of the United Church, extended the United Church’s international reach when she was elected to the six-person Presidium of the World Council of Churches from 1983–91. In a similar vein, L’Arche may be small but it is widely respected even in government social services: a 2006 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation review of options for people with intellectual disabilities identified L’Arche as the only group-home-type living arrangement named as “best practice.”14 How to account for the outsized influence of both? How can we theorize L’Arche or the United Church in relation to the larger social contexts and cultural and religious forces that shaped the latter twentieth century? Scholarship around the United Church of Canada has focused mainly on church history, histories of specific United Church movements, theologies and ethics, biographies, essays in honour of individuals, and collections of sermons. A whole sub-genre of speculative discussions about the United Church’s imminent demise began in the 1970s.15 National church and regional archives hold historical documents such as records of proceedings and committee reports, and the United Church Observer holds pride of place as “the oldest continuously published magazine in North America and the second oldest in the English speaking world.”16

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Introduction 9

In contrast, L’Arche does not have comprehensive archives of its historic documents or working papers,17 but it has stimulated academic discussion in an astonishing range of disciplines. Articles and books in English have been published in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, social policy, theology, philosophy, political and cultural studies, ethics, social work, disability studies, history, geography, and biography, as well as poetry, drama, memoir, and even fiction.18 L’Arche International published the magazine Letters of L’Arche from 1971 until 2014. There have been many documentary films about L’Arche and interviews with Jean Vanier and others, in addition to Vanier’s own voluminous writings in philosophy, theology, memoir, and anthropology.19 Perhaps this is even more surprising when we remember that most people at the core of L’Arche would not be able to read any of these studies. But right from the founding by Jean Vanier with his newly acquired PhD, L’Arche has attracted people at both ends of the intellectual spectrum.20

“the

spirit of it”

In 2013, theologian John Swinton responded to my question of what the United Church could learn from L’Arche with this insight: “L’Arche in principal should function as a catalyst, that by being itself it changes things, rather than people copying it. Just the fact that it exists should be transformative if people notice it and hear the spirit of it.”21 A key to understanding “the spirit of it” is to consider how Vanier’s unique character and energy shaped the project from its earliest days. In a 1965 interview on C B C , Jean Vanier explained his new L’Arche house as a place of social levelling, “where we live all together without this kind of distinction between the director and those who are directed … a family together, brothers and sisters if you like, in a very happy family atmosphere where we eat together, where we live together.”22 Louis Pretty, a Canadian architect who went on to a distinguished teaching career at Université de Montréal, was involved in Vanier’s purchase of the first house in Trosly. Within weeks of its beginning, Pretty came to live there as one of the community’s early assistants. Looking back, he remembers: “Jean was always very optimistic, he didn’t see any problems, anywhere; everything was perfect, there was no need to worry, everything would go well! … His spirit was certainly a little contagious, but one did have some doubts.”23

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More recently, Vanier described the process of building a L’Arche community in three stages: “The first thing is doing acts of justice, taking people who have been treated cruelly out of those situations. Then the second thing is that the assistants are changed. And the third thing is that we come together, and we don’t know who is changing whom and it doesn’t matter, but we have fun. This is part of the complexity.”24 In other words, Vanier describes community life as a complex process without fixed positions of hierarchy, of high and low. It might start in what appears to be a unidirectional movement of a preferential option for the poor so that the “poor” are raised up, but then the assistants are also changed, then it turns topsy-turvy so that who is high and who is low isn’t identifiable and it doesn’t matter, because, Vanier insists, they are having fun together. As Vanier explained at a fiftieth anniversary of L’Arche celebration in 2014: “God wants unity between all human beings, and we can’t celebrate humanity if the poorest and the weakest are excluded. So we must have a place to welcome those who are the weakest, those in wheelchairs, those who have difficulty speaking, walking, who can’t go to university, a place for them where life can be celebrated, because if we haven’t got this place, we can’t celebrate humanity. That is God’s vision.”25 This suggests something interesting about unity: unity is entirely different than uniformity or even coherence. Unity is the ultimate project of both L’Arche and the United Church, but both have had to give up limiting ideas of what unity might look like. The United Church has had to give up a simplistic notion of unity as a single church structure into which more and more denominations were expected to merge together. Recently, the United Church has redefined unity as simultaneously embracing radical inclusiveness and maximum diversity with the goal of fostering a genuinely intercultural church. For example, the “Theologies of Disabilities Report” to the 42nd United Church General Council in 2015 states, “An intercultural church honours difference, works to transform relations that exclude, and is committed to be changed by those who have been seen as ‘other.’ When difference is recognized as ‘necessary to truth and goodness’ differences become sources of energy, alternative visions of reality, and ways of moving beyond binary thinking into models of multiplicity, mutuality, and dialogue.”26 In other words, unity is more than bringing together differences. For the United Church in the twenty-first century, unity “honours difference” that leads to mutual transformation.

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This formulation of the transformative power of an intercultural United Church is close to the “L’Arche Identity and Mission,” which states, “We are people with and without intellectual disabilities, sharing life in communities, and belonging to an international federation. Mutual relationships and trust in God are at the heart of our journey together. We celebrate the unique value of every person and recognize our need of one another.” The L’Arche statement continues, “Our Mission is to: Make known the gifts of people with intellectual disabilities, revealed through mutually transforming relationships” and “Engage in our diverse cultures, working together towards a more human society.”27 L’Arche too has had to let go of simplistic models of unity, right from the first year when Vanier agreed to expand his one household to include a small institution of thirty men with more serious behavioral issues. L’Arche expanded from its Roman Catholic beginnings, becoming first ecumenical and then interfaith, while developing into a complex worldwide federation of communities in many cultures, negotiating myriad regulations and contexts. For both the United Church and L’Arche, unity is not what they initially imagined. Yet each tenaciously holds onto a mission or call to unity. tender stories

Many key stories about L’Arche and members of the United Church initially seem like merely individual accounts of transformation, but for Vanier these experiences are the building blocks of changing the world. He concluded Becoming Human, his best-selling CBC Massey lectures, with his oft-quoted invitation to “change our world one heart at a time.”28 Consider United Church minister Maggie Enwright’s testimony about L’Arche: “Not to get too dramatic, but it probably changed my life. The first or second time I went, we sang ‘How could anyone ever tell you that you’re anything less than beautiful’ and I thought – that’s what I’ve been needing to hear all my life.”29 From the outside, I suspect no one would have imagined that Enwright was someone in need of affirmation. By the time she encountered L’Arche, Enwright was an experienced United Church minister with an undergraduate degree in psychology, a law degree, several years working as a lawyer, then a variety of other experiences before entering ministry. She had served both rural and urban churches as well as several years as United Church overseas personnel with the Moravian Church

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in Nicaragua. But something completely new happened for her when she got to know the people of L’Arche Comox Valley: “Until that moment, no matter how accomplished, I had such low self esteem inside. L’Arche changed that for me. How? By witnessing how valuable people are who don’t have accomplishments or smarts. And how coming into community they don’t seem to suffer the same intimidation that most of us do. When you walk in the door at Jubilee House, Lisa will say ‘Maggie! Hi Maggie!’ and Cory will shout out, and it’s been like that since day one and they knew my name.” I am not trying to perpetuate reductive stereotypes of either the open-hearted person with an intellectual disability or the anxiously self-critical United Church minister handicapped by an overly developed intellect. Rather, I want to slow down and pay attention to what Enwright says here: “L’Arche changed that for me. How? By witnessing how valuable people are who don’t have accomplishments or smarts.” People who will never grasp the implications of her degrees and life choices knew her name. Notice two inversions here. Enwright suddenly discovered that she is intrinsically valuable because she witnessed how people who are often dismissed or marginalized are valuable. In a movement that Aristotle might call recognition and reversal, recognizing their value transforms her own. It’s not only a transformative double-inversion, but also a story of pleasure. Her story is simple: from the very first day people knew her name and shouted it out with joyful welcome. Even more profoundly, Enwright’s story is tender. Tender is an important word in L’Arche. As Vanier explains, tenderness is physical, “a meeting through the flesh.” He adds, “it’s also to look tenderly, to listen tenderly and in that tenderness there’s no judgment, no condemnation. Essentially tenderness is the road to communion, to mutual presence. So tenderness is something that we are called to live with people with all forms of disabilities. And essentially the whole reality of life is to reveal to people that you are more precious than you’d ever believe. You’re important.”30 In the chapters that follow, we will listen to stories of encounters. Might the history between the United Church and L’Arche offer a unique model of a tender relationship? Perhaps at a time when the United Church continues to wonder about its very existence and L’Arche searches for new ways to respond to social changes, their history with each other says to both, “You are more precious than you’d ever believe. You are important.”

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Tenderness is also a sign of maturity. People’s intellectual disabilities are frequently defined as quantifiable immaturity in phrases like “the mental capacity of an 8-year-old.”31 In L’Arche, it is often noted that intellectual disability does not necessarily handicap someone’s spiritual life or ability to love.32 But few efforts have been made to explain what that maturity looks like. L’Arche psychiatrist Patrick Mathias believed that tenderness is a mark of mature solidarity: “Tenderness is a way of life, where gentleness and kindness remind us how different it is from sentimentalism or romanticism and that it requires maturity.”33 To Vanier, tenderness also implies unity. The opposite of violence, he suggests, is not simply non-violence, but tenderness. He adds, “it’s the coming together of the inner and the outer worlds. It’s the unification of the whole person, of the spirit and the flesh coming together in a unity.”34 The word tender has not been used much in the United Church. Tender is not in the 1940 Statement of Faith or any version of the New Creed or the 2006 Song of Faith or even in the Manual of any year. The 1925 Articles of Doctrine refer to Micah 6:8, but translates it as “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God” while most Roman Catholics using the Jerusalem Bible know the central verse as “to love tenderly.” The word “tender” has not been overused in the United Church. It is not over-determined. Tender is a noun, an adjective, a verb, even an adverb. Tender’s multiple meanings escape simple reduction – thus I propose that tender is a timely word now.35 Theologian John Swinton suggests, “I think the United Church can learn a lot from L’Arche: in L’Arche you have reclamation of the gifts of the Spirit in the sense that gentleness, kindness, and patience are at the heart of any community.” Paradoxically, “tender” can also imply something not yet mature. The term “tenderfoot” suggests a lack of experience, a deficiency that may need extra understanding and patience, with the potential for growth. At a still deeper level, tender hints at vulnerability, weakness, even suffering. A tender subject can be a sore point, something painful, requiring care and delicacy. Jean Vanier insists that “We must not be idealistic about people with mental handicaps. Some have been victims of so much contempt and violence, which they have stored up inside themselves, that there can be an explosion of violence.”36 Tenderness as a way of life must be able to encompass this kind of vulnerability in anyone, as well as in communities. Vanier continues, “At L’Arche, there are moments of elation,

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but there are also moments of great pain and anguish.”37 His description of L’Arche applies equally to the United Church. United Church minister Doug Graves, speaking at the fortieth anniversary of L’Arche in Greater Vancouver, commented on why he likes the “L’Arche Identity and Mission” statement: “I like the fact that it’s not a statement we created out of our heads, but is, in fact a summary of what we have learned about ourselves over the years – a statement of what we have discerned about ourselves and our role in God’s mission through our living and serving together.”38 Exploring the tender story of the United Church, Jean Vanier, and L’Arche moves “out of our heads” to claim a mutually transformative reality that is already being lived. the structure of this book

This book unfolds in two parts. The first two chapters trace aspects of shared history between the United Church and L’Arche. Vanier is frequently called a “saint,” but when members of the United Church say that, what do they mean, and how does he respond? Chapter 1, “Are You a Saint?,” explores early links between the United Church and Jean Vanier himself, beginning with his address to the United Church 25th General Council of 1972. We look back to his inclusion in the 1960s United Church “New Curriculum” for Christian education, then trace United Church involvement in Vanier’s televised 1983 address at the World Council of Churches opening assembly in Vancouver. In each instance, Vanier’s message offered a way to notice and welcome surprising social inversions, similar to those that the United Church itself was experiencing in the 1960s and 1970s. A tangible sign of the United Church’s inspiration through and affection for Vanier has been its support and commitment to L’Arche. Chapter 2, “Breakfast at the Ecumenical Buffet,” focuses on partnerships between the United Church and L’Arche, practical relationships that have been reciprocal though not symmetrical. In the 1970s context of the ecumenical movement and new developments in social services, connections between Canada’s “united and uniting church” and L’Arche in Canada included close collaboration, generous gifts, painful struggles, misunderstandings, and even breakages. We follow some key connections between the United Church and L’Arche leadership to the present day.

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The second half of the book is more thematic. Chapter 3, “Just Stories?,” explores L’Arche and the United Church as storytelling communities. Narratives of identity and revitalization encompass suffering and hilarity, revealing how the unique social levelling of L’Arche has impacted the lives and experience of United Church members involved in L’Arche. Chapter 4, “Secret Agency and Surprising Subjects,” reminds us that in L’Arche, “core members” are the energy and fuel of each community. Canadian society in general has had low expectations of people with intellectual disabilities, so moments when they claim their own agency have often been a surprise and revelation to their fellow United Church members. Social and cultural theorists help to understand the dynamics, paradoxical complexities, and significance of unexpected agency in the United Church and L’Arche. “Tell the story!” United Church writer and speaker Ralph Milton urged me. Quoting Aristotle, he added: “Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, hopefully not too far apart.”

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1 “Are You a Saint?”: The United Church of Canada and Jean Vanier Tender: a small boat connecting a larger ship to the land: a connector, a liaison.

“If you don’t worship him, you don’t know him.” Read that twice. This adulation of Jean Vanier is surely one of the most astonishing statements ever published in the United Church Observer. It comes from the December 1972 issue introducing an edited version of Vanier’s address to General Council, a large national gathering of the highest “court” of decision-making in the United Church of Canada. It continues, “To know Jean Vanier himself you can read his book Eruption to Hope, or his poignant poetry in Tears of Silence. You can observe him on T V – Canada has had at least three national programs about him. Or you can meet him, as the commissioners to General Council did this summer, when he talked with them for two and a half hours.” Then, as though embarrassed by its own starry-eyed enthusiasm, it adds an amusingly down-to-earth physical description: “His shabby jacket hangs loosely, like the folds of an ill-fitting skin, on his gaunt, stooped, 6’4” frame. In his chair up front, he sits hunched, hands in his lap, staring down his great hooked nose at the floor like a meditative but amiable buzzard.” Yet this unusual introduction concludes by insisting that Vanier’s expression of saintliness is available to everyone: “in the glow of his words and his life, you forget everything except that this man is a saint, calling us to be the same.”1

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1 9 7 2 : j e a n va n i e r at t h e 25 t h g e n e r a l c o u n c i l o f   t h e u n i t e d c h u r c h o f c a n a d a i n s a s k at o o n

Many years after Jean Vanier addressed the 25th General Council of the United Church in Saskatoon on 19 August 1972, no one is entirely sure why the general secretary of the United Church George Morrison invited Vanier. Sr Sue Mosteller, who was part of L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill and coordinating Vanier’s schedule, remembers that Vanier and Morrison had been in touch often, but does not recall why.2 Changes in style and hierarchy were afoot in the United Church at the time, however. United Church minister Bruce McLeod, who was elected moderator at that General Council, highlights efforts by Morrison to change the centralized nature of United Church leadership, moving from a top-down model to something “more circles than ladders.”3 George Morrison had joined the General Council office (United Church head office) around 1970, bringing what McLeod recalls as “a different style, more soft-edged. He didn’t care if he had a little room for his office without a proper desk.” A former vicepresident of I B M in the US, Morrison had entered ministry later in life, winning the Gold Medal at Emmanuel College. He provided leadership for a new kind of United Church General Council meeting, seating delegates at round tables rather than in pews. And he invited Jean Vanier. “George had it in his mind that this was something we needed at this strategic time in the United Church, to have a presence like Jean with us,” says McLeod. By the time Vanier addressed the 451 members of General Council in 1972, many United Church members were already aware of his work. Jean Vanier was known in Canada as the son of Pauline Vanier and the late Georges Vanier, one of Canada’s most beloved and respected governors general. In 1964, Jean Vanier had founded L’Arche in France, creating a new model of making home together with people with intellectual disabilities. It was a radical idea in the era before community living or group homes. The first Canadian L’Arche community was begun in Richmond Hill by Anglicans Steve and Ann Newroth in 1969, bridging the Protestant–Roman Catholic divide.4 He had been interviewed on CBC several times, beginning in 1965 while his father was still governor general. Vanier’s book exploring his father’s spiritual life, titled In Weakness, Strength, was

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published in 1969. His 1967 address to a parliamentary prayer breakfast shortly after his father’s death would have been attended by United Church members on Parliament Hill such as Prime Minister Lester Pearson. The text of that talk, along with an address to Major Superiors of Roman Catholic Religious Orders in 1969 and to the Empire Club of Canada in 1971, was published as Eruption to Hope in 1971. United Church members remember hearing him speak at cities across Canada when he returned from France each year to give public lectures. There was probably another layer to Vanier’s invitation to General Council in 1972. Phyllis Airhart, United Church historian, guesses that his invitation might have been because he was French-Canadian.5 Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, the 1968 creation of the Parti Québécois, and the 1970 “October Crisis” had challenged the United Church to find ways to be a united and uniting church in Quebec. In 1971, General Council had created a special commission on French-English relations.6 Jean Vanier would have looked like an ideal choice: descended from generations of the de Salaberry and Vanier families, his Quebec credentials were impeccable. He was the son of Canada’s first French-Canadian governor general, and had served in the British and Canadian navies. He held together French and English cultures through his particular history.7 Still, it seems no one was prepared for the experience of Vanier’s address to the 25th General Council. More than forty years later, Bruce McLeod’s face lights up as he remembers that day. Clearly his first meeting with Vanier in Saskatoon is still, as he says, “very vivid.” At forty-three, he was the same age as Vanier. He was also minister of Bloor Street United Church in Toronto and the newly elected moderator of the United Church of Canada. McLeod had not expected to be elected, and was asking himself “What am I doing?” as he rushed out to buy a necktie. He was to introduce Vanier, so they sat together at lunch before Vanier’s talk. McLeod recalls that he tried to get to know Vanier, “and at the end of lunch he knew all about me and I didn’t know anything more about him than when we had begun. He drew out my whole life and held it in his hands as we had lunch together, the kindest, most beautiful – it wasn’t patronizing at all – like you’d hold a bird in your hand, he was holding me there, who had just been elected moderator.” Perhaps no one remembers McLeod’s introduction, but everyone who was there remembers Vanier’s talk. United Church minister

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Beverley Milton and writer Ralph Milton had spent the previous decade in the Philippines and New York, so had no expectations or particular sense of who Vanier was. They do not remember any notable excitement in advance among the people at General Council that Vanier would be speaking. But both recall the talk itself in detail.8 As Beverley Milton describes: What I remember was sitting in break-time in between speakers, and he’s not in sight yet, and everybody else is gossiping about what’s going on and out of the corner of my eye I saw this fellow coming down the aisle, not really dressed for the conference, and looking kind of seedy, and my God, he went up and he got on the platform and everything went absolutely quiet. He had a way of getting attention. It wasn’t what he wore – it didn’t matter what he wore! When he opened his mouth, we didn’t move, and it was at least two hours or more, and we didn’t move at all. We listened, and we became part of what he was trying to say. I think it’s his presence. Who he was, and what he was, was in his whole demeanor. More than four decades later, Ralph Milton still sounds awed: I’m a guy who has spent a lifetime working on communications, and how people present themselves, so I’m very aware of how people conduct themselves when they are in public. This man violated every rule I know of in terms of public speaking. First of all, he sat down, he was sitting, he did not stand. He was sitting! And he wore a suit that looked as if he had bought it at the thrift shop and it didn’t fit very well. He was not animated: his voice was quiet. He just quietly told stories about his experiences at L’Arche – stories about his interaction and the spirit that he saw in these people. I remember him talking about giving a bath to a man who had no communication whatever, he could not even move his own body, and he was giving this man a bath and it was as if he were giving a bath to the Christ. This man was Christ to him. And the way he talked about it, these stories were so real to him and so personal that there was absolutely no way you could do anything except believe that this man had been blessed – this man of huge intellect who came from a wellknown family, the Vaniers – this man was giving his life to people

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who couldn’t give anything back it seemed, and yet were giving him everything. Ralph Milton continues, trying to tease out what exactly happened that day: “That for me was a kind of deep, deep wisdom that I would really covet and really wished I could somehow have. As Bev said, he held that audience totally – you could have heard a pin drop – just by the strength and the power of his spirit there. You could evaluate it: he did everything wrong, and yet it was totally right.” As Ralph and Bev Milton recount their initial impressions of Vanier, one sees that a strong part of the attraction was in how he surprised and even overturned initial expectations: his shabby attire yet commanding presence, his seated delivery yet riveting stories, his quiet voice yet the strength of his spirit, his huge intellect given to people with intellectual disabilities. That everything was “wrong yet totally right” was paradoxically fundamental to Vanier’s allure. A key argument of this book is that experiences of inversion, where expectations are overturned, can be simultaneously upsetting and exciting, challenging and inspiring. To grasp the implications of this, we need first to understand how high/low hierarchies pervade our social perceptions. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, literary theorists Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue that western cultures are structured by largely unexamined hierarchies of value in four areas: “The high/low opposition in each of our four symbolic domains – psychic forms, the human body, geographical space and social order – is a fundamental basis to mechanisms of ordering and sense-making in European cultures.”9 We can find this dynamic at work in all four “symbolic domains” in the Miltons’ accounts of Vanier’s talk. At the “high” end, Vanier’s academic intellect and spiritual insights (psychic form) at the important 25th General Council (geographical space) contrast with his “low” unassuming demeanor (human body) and his life with marginalized people (social order). This kind of inversion is part of the core appeal of the gospels. It underlies Vanier’s vision for community and society and has gripped the imaginations of people in the United Church, especially those with direct experience in L’Arche. By all accounts, Jean Vanier blew into the lives of the United Church leadership like the wind of the spirit, and the love was mutual. In a public letter to his friends and communities, dated 25 August

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1972, Vanier called the encounter “one of the most moving that I have ever experienced”: I departed [from Cleveland] Saturday and when I arrived in Saskatoon, I had a meal with the “moderator” and a few other people from the United Church. They welcomed me with such goodness and openness. I spoke with the United Church assembly for an hour and a quarter and then there were questions. I spoke about the poor and wounded people in Cleveland, about people who close themselves off from misery, and about Jesus who comes to heal us and free us from our egoisms. Their attentive listening was such a strong sign of grace and of their thirst for the Holy Spirit. At the end the “moderator” asked me to say the prayer. All held hands as we prayed together. There was great peace and silence at this very moving moment. I felt so poor and little before their thirst and their cry to be instruments of the Holy Spirit. I wanted no more than to disappear to let Jesus appear. I had such a desire for unity; maybe Jesus will arrange that my next retreat include Anglicans, Catholics and members of the United Church. It would be beautiful if we could begin to pray together to beg the Holy Spirit to come and unite us all. This encounter is perhaps one of the most moving that I have ever experienced. We must pray even more for unity.10 What touched Vanier so profoundly? He identifies the openness, “thirst,” and “cry” of participants to be instruments of the Holy Spirit, as well as the entire orientation of the United Church toward unity. What did Vanier say in his talk? He states in his letter that he spoke about how Jesus comes to “free us from our egoisms.” The excerpts in the December 1972 United Church Observer show that he invited the United Church General Council delegates to recognize that “wounded people live in insecurity,” then to shift from their heads into their hearts through a series of movements from high to low: “No wonder that those who live in insecurity turn to God. No wonder Paul says, ‘God has chosen the weak to confound the strong; God has chosen the foolish to confound the wise; God has chosen the despised to confound those who think they are favoured’ … and also to tell those outside prisons that they too are in a prison, a prison of culture, a prison of a priori’s and prejudices, a prison of fear which

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stops us meeting wounded people, because we’re frightened.”11 Vanier reverses assumptions about social connections: “Sometimes people say, ‘I’ll never go back to India because you see people dying in the streets.’ Even if it were true, why aren’t they saying, ‘Because there are people dying in the streets, I must go there’?”12 He delightedly upends assumptions about authority: “The other day, I heard from a group of specialized educators for the mentally retarded. They said, ‘Can we come and visit you? We’re very interested in the sexual problems of the handicapped.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s good, because we’re very interested here in the sexual problems of educators; so we can have a nice sharing session.’”13 Even in humour, his point is clear: “To specialize in people can be a flight from listening to people.”14 Vanier reframes the request from the specialized educators for access to intimate details of the lives of his community members.15 I don’t want Vanier’s story to be misunderstood: he cultivated close and trusting relationships with the many professionals who supported the community, and by 1972 many L’Arche communities were already engaged actively in policy development.16 He is not rejecting professional interest or expertise. Rather, he is offering an amused and unexpected suggestion of mutuality that reveals some of the unnamed power dynamics and assumptions. He reiterates his underlying point: “Don’t look at the file first, look at the person! Listen, listen, listen!”17 An essential aspect of this way of relating is the unexpected reversal of expected roles and status. To Vanier, this kind of reversal is foundational in the Christian tradition and key to understanding Jesus: “But Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies. Bless those that hate you.’ This Jesus is a madman – he is continually telling us to do the impossible … To become these carriers of peace – this is the message, the very simple message of Jesus. Frequently we complicate it. But he is a strange man, this Jesus who kneels and washes the feet of the twelve. He does these follies because he loves.”18 Vanier directly addresses the question of economic and class privilege, gently encouraging people to pay attention to their hearts and to take small steps: “it’s not so important to share one’s goods. We know full well we can give all we have to the poor, and still not have charity. What is important is to share your eyes, your hands, your tenderness. Look at people, and say ‘I love you.’ Look at the handicapped and the prisoners. Once you’ve met them and love has grown between you, then you can start dispossessing. You don’t dispossess

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before love.”19 The first questions, he implies, are not about denying or getting rid of a privileged social position, but looking for ways to use that privilege in the service of others: “It isn’t a problem of whether you keep this house, or this car; it’s whom you take in this car, and how you use it! Whom do you bring into your home? It’s not whether it’s this refrigerator or that, but what you do with the food inside it. Frequently we ask ourselves the wrong questions.”20 In other words, the important questions are not theoretical but rather choices made in response to relationships. Once mutual relationships begin, then something new and unexpected can happen. Many people bought and copied the tape of Vanier’s talk, but none can be found now because, they say, they wore out the cassette tape listening to it so often.21 His insights moved his specific United Church audience, hungry as they were to live the call of God in society.22 The significance of Vanier’s talk to the United Church General Council expands when it is read in the context of his activities in August 1972. Vanier arrived in Saskatoon after an intense time of speaking and leading retreats. In an 11 August letter from Quebec at the end of a retreat he admits, “In some ways it was quite a heavy week.”23 Sleeping in an old prison with homeless youth, Vanier had caught a cold. He led a retreat over several days for around 700 people. He visited a psychiatric hospital, then a hostel where men without work lived, often after being released from prison. But Vanier doesn’t describe that evening as bleak: “It was a good evening. We sang, danced and played games. I spoke to them about Jesus the poor one, and about some of my experiences in the prisons. I told them about the men I had met who had been deeply wounded by hardships.”24 From Vanier’s perspective, singing, dancing, and playing games together are not separate from deep hurt, but rather grow out of the painful realities of life. He continued on to Cleveland for a week-long event titled “Let’s Celebrate Jesus.” In a letter on 17 August, Vanier describes the leaders from seven “disadvantaged neighbourhoods” where “happenings” would take place throughout the week. The leadership group included “fifty people, some infirm, some elderly, a few priests, religious and black pastors. What united us all was our desire to announce and celebrate the name of Jesus.”25 As part of the event, Vanier visited several local prisons as well as homes for elderly people. He preached on the streets: “It was the first time that I had the joy of speaking outside in front of a crowd of people passing in the street

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… to people who are very little and very wounded, who do not even dare to enter a church.”26 When Vanier met with smaller groups, they would “share and pray together. It was good to share our weaknesses and our hope in Jesus.”27 In the evenings, large “Let’s Celebrate Jesus” festivals attended by up to a thousand people were held in the local parks of poor areas. One began with a street procession of people from ten different churches. Another was especially dramatic: while Vanier was speaking, there was a nearby car accident as a thunderstorm began. Vanier recalls, “One of the priests went to administer the sacrament of the sick. There was lightning followed by ambulance and fire engine sirens.”28 That evening ended with one of the attending police officers joining in the singing, praying, and dancing. At one of the last festivals, Vanier recounts with interest, “Many had drunk too much. One of them got up on the stage and spoke of his sufferings and he ended with, ‘but I love God.’ The parish priest said it was the first time that he saw in that neighbourhood of crime and drugs, a celebration for Jesus, the announcing of the Good News. It was a week of cooperation between men and women of different churches who wanted to say ‘thank you’ to Jesus. Often the pastors were little people, with small congregations in poverty-stricken neighbourhoods.”29 From there, Vanier flew directly to Saskatoon, where he ate lunch with Bruce McLeod and addressed the 25th General Council. It might help to think of Vanier as a tender, the small boat that connects a larger boat, such as an Ark, to the land and to other vessels. Through his talks, the privileged and respected son of Canada’s most beloved governor general connected the United Church not only to L’Arche, but also to people marginalized by poverty, disability, racial discrimination, violence, and imprisonment, as well as linking to French culture, the Roman Catholic Church, evangelical Christians of all denominations, the charismatic movement, and the Jesus people who delighted him in Cleveland and elsewhere.30 Vanier suggests that bridging social divides is not easy: “It is so difficult to bridge the gap. For myself, it is difficult. All my needs of security, all the values of my society, all my education – and then I discover that maybe the spirit of God is very different from the culture of our time.”31 Furthermore, Vanier asserts that bridging takes time: “It’s a slow process … becoming a bridge between these two cultures of those who have too much and those who have too little.”32 Ralph Milton muses that Vanier’s talk at General Council “certainly made a difference to me in the way I relate to people who have a

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handicap of some sort – or relate to anybody else, a recognition of my own handicaps, and recognizing that everybody has their own handicap, and there is a Christ in everyone that you meet.” This theme will run throughout all that follows: the deepest gift of L’Arche for the United Church is not a set of ideas, practical tips, or philosophical insights, but that L’Arche models a surprising way of being, inverting assumptions even about who is handicapped and where Jesus is embodied. For Vanier, these are not just ideas or tendencies, but experiences grounded in relationships. Perhaps these encounters are memorable because, in the imagery that Vanier uses in his letter, they offer a way of both awakening a thirst and responding to a cry. United Church Observer editor A.C. Forrest sounds elated reporting on the 1972 General Council, noting that he attended every General Council since 1948 but “This was the best!”33 He highlights “the long Sunday afternoon with Jean Vanier.”34 Forrest then describes a series of inversions, noting the full participation of delegates previously lower in status such as women, youth, and newcomers: “There were difficult years of Women’s Lib. This year the women, comprising about a third of the commissioners, seemed to take their place just like other liberated people without struggle, or without tokenism. Four-fifths of the Council was new. Youngsters who ten years ago would never have been considered were there as commissioners with their long hair, guitars and numerous speeches at the microphone.”35 Not only did those in previously low positions rise up, but the highlevel commissioners lay low: “I have never been at a Council where so many able men said so little and listened so much.”36 The new moderator overturned previous convention by presiding “in his shirt sleeves instead of the heavy moderatorial robes. He avoided having everybody stand up for him by sneaking in early and starting the sessions by playing the piano for a few songs.”37 McLeod invited the four hundred commissioners not to sit passively but all to come forward and converge at the front to hold hands at communion. A shortage of bread turned into an abundance for all. Forrest notes that the Roman Catholic observers pointed out that “the 25th General Council ‘was a family at work and prayer.’”38 Forrest and the Observer’s enthusiastic summaries of General Council suggests that one of the reasons that the United Church appreciated Jean Vanier’s inversions was because they paralleled the United Church’s own similar inversions that were bringing new life and vision, and not just in Saskatoon. Forrest sees the exciting Council meetings as “a sign

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of the new direction already taken” by United Church congregations across Canada.39 Remarkably, the Observer describes the new Moderator embodying a literal inversion by “standing on his head in yoga class” and then asks, “Standing on his head? Well, you get a different view of things that way. If McLeod as Moderator stands the United Church on its head a few times in the next two years, it will be a salutary shaking up.”40 Mark A. Noll has suggested that in Canada, the changes brought about by modernity “have worked through the communal, top-down structures of traditional Canadian religion.”41 Because the United Church was still fairly hierarchical in the way that Noll points out, the leadership of Bruce McLeod and other key national leaders impacted every level of the church. McLeod thinks that the many connections with Vanier through the early 1970s changed him, and thus changed the United Church, stating, “I think the influence [of Vanier] on the United Church has been osmosis, not a formal influence. Maybe it is just in my life, but I have been very affected by Jean Vanier.” For example, McLeod believes that one area where Vanier’s theology influenced the United Church was in his language of “wounded people, and we’re all wounded and there are some people whose wounds are more visible than others. But we’re all wounded people, and all have gifts, and need to be respected.” This seeped into United Church ethos. McLeod reflects, “I think it’s beautiful. It’s not just the United Church, but churches in general are perhaps more open to diversity in many ways today, including people who are visibly wounded – they are welcome and celebrated as part of the family circle, no surprise anymore as it was at one time.” 1967 : t h e n e w c u r r i c u l u m

By the 1972 General Council, tens of thousands of United Church youth might have read about Jean Vanier in their church school book, part of the “New Curriculum” Christian education program.42 A variety of United Church authors wrote books for all age groups, and by the mid-1960s the newly printed hardcover books were being purchased by tens of thousands of families across Canada. The first edition of Frank H. Morgan’s Intermediate Student Reading Book God Speaks Through People was published in 1964 with a run of 50,000 copies. Chapter 12 of the original version was titled, “It Happens Today: The Story of Two Modern Christians,” and included

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short biographies of the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, and Dr Mary Verghese, who were both alive at the time the book was published. By the third printing of 42,000 copies in 1967, chapter 12 had been replaced with “Fox Hole Christian: The Story of Robert McClure” followed by chapter 13: “The Ark: The Story of Jean Vanier.”43 The chapter about Vanier begins by inviting its twelve- to fourteenyear-old readers to “pretend that you are a newspaper reporter” and consider how would they interview someone like Jean Vanier.44 A short biography of Vanier follows, then this description: “You will notice that he speaks with a musical, liquid French accent. There is much laughter in his voice.”45 The questions posed to Vanier in God Speaks through People are initially unexpected and even jarring. For example, the interviewer inquires: “A friend of mine had a brother who was a mongoloid, and he told lies all the time. How can you run a house full of them if they don’t tell the truth?”46 You can hear the “laughter in his voice” in Vanier’s response to the question about whether “mongoloids” lie: “Oh, that is funny! Mongoloid children tell stories and lies all the time. We normal ones are on the wrong wavelength. We are too serious. The mongoloid plays a game. He never tells the truth. But if he likes you he lets you into the game and tells lies to you. You only play games like these with people you love.”47 As in his talk to General Council, Vanier upends expectations here. He does not rebuke the interviewer for an insensitive question or correct his generalization of “mongoloids.” Rather, he counters by generalizing normal people, claiming that “we” are too serious, and thus “on the wrong wavelength.” Vanier had already implied this earlier in the interview:48 Q. Don’t you get depressed, working with these mentally retarded boys all the time? A. No, I get more depressed working with normal people. Q. Why? A. Normal people are so serious, but with my boys it is Marx Brothers sort of stuff all the time.49 There are several things to notice here. Vanier begins the interview by acknowledging the suffering often inflicted on people with intellectual disabilities. He describes the dehumanizing asylums in which many “mentally retarded” people are forced to live. He insists that

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“just maintaining people alive and putting them in long dormitories without love and affection is not progress.”50 But now he emphasizes fun, delighting in the entertaining quality of their shared lives together. Decades before disability rights advocates began writing about the tyranny of the normal, but perhaps in line with 1960s counter-cultural challenges to normal, Vanier confides that he prefers life with people who have been marginalized because it is surprising, unexpected, more fun, less “serious.” Literary scholar Allon White writes, “The social reproduction of seriousness is a fundamental – perhaps the fundamental – hegemonic manoeuvre. Once the high language has attained the commanding position of being able to specify what is and is not to be taken seriously, its control over the language of its society is virtually assured. Bakhtin calls this manoeuvre ‘the lie of pathos,’ which designates the insidious identification of ‘important matters’ with an idealism centred upon tragedy.”51 The interviewer assumes that Vanier’s life with people with intellectual disabilities must be depressing, engaged with the tragedy of pathetic lives. Vanier refuses those underlying assumptions. In doing so, he also redefines what is to be taken seriously. He takes seriously the people he lives with, but that does not mean that their lives together are grim. White shows that important topics are conflated with the serious in contrast to the pleasurable: “There is an ambiguity at the heart of seriousness which all high language takes advantage of: the serious is at once that which excludes pleasurable laughter and that which is felt to be important. In fact of course there is no intrinsic link at all between these two things. Many solemn occasions and activities are utterly trivial, just as many ‘laughable’ incidents are important.”52 Vanier cheerfully subverts the serious question of the interviewer, offering an alternative glimpse of social relationships full of hilarity, like the Marx Brothers. His answer is simultaneously amusing and important. In critiquing the social norm of seriousness, Vanier neither ignores nor minimizes the emotional pain of the men in his community. He continues the interview by commending the straightforward emotional communication of his “boys”: A. There is even something nice about the way they get angry. Q. Is there anything nice about getting angry?

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A. My boys get angry in a nice sort of way. When they get angry they just break a window and it’s over and done with. When normal people get angry they don’t break windows; they tell stories about you and break down your reputation. When my boys get angry, they go ‘B A NG!’ and it’s all over with.53 The astonished interviewer asks, “Is there anything nice about getting angry?”54 Vanier’s answer suggests that he listens for the communication in the act of violently breaking a window. He allows for anger as he allows for “lying,” as ways of communicating. One can feel in the interviewer a discomfort bordering on repulsion, and at the same time, an attraction: “Don’t you get depressed, working with these mentally retarded boys all the time?” and “Is there anything nice about getting angry?” Such simultaneous uneasiness yet curiosity about people who are designated as socially “low” is a contradiction inherent in the high/low structuring that Stallybrass and White delineate. They note how “The primary site of contradiction, the site of conflicting desires and mutually incompatible representation, is undoubtedly the ‘low.’ Again and again we find a striking ambivalence to the representations of the lower strata (of the body, of literature, of society, of place) in which they are both reviled and desired. Repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the debasing ‘low’ conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with a desire for this Other.”55 Does the interviewer unconsciously long to lie and spontaneously break a window? Or at least identify with the book’s adolescent readers, who might secretly wish they were free to express themselves in these ways? Part of what Vanier teases at by allowing that, yes, his boys do lie often and even break windows in anger is that they have a kind of freedom from social norms of behaviour, and from the serious self-regulation of so-called normal people who can hardly bear even to think of such actions. In response to the question, “Did your religion have anything to do with your founding of this modern ark?” Vanier replies, “Most certainly,” then tries to communicate his yearning to “understand” the mystery of Christianity through becoming “lowly.” He ponders, “Christianity is a mystery, you cannot understand it all. To fathom the mystery of Christianity you must become poor in spirit. You must become lowly and humble. How can Christ live in us if we are

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too attached to owning things? I thought a place like the Ark would help me understand. Yes, my religion had a lot to do with it.”56 As in his address to General Council several years later, Vanier looks to embody Jesus by a choice to live with and align himself with the socially low. Throughout the interview in God Speaks through People, which is aimed at intermediate youth, Vanier tries to bring abstract or overly general high-level questions back to the reality of his particular life and relationships with specific people. He describes individuals, how they spend their days, and what they most enjoy. He responds to the interviewer’s more general questions with encouragement to see each person as real and significant: Q. But if they never tell the truth, if they act like the Marx Brothers all the time, how can you help them? A. First, you must treat these boys as real people … You must discover their needs, and this is true not only of the mentally retarded, it is true of all people in trouble.57 Vanier insists earlier in the interview, “We must give of ourselves, even a smile, simply because beggars, or my ‘boys,’ are children of God.”58 He concludes, “The important thing is to try to put ourselves in their place and ask, what do they want?”59 Interestingly, that is probably why the interviewer asks such awkward questions: to think like a twelve- to fourteen-year-old with very limited experience of people with intellectual disabilities. The interviewer comments, “Don’t you find it hard to look at a mongoloid child and not stare at him? I find it hard to be natural with one of them.”60 And later, “I never got to know one. I just feel uncomfortable when I am with one.”61 Vanier consistently asserted both the marginalized position of his community and his own pleasure in his companions. In a 1969 lecture to the Vanier Institute of the Family at the University of Montreal, for example, Vanier identified himself as one who “has the joy of living in a milieu a little outside of society, in contact with those who are called ‘marginal people.’”62

“if

you’re not there, you’re missed”

Vanier’s place in the United Church’s New Curriculum was noted by United Church member Peter Flemington in “If You’re Not There,

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You’re Missed,” his 1967 film interview with Vanier in Trosly-Breuil. Perhaps this is the first time in English that Vanier is recorded responding to the question of whether he is a saint. He laughs, then gives a serious answer: PF: [narrative voiceover] I mentioned jokingly that Canada’s largest Protestant denomination now featured his life story as part of its church school curriculum. Did that make him feel like a kind of latter-day saint? JV [laughs]: Yeah, well, sanctity is shown after, eh? And there’s a word in the gospels, ‘Méfiez-vous – Beware you who are considered prophets in your own time’ – I forget, I have it in French not in English – the idea being that the ones who are considered prophets and saints during their life, those are not normally the ones that are the real saints. You’ll find that the real saints here are not the ones who are directing the house, but it’s some of the boys. I’m here because I’m happy here, and because I like it. The boys are happy also. But I find that the boys, in their capacity to what they have, make more efforts to goodness than the majority of the assistants and maybe all the assistants. And sanctity is always a question of correlation to capacity and realization. You have so much capacity matching so much realization – well, this is perfection.63 Vanier insists that all human beings are called to goodness, to the “saintliness” of living up to each one’s capacities, whatever those are. Vanier suggests that while the “boys” of his community would seem peripheral in society’s eyes, their ability to realize whatever capacity they may have for goodness makes them more saintly and in that sense more central than society would expect. Stallybrass and White note, “A recurrent pattern emerges: the top attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover … that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other.”64 This results in “a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level. It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central (like long hair in the 1960s). The low-Other is despised and denied at the level of political organization and social being whilst it is instrumentally

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constitutive of the shared imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture.”65 In other words, the socially peripheral “boys,” rejected and excluded, become symbolically central. Furthermore, Vanier shifts the frame here so that the people with intellectual disabilities are the active protagonists of the story. Literary scholar Northrop Frye, who was ordained into the United Church in 1936 before his literary career, follows Aristotle in setting out the different elevations of characters in literature. In The Anatomy of Criticism Frye explains, “Fictions, therefore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.”66 Some characters are superior to the reader and society not just in degree but actually in kind, including mythical beings or literature of saints as their power of action is above most humans. The “hero” can also be at the lowest level of elevation, which implies a freedom from conventional norms: “If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.”67 In responding to Flemington’s question, Vanier presents the “boys” as the central characters, heroes of the story. He elevates his companions with intellectual disabilities to the level of saints based on their power of action, the correlation between their capacity and how they realize (make real, actualize) that capacity, however limited. There is an important series of connections here. Remember Vanier’s happy frankness in his interview in God Speaks through People about the people he lives with. Now in this Flemington interview, he finds them saint-like because they are fulfilling their capacities. In each interview, he is not articulating, “Oh they are so nice and gentle if you get to know them – quite saintly!” He is resisting both interviewers’ dependence on that stereotype of the “boys” as “Other,” refusing as well the stereotypes that “they” are so sad, or depressing, or sweet, or frightening. Vanier presents not only a series of unexpected reversals of low and high, but on a larger scale positions his housemates as saints, not because they are perfect, but rather because of their capacity for action, their active choices for goodness. Vanier gives another response to the saint question in January 1972, this time for interviewer Patrick Watson in a CBC Man Alive show with Mother Teresa:

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PW: This has to be asked. In the eyes of many people, both of you are beginning to be spoken of in terms that approach saintliness. There are people who are coming somewhere close to the borders of worshipping, not God through Mother Teresa, but Mother Teresa. MT: That you use the word sanctity, that makes no difference. What we are in the eyes of God is what matters: how we accept, how we are at his disposal, God uses us as he wants. JV : I’d like to say two things: one is that on the Sunday before Jesus died, everybody was crying ‘Hosanna to the Son of David,’ and on the Friday, everybody was crying ‘Crucify him, crucify him.’ The second thing I’d like to say is that we have to see the motivation in the words of people, the dangers in the words of people when they say somebody is a saint – they mean ‘I am not called to this. It’s all right for you, but not for me’ – that you do not need to do the same thing. I’d say this is the danger of these words. It’s a complete negation of what we are both trying to say, that we are all called to this, and to the degree that you put someone on a pinnacle, you’re saying, ‘you can do this but I can’t.’ What we’re saying is that the spirit of God is calling us all to do this.68 Again, Vanier insists on the action of all humans, resisting any category that lets people delegate holiness to someone else. He reiterates that all people are called to actively seek goodness. New Curriculum author Frank Morgan also affirms that even children are called to actively choose lives of goodness. All editions of God Speaks through People conclude with a chapter titled “What Are You Going to Do About It? The Story of You,” written by Morgan. He comments, “The men featured in this book are only a few of the hundreds in the Bible who responded to God.” He then points out some of the differences between the world in which Jesus lived and the 1964 world of the young readers: “Jesus lived in a world where men could kill each other, but they could not do much damage to God’s earth. We live in a world where men have discovered the secret of nuclear power and can disintegrate God’s earth.” Amid these challenges of the mid-twentieth century, Morgan assures his young readers that they have the capacity for action: “To keep men from disintegrating God’s earth, God still needs people who will respond to him. He needs people who will learn what kind of God he is, and then show

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what they have learned to others.” He encourages his readers that “You can get to know him through Jesus.” Morgan sets out the attraction of actively engaging in God’s work: “Think of those who did respond … They did not have an easy life, but they had a thrilling one. God has a task for you. What are you going to do about it?”69 Morgan does not urge adolescent readers to action on their own, but in response to God, whom they can get to know through Jesus. Their action is grounded in a relationship to the divine. Morgan assumes that people who are often marginalized, in this case young people, can be creative, relational, and responsive. 1 9 8 3 : w o r l d c o u n c i l o f c h u r c h e s a s s e m b ly i n   va n c o u v e r

The 6th Assembly of the World Council of Churches took place in Vancouver in the summer of 1983. The event welcomed 4,000 delegates, accredited visitors, staff, and media from around the world to the University of British Columbia. For seventeen days, they worked together in five official languages. The United Church of Canada was a founding member of the World Council of Churches in 1948, and many United Church members held key roles in preparing for the 1983 assembly. For two years, United Church minister Gordon How worked as the local organizer for the opening celebration, planned to take place in the 15,000-seat Pacific Coliseum with a choir of 1,000 and a welcome from the governor general, along with readers, liturgical dancers, and special staging. The event would be televised nationally by the C B C . How describes it as “a grand public event by the Canadian churches to welcome the gathered world church at the start of its once-every-seven-years Assembly.”70 The planning committee agreed early to ask Jean Vanier to be the main speaker. How had encountered Vanier twice before. The first was very early in How’s career, when he was a commissioner to the 1972 General Council in Saskatoon. The second time he met Jean Vanier was at Shiloah, the Vancouver L’Arche community.71 He was on the local L’Arche board and Vanier visited soon after Shiloah opened. How recalls, “There were a couple dozen of us, residents, associates and board members sitting on the floor eating pizza with Jean as he inspired us all with his stories and presence.” Notice Vanier’s continued social inversion here, as people of all abilities and status enjoyed dinner sitting together on the floor.

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In late 1981, Vanier promptly responded to How’s letter of invitation to speak at the 1983 event, saying, “Come find me in Trosly, and we’ll spend a couple of days talking about this event in Vancouver. I need some time with you in advance to find out what you want.” So in the summer of 1982, when How was in Geneva at a World Council of Churches Central Committee meeting, he travelled by train to Compiegne, France. There, he relates: An engaging colleague of Jean’s picked me up in her little twocylinder Citroen and, after buying bread for L’Arche, she drove me through the French countryside to Trosly-Breuil. I was welcomed by his mother Madame Vanier and stayed in her guest room. The next day Vanier and I spent about three hours together, sitting in his little room on orange crates. He made tea and put honey in it and I just didn’t know where I was – it was an incredible experience and conversation. We talked about what he would say in his talk the next year. The visit was made more complete for me as I attended their evening Mass and joined with them at dinner. Vanier arrived in Vancouver in July, 1983, the day before the World Council of Churches event. How remembers: He surprised me by asking ‘Gordon, would you please come out to L’Arche this evening for an hour or so? I want to talk with you about tomorrow’s event.’ I hoped that there wasn’t a major problem. When I arrived, he showed me into his room, and as he sat at one end of the bed he read through and rehearsed his 25-minute speech for the next day. As I listened, I was wondering to myself, ‘How did I get to be the person sitting here? This is a wonderful and profound presentation.’ When he finished, he turned to me and asked, ‘Is that alright, will it do?’ I felt like saying ‘You expect me to critique you?’ Of course, I told him was it was perfect. The next day, I picked him up as arranged and we gathered with the World Council of Churches dignitaries. The celebration began with a full house. The choir sang with great joy and energy, the dancers were colourful, the readers perfect and the welcome by the governor general sincere though a little longer than expected. Just before it was time for Vanier to speak, he gave me his wristwatch, saying that he didn’t want people to

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see him looking at it. I wasn’t concerned because the day before the length of his rehearsal presentation was perfect. He said he would watch the time on the huge wall clock at one end of the arena. He spoke brilliantly about his work and what is important for us all in caring for and speaking for those who are wounded or not heard. It was wonderful and all present were with him for every word. But unlike the day before he went on and on for much longer. I learned later that the CBC were greatly troubled with this because their national coverage of a major sporting event that immediately followed had to be delayed! Why did he speak so much longer than planned and tested? When he returned to his seat, he asked, ‘How did I do?’ I said, ‘It was brilliant! Everyone was with you for every word.’ And then I said ‘Why was it a little longer than your rehearsal?’ And he answered the mystery, telling me that the ‘staging curtains blocked my view of the wall clock and I didn’t have my watch to check the time!’ So I returned his watch and we had a good laugh about it, but I’m sure the C B C never forgave us for going overtime and ruining the start of their football game. Lois M. Wilson was the first female moderator of the United Church, and in 1983 was an incoming president of the World Council of Churches. She met Jean Vanier for the first time as she welcomed him to the stage: “Here was this very tall man towering over me as I struggled on tiptoe to greet him and welcome him to the platform. It was wonderful. He spoke ‘for those who had no voice.’ It was a round stage and he pivoted around and spoke for what seemed to me about forty-five minutes. It was magnificent.”72 Jean Vanier himself described the same event in a letter dated 27 August 1983: I was also touched by the invitation to give the homily at the official opening of the World Council of Churches meeting. I was a bit frightened as I was asked to give it in the Coliseum of Vancouver in front of fifteen thousand people. I had written a text but I could not use any notes finally. So I went to the podium putting all my trust in Jesus and offering everything to Him for the unity of Christians, and Jesus truly helped me. I spoke about creating community with the poor. The mother of an eight year old girl told me later that her little girl said at

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the end of the homily: ‘Mommy, while he was speaking my heart was burning. Was your heart burning too?’ That little eight yearold confirmed and encouraged me.73 Here again Vanier resists being assimilated into a story of success or sainthood. In his public letter, he announces his vulnerability, saying that he was “a bit frightened.” There is a paradox in this very tall, famous person admitting that he feels weak and is dependent on Jesus. In his account, his confirmation comes not from important people, but from someone very little. At the same time, his social standing was sufficiently high that even C BC did not dare cut to the football game.

“calling

us to be the same”

The December 1972 United Church Observer introduction to Vanier’s address to General Council concluded, “in the glow of his words and his life, you forget everything except that this man is a saint, calling us to be the same.”74 In 2014, former moderator Gary Paterson also spontaneously used the word saint in describing Vanier as someone willing to let go of his high position, both in terms of height and prestige: I have a memory of hearing Jean Vanier at Vancouver School of Theology decades ago. I was deeply moved. I had no idea he was so tall and stooped, the compassion that he radiated. I was also struck by someone who willingly surrenders privilege. I see that’s a temptation that many of us face – we have a lot of privilege globally, and he did as part of the Vanier family and he just chose to let some of it go … I have this thing, that Protestants should develop a larger panoply of saints … And I think Vanier is one of those – you have a sense of Spirit radiating from him.75 Religious studies professor and United Church member Dr Harold Coward taught a course about gurus in different religious traditions and included Vanier, “not as a guru, more what the Celts would call a ‘thin place.’”76 Bruce McLeod reflects, “I just feel Jean Vanier has had a quiet and pervasive influence in the United Church of Canada over more than four decades. Nothing dramatic, and people might not

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recognize the connection.” Having seen how it began, McLeod believes it has changed the United Church. Like Paterson, he notes the symbolic significance of Vanier’s height as someone high choosing to become lower, even how he listens, how he bends down, how he smiles … We’ve all read his books and related to his stories about his community of L’Arche in France. These are wonderful stories that remind us of the communal aspect of Christianity from the beginning – the sharing of food and all varieties of people. Those stories of Jean and L’Arche ring the bell, and you say, ‘That’s it! That’s who we are and ought to be’ and it resonates with us. What is it in L’Arche that people run to? I think it’s that resonating. They recognize this is who we ought to be – what all those words about Christianity really mean, when a community emerges that is really trying to live that out with all its ups and downs, without trying to impress outsiders. In a February 2017 conversation with Jean Vanier, I invited him to comment yet again on this word “saint.” He immediately began with Jesus, explaining that if you talk about Jesus because you are going to church, “it doesn’t mean very much. But if you talk about Jesus as a relationship, people think you’re a saint, because they would like a relationship like that.”77 Vanier continued: Dorothy Day had the same problem. She said, ‘Don’t write me off like that.’ What does it mean? If you are trying to live the gospels, then you’re a saint. This is how it is in the letters of Paul: he is writing to the saints. But then there is a problem in the Catholic Church – a saint, you put them up on the altar. The reality of Paul is the saints are those who are trying to live the gospels. But then it became something else. Mother Teresa has ceased to be Mother Teresa since she became a saint. Before, you were following Mother Teresa and you would do things like she did. Then she is beatified, and it brings confusion. There is a difference with Mother Teresa after she was beatified. Before, she was entirely ecumenical, or inter-religious, and she even tried to welcome Hindu and Muslim women who wanted to create Hindu and Muslim Sisters of Charity working with the poor.

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Mother Teresa: you could follow her. But Saint Teresa is now a Saint of the Catholic Church – it’s this word saint, which initially meant those who were living the gospels. Vanier went on to note the difference between Catholics and Protestants: “When the United Church people call me a saint, it means he is living the gospels. In the Catholic Church, it means she is now on a pedestal.”78 Vanier is right about the United Church. This meaning of saint is intrinsic to the 1925 “United Church of Canada Twenty Articles of Doctrine” that laid the foundation of Canada’s new church: “We acknowledge one Holy Catholic Church, the innumerable company of saints of every age and nation, who being united by the Holy Spirit to Christ their Head are one body in Him and have communion with their Lord and with one another. Further, we receive it as the will of Christ that His Church on earth should exist as a visible and sacred brotherhood … for the upbuilding of the saints, and for the universal propagation of the Gospel.”79 Lois Wilson considers Vanier a saint: “In the 80’s, I kept running into Jean Vanier in radio stations across Canada where we had both been doing interviews. On one occasion in Winnipeg, the radio announcer told me that after my interview, he was going to interview Jean Vanier. ‘Oh,’ I exclaimed, ‘he is a saint!’ I ran into Jean on my way out of the station and in a brief exchange, told him what I had said about him. Then I disappeared before he could respond. But I was right I think.” I asked Wilson what saint meant in that context. She replied: Our tradition stems from the Methodist idea of a saint as one who is close to God, who is ‘in Christ or in where Christ dwells.’ That is why I called Vanier a saint. The Protestant understanding is from interpretation of scripture, particularly from Paul’s frequent use of the word ‘saints’ to whom he directs his letters: 1 Corinthians 12 ‘called to be saints’; Romans 1:7 ‘to all God’s saints beloved in Rome’; Philipians 4:21 ‘Greet every saint in Jesus Christ’; Hebrews 3:24 ‘Salute all the saints.’ So all confessing Christians are called to be saints – to put on Christ. I wrote a book about people I knew who have ‘put on Christ,’ titled I Want to Be in That Number: Cool Saints I Have Known.80

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By 2015, the United Church’s purpose in “the upbuilding of the saints” had expanded consciously and explicitly to affirm people with disabilities among those saints. The “Theologies of Disabilities Report” to the 2015 42nd General Council emphatically states that people with disabilities fully participate in the image of God. The report asserts: Disability is part of the natural limits and conditions of creation, neither a flaw nor a blessing but one of the diverse ways of being an embodied creature. For the image of God is not as a set of capabilities that can be listed and measured according to standards of exchange value, such that their absence makes someone less human; rather, it is a sign of intrinsic goodness and preciousness that is vulnerable and expressed differently in each person. If all are created in God’s image, we might welcome one another with the intent of honouring the unique and different way that image is borne out in each of us, including disability and/or ­mental illness.81

the pleasure of the saints

Julia Kristeva is a well-known psychotherapist, philosopher, feminist intellectual, and disability activist who lives in France. She is also the mother of an adult son with multiple disabilities who lives in the community of L’Arche partner Association Simon de Cyrene.82 Between June 2009 and August 2010, she and Jean Vanier exchanged an intriguing series of letters, published as a book in 2011 titled Leur regard perce nos ombres. In a letter dated 15 July 2009, Vanier acknowledges to Kristeva that L’Arche is fragile: “Many people would not want to live with people with disabilities. Will L’Arche exist in ten years?” Then he writes something unexpected: “What is the secret that allows L’Arche to exist still? I’ll tell you: pleasure!”83 To understand “pleasure” it is helpful to remember that Vanier did his doctoral studies on Aristotle, writing his thesis on happiness in Aristotle’s philosophy. When Vanier claims pleasure as the key feature that will keep people in L’Arche long term, he is thinking of pleasure in an Aristotelian sense. Just before discussing pleasure in his 15 July 2009 letter to Kristeva, Vanier points to Aristotle, indicating that he agrees with Aristotle that pleasure and joy both refer to the same

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reality.84 Pleasure, according to Aristotle, is not simply an enjoyable aspect of a thing like the lingering taste of a good meal. Rather, pleasure comes from activity. Vanier’s 1962 doctoral thesis shaped his 2001 book Made for Happiness: Discovering the Meaning of Life with Aristotle. In this book, Vanier says that “The aim of Aristotelian ethics is to help human beings choose the activity from which they will derive the greatest pleasure or joy, and thus become as happy as possible by divorcing themselves from activities that give them more superficial and temporary pleasure but prevent them from progressing towards the finest activities and pleasures.”85 For Aristotle, Vanier explains, “That is to say that pleasure is born of, or springs from, perfection of the activity.”86 Remember that in the 1967 interview with Peter Flemington, Vanier insists, “You have so much capacity matching so much realization – well, this is perfection.”87 The activity that Vanier considers perfection is not only individual action, but social. In 2001, Vanier suggests that for Aristotle, the most perfect and thus pleasurable activity is friendship, and “what drives the dynamic of friendship is living together.”88 He elaborates: “It is a life lived in communion, that is nourished by shared actions with a view to great and noble things.”89 Vanier’s main criticism of Aristotle is that his vision is static, while Vanier’s experience of friendship in community is fluid and everevolving as people and relationships change and mature. In his 1975 book Be Not Afraid, Vanier described three stages of growing into community, symbolically calling them months although he notes that a “month” could be ten years. Along the way, he nonchalantly deconstructs then reconstructs alternative binary divisions: People who have lived alone normally find their first month in community a great joy. Everyone around them seems to be a saint; everyone seems so happy. Then in the second month, everyone is a devil. Everyone has mixed motives for whatever he does. Everyone is something of a hypocrite. Everyone is so greedy that he takes just the piece of meat I had my eye on. They talk when I want to be silent and when I want to talk they cut me off with their long silent looks. It’s a conspiracy. In the third month, they are neither saints nor devils. They are people who have come together to strive and to love. They are neither perfect nor imperfect, but like everyone else a mixture of the two. They are people

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who are growing, and that means the good is in the growth and the bad is what prevents growth.90 It might be asked how Vanier can claim the central importance of pleasure when there is clearly so much suffering in the lives of people with disabilities and those who love them. Vanier had begun his letter by identifying “the cry” that he heard in Kristeva’s previous letter, connecting that with the cry that he hears in the wider world that builds walls between people. It is in this context of interpersonal and political pain and estrangement that he announces pleasure as the secret that allows L’Arche to survive. Even when people’s fear, sorrow, and abject aspects break through, the love with which people receive and support those difficult dimensions of each other is an activity of solidarity with its own consequent and profound pleasure. Thus the joys, celebrations, and spontaneous hilarity of L’Arche grow out of the pleasure of shared life, which encompasses the pain that is also shared. Sheer fun is part of the “joie-de-vivre” and pleasure that sustains community. At the end of the 1970s, after fifteen years of L’Arche, Vanier gathered his reflections on his community experience in Community and Growth: Our Pilgrimage Together. Rather than presenting suffering and celebration as antitheses, Vanier claims them as surprising complements that he sees together often in L’Arche. He reflects, “I wonder then if all joy doesn’t somehow spring from suffering and sacrifice” and remarks on how people in moments of celebration often “shed the burden of daily life and … live a moment of freedom in which their hearts simply bound for joy.”91 Vanier continues to reflect on the nature of the pleasure of L’Arche in his 2009 letter to Kristeva, again deconstructing the perception that L’Arche is serious or tragic, only for the heroic or saintly: “People come and stay because they are happy and have pleasure. No assistant will stay because it is required, or only because it is a good thing to do. We have a problem in our society: no one believes that the pleasure of L’Arche is possible. They think people in l’Arche are heroes or saints. But that’s not true. We stay at L’Arche because it gives us pleasure.”92 Bruce McLeod tries to explain the attraction, the pleasure of Vanier’s vision from 1972 when he first heard him and over the years since then. As McLeod puts it: Many ‘spirits’ are trying to grab our attention. But here seems to be something that comes from a pure stream. It’s like a clear

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glass of water, and you run to it like a thirsty deer. It’s the attractive things that we are instinctively drawn to. What are these exactly? Openness to God not as an idea but a presence in your life; the inclusive nature of Vanier’s reaction to other people; non-judgmental, inclusive community; the commitment to the visibly wounded in order to recognize our own wounds; to be open to the world with no barriers, open to other faiths. McLeod adds that Vanier’s vision is accessible to everyone: “These kinds of emphases are just exactly what will revitalize the church or any community.”

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2 Breakfast at the Ecumenical Buffet Tender (verb): to offer or give something to somebody, or to request an offer or proposal for goods or services.

Whether Jean Vanier is a saint and whether we all are, the United Church Observer’s conclusion that he is “calling us to be the same”1 is inescapable. This chapter is about how the United Church took up Vanier’s message, tracing some key connections between Canada’s “united and uniting church” and L’Arche communities in Canada.2 L’Arche communities and United Churches exist as ideas, wellarticulated organizations that aim to make a difference in their society. At the same time, both are located contextually in their local and historical moment and physically in specific places. You can find them on maps. People come and go. In that physical space, particular people are included and excluded, stories are told and remembered or forgotten. Exploring this wider cultural context can help us to understand some of the contradictions, the creative innovations and pleasures of these organizations discovering each other, as well as painful struggles, misunderstandings, and breakages. This chapter unfolds in three parts that explore such contexts in a generally chronological fashion, beginning with several ecumenical retreats that Vanier gave in the early 1970s, then tracing the United Church’s involvement in the founding and growth of several L’Arche communities in Canada, and finally considering the experiences of three United Church ministers whose Presbyteries have accepted their leadership role in L’Arche as a ministry of the United Church. As we look more closely at the historic and ongoing stresses, Vanier’s comment in his circular letter after the 1972 General Council seems more prescient. Notice that he does not say readers must work for

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unity, but goes deeper to the common ground of prayer: “This encounter is perhaps one of the most moving that I have ever experienced. We must pray even more for unity.”3 Vanier assumes prayer effects a change of heart and thus action, whether on the part of the person praying or whoever else the spirit moves. The son of skilled diplomats, Vanier really believed that the personal was political, that the world could be changed one heart at a time. But even that movement functioned for Vanier at a level beyond human understanding, so he repeatedly acknowledged in his letters to supporters the critical importance of the people who uphold L’Arche through prayer.4 Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Council of Churches in August 1973, its general secretary Philip Potter, a WestIndian Methodist, asserted, “The most effective service the churches and the ecumenical movement could render to a divided world would be to live a credible fellowship amidst the conflicts and diversities of people and societies of which the churches are a part.”5 Does this sound like L’Arche communities, serving a divided world by living credible fellowship amidst conflicts and diversities? Potter’s remarks were indeed timely as L’Arche expanded rapidly in the 1970s through Canada. But living a credible fellowship was not as simple as it sounds. Sharing life with people with and without intellectual disabilities was more straightforward than sharing life ecumenically. n a r a m ata r e t r e at 1973

A few months before Potter delivered his remarks, Vanier led a retreat in British Columbia. Remember Vanier’s 1972 letter that mused, “I had such a desire for unity; maybe Jesus will arrange that my next retreat include Anglicans, Catholics and members of the United Church”?6 Vanier writes in a public letter on 8 March 1973: “From my trip I sense a new hope as many people are thirsting to do something beautiful, to work for universal peace and to follow Jesus in His Beatitudes. I will return to Canada in June for a retreat with people from the United Church, the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church. Pray for this retreat, a time where we will meet together as disciples of Jesus in a common search to live more fully the Beatitudes.”7 Louise Cummings, who later became a United Church minister, was twenty years old in the spring of 1973 when she attended the Faith and Sharing retreat at the Centre at Naramata. Many people who went on to found L’Arche communities across Canada were

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there.8 It was, she recalls, the first of L’Arche’s “ecumenical” retreats, “by which they meant four hundred Roman Catholics and space for forty ‘others.’”9 Cummings and her mother were initially on the waiting list, but “squeaked in” as two of those forty people. “The Catholic-Protestant divide was painfully present, and nobody had really thought it through,” Cummings recounts. “Catholics assumed it didn’t matter to the others about communion because the underlying assumption was that communion doesn’t have much of a place in the Protestant traditions.” She remembers Roman Catholic mass on the first day of the retreat: “It was a great community celebration, everybody was so joyful and wonderful, full of life and vigour and isn’t it great!” An announcement was made: at the time of communion, “any non-Catholics can go to that room over there.” That was news to her. Cummings explains, “Nobody really knew what was going to be there – we just knew we were to exit. So we went off and it was a room full of abandoned guitar cases and coats and some things – just a side room – I don’t know what they were thinking.” The Protestants “looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, what we’ll do is plan to have our communion service later in the week.’ That would be okay, and then we all came back out to be with everybody. We were all standing along the wall of the gym as everybody was filing up for communion, and they’re singing ‘We are one in the spirit and they’ll know we are Christians by our love,’ filing past us, and we were just standing there watching this happen, and it was just awful – it was so vividly painful.” She recounts what happened next with humour: “There was a meeting suddenly scheduled for the Catholic Bishop and Jean Vanier to meet with these Protestants the next day. The angry Protestants! There they are, protesting again!” Cummings continues, “The next day, the crowd of ‘angry Protestants’ had gathered and I was on my way there in the hallway, and along came the bishop. His hands were shaking because he was so scared of what he was going to find in there. I said some kind words to him, and he said ‘Will you sit with me?’ What a sweet kid I was! My brother the bishop, yeah.” There is an unexpected reversal of power, hierarchy, and age here, in the older bishop’s fear of the marginalized Protestant minority, and the confidence and hospitality of the relatively young Louise. The moment required Louise’s active participation to walk into the room with the frightened bishop and sit with him. “I love my twenty-year-old self,” laughs Cummings.

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The retreat that Louise Cummings describes was held at a specific place, the Centre at Naramata. Ironically, this was a retreat centre owned and operated by the United Church of Canada. In other words, the place where United Church members and other Protestants were excluded was a United Church space. British cultural geographer Doreen Massey provides a helpful way to think about the relationship of places and stories: One way of seeing ‘places’ is as on the surface of maps: Samarkand is there, the United States of America (finger outlining a boundary) is here. But to escape from an imagination of space as surface is to abandon also that view of place. If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space. Their character will be a product of these intersections within that wider setting, and of what is made of them. And, too, of the non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions. All this contributes to the specificity of place.10 As Massey insists, every place is both its geographical coordinates and “a simultaneity of stories-so-far.” Other participants at the Naramata retreat hold completely different stories. Most of the Roman Catholics who attended do not remember any particular stress around denominational differences. Massey notes that the “disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions” are also part of the character of the place, as is “what is made of them.” For the Protestant minority, the story did not end with the first painful experience of marginalization and exclusion at the Roman Catholic mass. Instead, the story-so-far continued with meetings to redefine the “wider powergeometries,” beginning with Louise offering kindness and hospitality to the frightened Bishop. Massey suggests that any given space is characterized by how intersections within the wider setting of power relations are interpreted. Let us step back to the wider cultural setting of the time. First, it is important to state that L’Arche has always worked to respect denominational differences. In a few circumstances the eucharist has been offered and received across denominational lines, but L’Arche has carefully avoided becoming a church itself.11 It is a stance in keeping with the larger L’Arche philosophy of appreciating and celebrating

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difference. Similarly, the United Church was committed to interdenominational dialogue and ecumenical cooperation as a founding member of the Canadian Council of Churches in 1944 and the World Council of Churches in 1948.12 In the later 1960s and early 1970s, both L’Arche and the United Church were responding to the larger social justice movements of their times. As many have observed, a combination of frustration and idealism led to a burgeoning of new communal efforts to improve society, such as co-operatives, communes, peace marches, shelters for women fleeing violence, and feminist solidarity.13 For people with intellectual disabilities and their families, deinstitutionalization was linked to a vision of integration into local communities. All these movements fit right into United Church priorities. As far back as 1935, the United Church had committed itself to “inclusive Christian fellowship,” a phrase that remains in The Manual of the United Church of Canada. In The United Church of Canada: A History, United Church minister and scholar Joan Wyatt characterizes the 1970s as “Voices from the Margins.” She lists many “new ways to be communities of faith” in the United Church, including “feminist women,” large ecumenical women’s conferences, house churches “some of which were safe places for gays and lesbians,” charismatic prayer groups, the Jesus movement, ecumenical evangelical conferences, and Faith Festivals.14 Meanwhile people with disabilities and their needs were coming into visibility in the worldwide Church. In 1971, the World Council of Churches published “The Unity of the Church and the Handicapped in Society,” suggesting that people with disabilities “remind the Church that Jesus Christ was rejected and broken, yet is for us the model of wholeness and of life.”15 In 1975, the 5th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Nairobi issued a statement on “The Handicapped and the Wholeness of the Family of God” which affirmed that “the church’s unity includes both the ‘disabled’ and the ‘abled.’”16 The United Church’s 27th General Council passed their own resolution in 1977 also titled “The Handicapped and the Wholeness of the Family of God.” This resolution stated that “the Church’s unity includes both the disabled and the abled, and a Church which seeks to be truly united within itself and move toward unity with others must be open to all; yet ablebodied Church members, both by their attitudes and their emphasis on activism, marginalize and often exclude those with mental or physical disabilities.”17

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Vanier was inspired by the Second Vatican Council that began in 1962 and “breathed energy and hope back into the Church.”18 In Vanier’s 2013 book Signs of the Times, he quotes the Council’s closing message of 1965: “All of you who feel heavily the weight of the cross, you who are poor and abandoned, you who weep, you who are persecuted for justice, you who are ignored, you who are the unknown victims of suffering, take courage. You are the preferred children of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of hope, happiness and life … Know that you are not alone, separated, abandoned or useless. You have been called by Christ and are His living and transparent image.”19 Vanier explains how L’Arche grew out of the spirit of Vatican II with “its vision of the church as the people of God, with those who were the least powerful at its very centre. L’Arche’s vocation was to stand with them which is why it wasn’t simply a question of welcoming people with a disability. It was a question of living together with them in the joy of helping each person, whether defined as handicapped or not, to grow.”20 In a 2008 exchange of letters with Ian Brown that was published in the Globe and Mail, Vanier summarizes the intercultural, interfaith vision that had evolved in L’Arche: “Our communities want to witness the beauty and value of each person, whatever their culture, religion, abilities or disabilities.”21 Vanier also saw L’Arche as part of the peace and justice movements of the 1960s, writing to Brown: I did not begin L’Arche because I wanted to help a few ‘unfortunate’ people locked up in dismal and violent institution. My life in L’Arche is part of a larger struggle for peace. During the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. rose up to bring justice to the blacks of the United States. His dream of brother-and-sisterhood flowed from his deep belief that every human being is important and valuable, that everyone has a right to be free and have a place in our society. This dream flowed from his faith in Jesus and the Gospel message: Each person is important, each person is a child of God. My life in L’Arche flows from the same conviction.22 l’arche begins in canada: l ’ a r c h e d ay b r e a k , 1969

The first L’Arche community in Canada is a study in what Massey would call the “power-geometries of space.” L’Arche Daybreak opened

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in 1969 in a rural area on the outskirts of Richmond Hill, 30 km north of Toronto. A large home and surrounding land were donated to the Friends of L’Arche by Our Lady’s Missionaries. Given this donation and the entirely Roman Catholic character of L’Arche in France, it is perhaps surprising that L’Arche in Canada was founded by an Anglican couple, Steve and Ann Newroth.23 Even the location and history of Daybreak’s first house are significant. The actual threestorey building was built in the early twentieth century as a novitiate for men training to be Roman Catholic priests, then later converted to a thirty-room sanitarium for nuns with tuberculosis. As a place for healing, doors wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs opened from each bedroom onto wide south-facing verandahs. From the verandahs, you could glimpse the large “Loyal True Blue and Orange Home” a few hundred metres to the south. It had been opened in 1923 by the Loyal True Blue Association and the Orange Order to care for orphaned or underprivileged Protestant children.24 These were the only large buildings on that rural section of Yonge Street, separated only by a small farmhouse. When Daybreak began, the Loyal True Blue and Orange Home was still in operation as an orphanage. Steve Newroth’s secretary Mrs Bell lived in the farmhouse between the two buildings and she joked that her husband put Irish thistles in his south windows facing the Protestant orphanage, and shamrocks in his north windows, facing the Roman Catholic Sisters. The Sisters of Our Lady’s Missionaries had used the former tuberculosis sanitarium as their novitiate, but by the late 1960s they moved their novices to the city where there were more opportunities for postVatican II ministry. Steve and Ann Newroth met Jean Vanier in Toronto while Steve Newroth was studying at Toronto School of Theology, then they spent a year in the new L’Arche community in France. Steve Newroth recalls, “We arrived in Trosly in October of 1966 and stayed for a year before moving on to the Bossey Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland. When we arrived in Trosly, Jean Vanier spoke to the local bishop about us receiving communion. The bishop said that the current policy was if no Anglican Church existed within 100 kms communion could be received. Unfortunately, Paris was within the 100 km range. So we just didn’t receive.”25 During their next year in Geneva at the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, the Newroths were in regular contact with Jean Vanier and on at least one occasion he visited them and spoke to the student body. By the end of that

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time, Steve Newroth had completed all the requirements to be ordained in the Anglican Church, but after a time of discernment and retreat he declined ordination so that he could continue to be part of Vanier’s L’Arche community. Steve and Ann Newroth took the challenges of ecumenism seriously. Before the founding of Daybreak, L’Arche existed only in France and was explicitly Roman Catholic. The Newroths’ understanding of ecumenism would help transform L’Arche from a French Roman Catholic movement into a worldwide ecumenical and interfaith movement. Both visionaries and practical leaders, they began L’Arche in Canada as an explicitly ecumenical endeavour. The new Daybreak community did have both Anglican eucharists and Catholic masses, but did not practice open communion.26 Newroth confirms that there were “very few United Church communions celebrated at Daybreak, although we did have a wedding with a United Church minister presiding.” Beyond the community, the Newroths and some community members went to St John’s Anglican Church 2 kms north of Daybreak, which had opened in 1848, many years before either the Sisters’ tuberculosis facility or the Loyal True Blue and Orange Home were built. Newroth also actively pursued connections between L’Arche Daybreak and Richmond Hill United Church. He started immediately when Daybreak began in 1969, perhaps in part because the United Church and the Anglican Church were in dialogue about church union. Many were confident that it would happen within the decade. Newroth explains: I was studying theology at Toronto’s Trinity College during the United Church/Anglican dialogue and some of our professors were directly involved in the discussions. So they kept us up to date on progress. The genius of the United Church/Anglican dialogue of the early 1960s was that they scrapped the old method of comparing theological differences in favour of a new approach that was based on the idea that if we were to begin a totally new Christian church, what would it require in terms of mutually acceptable theological underpinnings? Remarkable progress was made and many were optimistic that union was near but, as I recall, the Anglicans backed away from the process because Canterbury was deep into similar talks with the Roman Catholic Church and the rather Protestant image of the Canadian Anglican Church was threatening the more ‘catholic’ dialogue

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with Rome. So you see politics is part of every aspect of life – for better or for worse! So did it make any difference that church union was being discussed at the time? I think it did because morale was very high between the two groups. Hope was in the air. Bob Smith was the minister of Richmond Hill United Church in 1969. Newroth set up a meeting with him as L’Arche Daybreak was beginning, and Smith recalls that it immediately became apparent that this was more than a courtesy call. Newroth invited Smith to come visit the L’Arche community, to occasionally lead worship for them, and to see this new L’Arche community as part of his Richmond Hill United community. The Anglicans and United Church decided in 1975 not to merge, but by then the Newroths and Bob Smith had invented a relationship between the local United Church and L’Arche that continues across Canada to this day. Local United Church ministers are encouraged to participate in L’Arche communities through friendship and by leading prayer services.27 Bob Smith’s successor at Richmond Hill United Church was Robert Shorten. He remembers leading only one worship at L’Arche Daybreak in his four years at Richmond Hill United, but he was moved and inspired by the people with disabilities and the assistants who were actively involved in his congregation. He recalls those years as a difficult time in the Richmond Hill congregation and thus in his own ministry. The stress in the church was so exhausting and discouraging that he thought seriously about leaving the ministry: Seeing the people with handicaps and the people who worked with them helped me. I was really struggling in my ministry, and the people from L’Arche were a great lesson to me in Christian discipleship. I learned a lot from them. I thought I didn’t belong in ministry anymore, but their example helped me see that it was worthwhile to serve in a congregation. When they would come to an event, they would bring everyone, and that amazed me. Some people couldn’t participate in the discussion, but they always came together. This was an eye-opener for me: I had never had contact with a community like that before.28 Shorten began to see his role for his congregation as a supportive listener, building community in the church and the wider Richmond

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Hill community. He worked to tone down the strident and sometimes hurtful disagreements within the church. Looking back, Shorten believes he was able to choose to remain in ministry because of the inspiration and encouragement of members of L’Arche. He was also helped by the counsel of Daybreak’s Sr Sue Mosteller, a Roman Catholic Sister of St Joseph who was also the first L’Arche international coordinator after Jean Vanier (beginning that role in 1975) and director of Daybreak after the Newroths left in 1976. An entire study could be done on just Richmond Hill United Church and L’Arche Daybreak, exploring the highs and lows of a relationship that now spans five decades, influencing many ministers as well as members of the congregation. In the 1970s, as L’Arche grew into an international federation, the Newroths also experienced the same kind of ecumenical lapses and frustration that Louise Cummings describes. Steve Newroth observes, “There were occasions when the non-Catholics were badly treated, not out of malice but just out of insensitivity.” In fact, although Newroth does not remember this, several people recall clearly a meeting of North American L’Arche leaders where he became so frustrated that he pounded the table and exclaimed, “This is a god-d*** Catholic club!” One eye-witness comments, “That was the fist heard round the world! That was the beginning and we formed a committee immediately, not led by a Catholic, although not much came of it immediately.” Newroth does remember that at one point “Ann and I called for a meeting with Jean Vanier and asked him if we were part of L’Arche and his answer was ‘I will not answer that question because of course you are part of L’Arche.’”29 As well as ecumenism, the Newroths and others at L’Arche Daybreak were involved in new developments in theory, policy, and research for people with intellectual disabilities. The big new idea was “normalization.” Instead of being sequestered in large institutions far from neighbourhoods or contact with others, people with intellectual disabilities could live in “normal” houses in “normal” neighbourhoods and do the kind of things “normal” people did. Although limitations to the idea became apparent, overall the initial idea was an improvement over institutionalization.30 The North American proponent of normalization was Wolf Wolfensberger, who was a visiting scholar in Toronto at York University’s National Institute on Mental Retardation (N I M R) from

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1971 to 1973. In June of 1973, Wolfensberger edited A Selective Overview of the Work of Jean Vanier and the Movement of L’Arche containing just two articles, one by Steve Newroth and the other by Wolfensberger.31 The preface by G. Allan Roeher, director of N I M R, states: “The movement that has been given rise by Jean Vanier has injected new elements onto the mental retardation scene in Canada, but has not been free of controversy, as few new movements are.”32 Newroth offers a detailed and engaging description and analysis of the ideas and structure of L’Arche, beginning with the claim that “A fundamental role of L’Arche is the creation of a new kind of community where the assisted and the assistant can truly live and progress together in a spirit of mutual esteem and love.”33 L’Arche, Newroth explains, expects that everyone can achieve greater maturity, with primacy placed on mutual esteem and “a spirit of great friendliness.”34 The first priority is to provide a home, then meaningful work for everyone. After that, attention turns to recreation and social events with the community’s rapidly expanding circle of friends, such as the community’s homemade pond for swimming in summer and hockey in winter, as well as outings by individuals or groups to choir practice, dinner, movies, or an evening with friends. Newroth recounts, “The highlight of the week is the Friday night ‘Coffee House’ where friends of Daybreak, coming from Richmond Hill, Aurora or Toronto, bring their guitars to visit, sing, talk, and be enriched by the laughter of the community.”35 The quality of welcome “that comes from the residents permeates the house,” and often requires spontaneous hospitality: “it would be ridiculous to welcome the handicapped and at the same time not be open to those who wish to visit, to meet, or to work with them.”36 He concludes, “If we at Daybreak have something of value to share, it lies most likely in the area of attitude, because the assistants, each one of us, are becoming open to the important role of the mentally retarded in the community.”37 In his article, “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” Wolf Wolfensburger discusses his experience reading Vanier, meeting him, and visiting L’Arche Daybreak in 1971–72. He admits feeling somewhat astounded by the revelation that having fun is normal. “In my many years of involvement with the mentally retarded, I had consistently opposed the placement of excessive emphasis upon recreation,” he writes, explaining that educational and vocational services were more beneficial, and an overemphasis on recreation was often derived from a “misguided attitude of pity” or a perception of retarded adults

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as childish. Wolfensburger then clarifies, “I have not changed my views, but I learned from L’Arche that I had failed to recognize a balancing dimension: the proper place of joy in the lives of the retarded. Joy and recreation are not the same … I can scarcely begin to define what I mean by joy in the lives of the retarded, because one has to experience this phenomenon to understand it.”38 He suggests that this joy comes from the spiritual life (the value of which he also confesses to having underestimated)39 as well as from feeling valued and esteemed by others and at social occasions. He is clearly enamoured of Daybreak’s Friday night Coffee Houses “where one can sing and dance out one’s feelings, as David did ‘with all his might’ before the Ark.”40 The joy of Daybreak amazes Wolfensberger. He asks himself “why so many non-retarded members” of the wider local community come to relax and enjoy themselves at the Coffee Houses: The crowd at these socials can be relatively large, and there is laughter, music, refreshments, and dancing … I suddenly had the insight that there are very few social occasions in the community at which adults can experience joyful vigorous group interaction and relaxation in utter innocence; and where they can express energy and joy in dance with persons of various ages, and with members of the same or opposite sex … Barriers between individuals collapse before the joyful welcome of people who are retarded but worthy, and especially the young people in our society identify with this joy and openness, and share these occasions with pleasure.41 As Doreen Massey notes, the character of a place is a product of “intersections within that wider setting, and of what is made of them.” Wolfensberger’s rapt assessment of the “joy” of Daybreak is remarkable in its semi-abashed excitement and what he makes of it, allowing that the spirituality of L’Arche and the energy of Daybreak’s social occasions are not normal but far better, meeting “a strong social need that is scarcely met anywhere else.”42 He concedes that in some ways L’Arche successfully deviates from his normalization principles.43 The December 1972 United Church Observer with Vanier’s address to General Council had introduced many readers to Vanier and to L’Arche. The enthusiastic circle of joyful friends that Wolfensberger enjoyed at Daybreak’s coffee houses included young members of

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nearby United Churches, some of whom carried on to become assistants at L’Arche, as well as people with disabilities who were also members of the United Church. c e d a r g l e n r e t r e at 1974

In 1973, Bob Smith recalls, Vanier proposed that a retreat be planned for 1974 to include leadership from the United Church, Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. Smith was a young minister, but he was in Richmond Hill and the retreat was at Cedar Glen, a nearby United Church retreat centre, so Smith was the local representative. Smith remembers with some amusement, “I was ambitious and upwardly mobile, and this was big-league!” He was excited to work with Moderator Bruce McLeod and General Secretary George Morrison. And then Vanier added in an unexpected twist. Smith still sounds amazed as he recounts, “He said we need the littlest, the lonely, the lost, real people, a range of people. This was astonishing.” The retreat gave Smith a different focus than the ecumenism of church union between the United Church and the Anglicans, which he recalls as “excessively institutionally focused: how do we bring two Church bodies together? And within two years, the bishops had voted it down.” Smith remembers vividly the days of prayer, singing and storytelling at Cedar Glen – and, most of all, meeting people: “Not the poobahs, but broken people, people I’d never met before. They knew things I didn’t know, and I discovered my own brokenness.” Smith’s wife Ellen confirms that the retreat was a “big turning point for Bob in terms of perspective.” Smith identifies that week as one of the first instances in his life of experiencing the “gift and burden of seeing the world as it is, through the eyes of the poor.” Bob Smith went on to become thirtieth moderator of the United Church, delivering the historic United Church of Canada apology to First Nations in Sudbury in 1986. Furthermore, Smith believes that his early experience with Vanier and L’Arche shaped his last five years of ministry before retiring. He spent them at First United in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: “I preached and cleaned toilets and accompanied people.” Those final years of ministry were an authentic expression of faith in action, he said, calling it the “richest experience of my life.” First United rounded out the ministry of presence and solidarity that Smith had begun at Richmond Hill United Church decades earlier.

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Sr Sue Mosteller was working closely with Vanier at the time and remembers the Cedar Glen retreat as an early effort to create a genuinely ecumenical retreat: The people in the United Church were really loving what Jean was saying to them at the General Council and that was mainly about Jesus. They were very socially conscious, and helping a lot of people socially, and they were very connected with what was going on in the city. Jean was talking about Jesus, Jesus’s love for us, Jesus’s message to us, Jesus’s mission and our mission to be like Jesus in the world. And of course for their social consciousness it was what they wanted to hear, and so they really loved Jean and wanted to be connected with him and with us. I have a sense that for Jean, being with people in the United Church and received with such total acceptance gave him a desire to say, ‘How do we talk together from the different churches? They have accepted me totally. I have accepted them. God is with us, we’re walking together. Should we have a retreat?’ Jean said let’s call it an ecumenical retreat, and he said we want a third of the people to come from the Anglican Church because we had a lot of Anglican connections and Steve and Ann were Anglican. Let’s have a third of people from the United Church, and a third Catholic. I think that there were more United Church people there than Anglicans and Catholics. The United Church really turned out.44 Hearing her description, it seems that after the Naramata retreat and a retreat at Gimli, Manitoba also in 1973, denominational quotas were left behind. Further, the lessons of the Naramata retreat had been taken to heart, and the worship at this retreat was different. Mosteller continues: So we planned this retreat and how do we worship together? We couldn’t just have Catholic mass with all the people, and for the Catholics we couldn’t just have sort of a little liturgy of the Word – that would not be satisfactory at all. For Jean this was not a problem. This was something that we needed to dialogue about, that we needed to plan for, and then we needed to invite people into the experience, not as something that was a problem but as something that would help us to grow and appreciate one

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another. So what did we do? One day we had a eucharist in the Anglican tradition. Then we had a United Church service with a lot of music and scripture. Then we had a Catholic eucharist. We did that over the days that we were together and Jean said to people again, this is not a problem, this is a gift. We want to live something together with the God that we all love, and who loves each one of us. The influence of the Cedar Glen retreat in the United Church was not only interpersonal, teaching Bob Smith to see the world through different eyes, nor was it only a more successful experiment in ecumenical worship, openness, and respect. The way in which Vanier spoke about Jesus was significant. McLeod and Smith both recall that Vanier spoke from scripture passages. McLeod describes how “He spoke to us in his inimitable way, beginning with a scripture passage that he would then extemporize on.”45 Vanier spoke of Jesus intimately as a friend, “as though he was in the next room – and maybe he was, is.” But despite their fascination, McLeod, Smith, and others from the United Church also found themselves uneasy, because it wasn’t the way the United Church talked in the 1970s. “The United Church tended to talk more about the Spirit,” explains McLeod. “Vanier was definitely coming in with a different vocabulary of spirituality than we were used to. We were a bit uncomfortable. We couldn’t see ourselves talking about Jesus that intimately and often.” Jesus-language held a certain ambivalence, in part linked to the theology and ideology of the “Jesus-people” of the time. A quick glance through issues of the United Church Observer dating from the early 1970s reveals both keen interest and reservations: for example, the November 1972 issue features several articles revealing the ongoing United Church desire to affirm and encourage young people’s commitments and idealism alongside wariness of their “hippy” look and fundamentalist theology. At the Cedar Glen retreat, some United Church members of the retreat actually went to Vanier and asked to discuss his intimate way of speaking about Jesus. Smith remembers that they felt “dishonest pretending this was working for us.” The United Church style was to pray to God, and the second person of the Trinity was “teacher.” So Vanier said “I’ll meet you at quarter to twelve tonight.” His late-night stamina astounded them, but they went and laid out their concerns. McLeod wondered, “If we were to respond wholeheartedly to Vanier’s message, should we be talking about Jesus

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in that way, too?” They told him they were uncomfortable with this spirituality. It didn’t feel natural to them, but they didn’t want to spoil anything for others with their own unease. Decades later, Smith still remembers Vanier’s answer. Vanier replied: “At Cedar Glen, breakfast interests me – eggs, cereals, sometimes pancakes – and some people are unhappy with everything and bring their own granola. Perhaps you’re so busy looking over to see what’s in your neighbour’s bowl that you don’t see what’s in your own. Ignore the language: be in the experience.” In other words, notes Smith, “I was excessively rational, and so not sufficiently free to be present to what was happening. Jean helped me to appreciate it for what it was instead of sitting in judgment on it.” McLeod felt a “tremendous reassurance for me and for others when he said ‘No, I’m not laying this language on you at all – it’s my way of speaking about the mystery of God through Jesus,’ who he sees in this very personal and vivid way. That was very reassuring to us. He wasn’t saying that if you want to be a true Christian you must do this. It was very broad and accepting of where we were in the United Church at that time.” Smith came away reassured that the language of Spirit was his “breakfast bowl.” Alternatively, McLeod felt freed to speak about Jesus: “I do think that a large part of the reason that we now feel more comfortable using that language is his influence. It is very much more common in United Churches now, and in my life and preaching Jesus is the window.” Mosteller sums up the effect of the Cedar Glen retreat: I can just tell you that every day we had goose bumps because it was so beautiful, and because someone had shaped us to the experience, given us a way to look at it which was ‘I don’t have to see the differences and criticize that they don’t have what I have.’ Instead we see the gift of one another. I’m not positive of this point, but I think that after Cedar Glen, Jean’s retreats were more and more ecumenical just because more people knew that he was coming in the summer to give a retreat and nobody was saying, ‘are you Catholic or Protestant?’ Jean Vanier’s letter to his circle of friends dated 19 March 1974 reads: In Toronto we had an ecumenical retreat and two days of prayer and unity with brothers and sisters from the Anglican and United

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Churches. As in all ecumenical retreats there was much pain but Jesus helped us live the pain as an offering for all the divisions, hatred and refusals of the past. Deep union can only come gradually, through suffering and through a real deepening of our lives in the spirit of the Beatitudes. Unity can only come about when we are all transformed by the Holy Spirit. We must work more and more towards this unity through prayer and through work with other followers of Jesus. Unity around the Eucharist can only come little by little, when the time is ripe and when the Holy Spirit brings that unity into being.46 What is interesting about Vanier’s letter here is his frequent efforts to decentre himself, to keep Jesus at the forefront, and to build genuinely interdependent and trusting relationships with others that allow for unity in diversity rather than pressing for superficial uniformity.47 1 9 7 4 : t h e u n i t e d c h u r c h h e l p s l ’ a r c h e d ay b r e a k e x pa n d i n t o t o r o n t o

In 1974, the United Church of Canada supported L’Arche Daybreak in a very material way by cheaply renting the community a house on Avoca Avenue in downtown Toronto. One of the core members at Daybreak wanted to live in the city rather than on a farm, and others were more able to find suitable employment in the city. Steve Newroth remembers going with Jean Vanier to George Morrison’s tenth floor office and explaining to him the basics of L’Arche and their desire to add new homes: “With that, George took us to the window and pointed out a ring of houses below owned by the United Church that surrounded their parking lot. He said, ‘Do any of these look like a L’Arche house?’ Thus was Avoca House born.” The early residents of Avoca House do not remember any particular day-to-day connection to the United Church. No one attended the United Church, although one Anglican core member was especially happy to live near a cocktail lounge that served mint juleps.48 There was a weekly mid-week potluck with Roman Catholic mass in the living room, presided over by Jesuit priests from the Lady of Lourdes parish. When Toronto city fire regulations changed, the United Church did not want to invest money into the required upgrades, such as a fire escape, so in September 1986 L’Arche Daybreak moved the Avoca House community to a new house that they purchased on Mortimer Street in Toronto.

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united church has given us immense support and never asked anything in return”

There is something about this story that sounds familiar: George Morrison took the L’Arche leaders to Toronto to stand at the highest point of the General Council offices and showed them the United Church’s houses spread out below in all their splendor. “Any of these can be yours!” he said. But here any echo of the temptations of Jesus end, because there was no “if” following. The United Church wanted only a very low rent, with no other conditions attached. The United Church did not ask to be worshipped – indeed, quite the reverse. United Church minister Doug Graves was struck by something Jean Vanier said at a meeting of the L’Arche Church Leaders Group (a group of four clergy from different Christian traditions who met regularly with the international coordinators of L’Arche and Jean Vanier): “I had a talk with Jean at the last gathering. He said ‘One thing I have always liked about the United Church – it has given us immense support and never asked anything in return.’”49 Graves comments, “That is the United Church’s stance, its way of doing things. We would not attempt as a church to take ownership of something like L’Arche. It would be characteristic of the United Church to say this is a Roman Catholic thing we are supporting, and we are very happy to support it. Certainly that was my attitude when I began getting involved in L’Arche. Whereas the Catholics immediately want to build in a structure, we have no structure to say L’Arche and the United Church should relate in any way other than individual people in relationship.”50 Church historian Phyllis Airhart quotes Ron Graham’s 1990 suggestion that the United Church is “the most Canadian of churches” because “like Canada, its strengths may be the same as its weaknesses: diversity, tolerance, compromise, humility, practicality, and niceness.”51 That characterization of the United Church reflects the stance that Graves describes. Underlying many of the stories about the United Church is the question of how the United Church imagined itself. We could call these kinds of self-characterization “social imaginaries,” in Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s use of the phrase. He describes it as: “the ways in which they imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations … And

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beyond the ideal stands some notion of a moral or metaphysical order, in the context of which the norms and ideals make sense.”52 United Church theologian Don Schweitzer uses Taylor’s framework to explore how the United Church’s social imaginary has changed since 1925. He notes that already by the mid-1970s, the United Church was no longer functioning as an integral part of English-speaking Canada in the way that it had prior to the 1960s, and “its social imaginary began to be formed by the contrast between its former privilege, power, and effective programs, and its now diminished size and influence as a volunteer community.”53 Meanwhile, L’Arche too had a social imaginary – a vision for making homes with people with intellectual disabilities. It was a vision that galvanized people’s interest across Canada and new communities exploded across the country: after Daybreak in 1969 came Ottawa and Edmonton in 1972, then Stratford, Calgary, Winnipeg, and Toronto (initially part of L’Arche Daybreak) in 1973, Vancouver and Saint-Malachie in 1974, Arnprior in 1975, followed by ten more communities over the next 10 years.54 A letter of Vanier’s dated 1 September 1975 gives a sense of the social imaginary of Vanier and perhaps of L’Arche in relation to ecumenism: We lived very deeply the ecumenical reality of L’Arche. Since the last Federation it seems we have become more and more truthful in this domain. Many of our North American communities have an equal number of Catholics and Protestants: it is important that we recognize this reality and that we try to live it with mutual respect. The fact that Daybreak was the first community created after L’Arche-Trosly is very prophetic and I am sure we are going to discover this more and more. It is important for each one to be faithful to Jesus and to our respective traditions, not seeking to make a syncretism which would be false and unrealistic. If each one of us is faithful to Jesus and to our churches then we will live unity as a gift of God.55 l ’ a r c h e s h i l o a h , va n c o u v e r 1974

United Church minister Gordon How tells the story of how L’Arche arrived in Burnaby, British Columbia, just east of Vancouver. In 1973, he started a new job for the Metropolitan Council of the United Church in the Greater Vancouver area, which included the

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oversight of various United Church mission units and projects. Only a few years earlier, the United Church had built a new “Home for Unwed Mothers,” not realizing that social conditions were changing. How explains that this was more than just new methods of contraception: “After only a few years, the United Church could not continue the ministry as costs were increasing, residents’ needs were more complex and social conditions for single parenting were rapidly changing.”56 How was asked to recommend a new use for the home, and he recollects: Sure enough, this suggestion came that we explore the possibility of it being the home of a L’Arche community. I do not know where this suggestion came from, though I suspect it was made by George Morrison because he had been part of establishing the United Church Metropolitan Council in Vancouver before relocating to the United Church’s General Council Office in Toronto. I was asked to go to Daybreak and meet Steven Newroth and talk about any interest they might have in establishing a L’Arche community in Vancouver. It didn’t take long for one thing to lead to another. How represented the United Church of Canada on the new Vancouver L’Arche board. He was especially impressed by the community director: “The first director of L’Arche in Vancouver was Judith Leckie, who had grown up in Vancouver and who had been working with Steven Newroth at Daybreak. She became the director of Shiloah57 through its first several years. Judith’s pastoral, spiritual and administrative leadership was exceptional.” How also remembers Judith Leckie’s brother, the late Peter Leckie, who was director of finance for the City of Vancouver at the time. His sister convinced him to volunteer on the first L’Arche Vancouver Board in 1974. Judith Leckie recounts how she came to L’Arche, and became the founding director of L’Arche Vancouver: I grew up in Vancouver and was for the first 25 or so years of my life a regular member of the United Church. I had even at one point wanted to be ordained until I discovered that no women were being given churches of their own! I left Vancouver in 1963 to move to Toronto and about four years later became a Roman Catholic (but I have always referred to myself as a

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low-church Catholic). I think that I first heard of Jean Vanier from Sue Mosteller whom I met when she was working at the Archdiocesan office for religious education and I was working for the Ontario and Canadian Association for the Mentally Retarded. I also met Steve Newroth at that time as he was beginning the first community at Daybreak. Sue Mosteller and I traveled to India and other places together when she was preparing to write her book My Brother, My Sister and it was on that trip when we finally went to Trosly that I met Jean Vanier. I found him scary because I had this sense that he could be an instrument of life-changing proportions and I was not quite ready for that. In any case, he did become such an instrument – I attended a number of the retreats he was giving in North America and so I ended up at Daybreak shortly after Sue. It was during my year at Daybreak that Steve approached me about the United Church’s offer of the house in Burnaby. He and I went out to see it – it was amazing and though in some sense, totally unsuitable for a homey L’Arche community it was only one dollar a year so it was too hard to resist. We thought it could be made into a good, loving place. In January of 1974, I came out with Peggy McDowell to begin to make the connections that were needed – with the United Church, with the local institutions, with the various services. We formed a board which included Gordon How. When we were setting things up in Vancouver we were alas, pretty Catholic oriented initially apart from Gordon’s terrific help. But as more people came – most of the assistants were Catholic but not all the core folks were, so we made connections with the local United Church. Ken Milne went to the local United Church and was welcomed beautifully. We certainly did struggle at all levels to try to work this out because it was clearly important that everyone’s faith be supported and nourished if they wished. And it was important to find a way to be together in worship so that people did not feel excluded but this even now may still be in the struggling stage. The connection got stronger quite a while after I left in 1979.58 Leckie notes that L’Arche Greater Vancouver now has a close connection with the United Church, and their shared history is recognized: “When I was there for the 40th anniversary one of the important events of the weekend was a service at Burnaby United

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that included Gordon How and Doug Graves. It happily celebrated L’Arche Greater Vancouver’s history with the United Church and of course the fact that without the gift of the house, the community would never have existed.”59 a sense of place which is extroverted

In a 12 August 1974 letter, Vanier described yet another ecumenical retreat as: one of the most peaceful retreats that I have ever had, despite the number: about five hundred and fifty people from the Catholic, Anglican and United Church traditions … I felt deeply united with the Anglican bishop and the regional head of the United Church. One evening all three of us travelled together by car and shared for nearly three hours. We are united in our hearts and in our desire to follow Jesus, in spite of all our poverty and failings. I thank Jesus so much for that retreat and for the unity he gave us. Twenty years ago the different churches were fighting among themselves; ten years ago they were hardly speaking; and now we are able to live and pray in unity even though we are not yet united in the Eucharist.60 In this letter, Vanier recounts a story of three church leaders in a car, an intimate time when these public figures could share personally, including their “poverty,” failings, and deepest desires around following Jesus. Doreen Massey notes that “places can be imagined as articulated moments of networks of social relations and understandings but where a larger proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself.”61 Massey continues that “this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.”62 Vanier places the very personal conversation on the three-hour drive in a larger context and scale of how ecumenism has been growing over the past twenty years. He sees their sharing as part of a larger whole, the extroverted expression of their place in the wider world. Insofar as their conversation was also about their respective churches, their

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expression of ecumenism included listening to each other’s denominational social imaginaries. A different example of this extroverted sense of place involves the participation of a United Church minister in the early days of L’Arche Winnipeg. Eileen Glass, an Australian assistant from 1974 to 1976, recalls how her fellow assistant Jim Lapp’s father, United Church minister Gus Lapp, supported the new community’s assistants in a creative, tangible way: The first year I was in L’Arche Winnipeg we had a number of assistants who were from a United Church background. One of them had a father who was a retired United Church minister, and I have to say he remains part of my life story and my formation, because he, having an understanding of what we were living as young assistants coming into community, realized that we needed some theological framework to reflect on our experience. He used to send his son a parcel of books from time to time, and he would say to his son ‘Look, you people need to be reading but you don’t have time to read everything,’ so in these parcels of books he would mark particular pages or chapters. He really opened up for me writers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day. When our days away came around we would often go to Jim and ask, ‘What has your dad sent you? What are you reading?’ Because we were reading the same things, we were enjoying endless tutorial-type conversations, reflecting on what we’d read and applying it to our life in community. I found it a very simple thing that this man did for us, and yet so immensely important in terms of stimulating our reflection on experience, which is of course the whole value of entering into the wondrous adventure of community life.63 It was a significant gift not just to the individual assistants, but to L’Arche. Eileen Glass went on to found L’Arche in Australia. Forty years later, Jim Lapp was community leader of L’Arche Winnipeg and Eileen Glass was one of two leaders of L’Arche International. l ’ a r c h e h o m e f i r e s , w o l f v i l l e , n o va s c o t i a , 1981

Cultural theorists Peter Stallybrass and Allon White ask, “How does one ‘think’ a marketplace? At once a bounded enclosure and a site of

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open commerce, it is both the imagined centre of an urban community and its structural interconnection … A marketplace is the epitome of local identity and the unsettling of that identity by the trade and traffic of goods from elsewhere … It sometimes seems that the commonplace is what is most radically unthinkable.”64 A similar question could be asked about both L’Arche and the United Church. How does one ‘think’ a L’Arche community? How does one ‘think’ a United Church? Not the larger social imaginary, but a specific L’Arche community, a particular United Church at a particular time: think L’Arche Homefires community and St Andrews United Church in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Both are physical places with buildings for members, but also spaces of hospitality and welcome. Both are imagined as centres of their communities: places of prayer, spiritual nurture, ritual, spontaneous celebrations, music, and social interaction. They are also structurally connected to networks of volunteers, fundraising activities, government safety regulations, tax status, and service provision according to variously evolving theories and ideologies, such as normalization or even ecumenism. Each is independent, with an illusion of selfdetermined identity and separateness, but L’Arche Homefires is also part of an international federation with its own leadership structure, priorities, and external funding constraints, and each United Church congregation is also part of the national United Church of Canada. Even a United Church can be closed or amalgamated. United Church members Jeff and Debra Moore began L’Arche Homefires in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, in 1981.65 It had been a journey of more than a decade to reach that point. In 1964, as a high school student, Jeff Moore got a summer job as a recreation worker on the “mental retardation” unit of the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital. He did what he could to create positive experiences but was deeply saddened by the overall living conditions and the experience stayed with him. After university, while working with the Canadian Association for Community Living in Halifax, Moore read about L’Arche and even tried to start a L’Arche home as a way to get people with intellectual disabilities out of the rather bleak Beaverbank nursing home. When that didn’t happen, Moore moved back to Ontario to work at the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital again, but now as a social worker in a position to help make alternative plans for people. He helped the new L’Arche communities in Ottawa and Cornwall to welcome people from the institution into the community. Over time, however, he found the ingrained “cuckoo’s nest” culture of the institution so demoralizing that he decided to focus his efforts on building community

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alternatives.66 Moore moved to Silver Spring Farm for men with intellectual disabilities, where he met Debra in 1973. They both pursued studies in social work, but spent a great deal of their free time visiting and dreaming about L’Arche communities. They remember it as a stimulating time: “normalization was going to change the world for people with disabilities and L’Arche was going to change people’s hearts.” In the summer of 1976, they moved to Wolfville in the Annapolis Valley to support Jeff’s brother, Terry, through his cancer treatments. Coincidentally, they were asked to start two new group homes for the Canadian Association for Community Living: one was a pilot project for persons with more significant handicaps and its first residents were Keith Strong and John McNeil, “who came from the abysmal Mountainview Home, the old ‘poorhouse.’” While such group homes were a huge step forward, Jeff and Debra Moore felt they typically lacked heart and too often ended in “blaming the victim” by treating people as if it was their fault that they were marginalized by society. Jeff Moore finished his masters in social work and the Moores started a family while continuing to be involved in deinstitutionalization and the development of community options in Nova Scotia. They stayed good friends with Strong and McNeil, and often invited them to visit. In a 1989 article, Jeff Moore writes: When I first met Keith, I was part of an effort to open one of the first group homes in North America for people who were classified as severely mentally retarded. The guiding principle behind such efforts was ‘normalization.’ When this approach was initially conceived in Scandinavia in the late 1960s, it was concerned with normalizing the general physical and social living conditions for people with intellectual handicaps. When it was reformulated by Wolf Wolfensberger (1972) for North America, the emphasis was changed from normalizing conditions to normalizing people, i.e., their behavior and appearance … On the surface normalization seemed simple and made so much sense – helping people who had been segregated to fit back into society. From my experience, however, it seemed that people, and especially people who were handicapped, were too often taking a back seat to ideas, to the agendas of others. These agendas – to reform institutions, to rehabilitate individuals, to establish rights for the handicapped, to change society – were often well-­ meaning but misguided. They were not being carried out in a

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way that was responding to the basic needs and interests of the people involved.67 Jeff Moore remembers, “In time, the group home system wasn’t working for Keith or John, and Keith asked if he and John could come and live with us. It seemed like the natural thing to welcome them to live in our home though some thought we had lost our marbles. It wasn’t long before we realized this was a long-term commitment and we had really started our own L’Arche type community with John and Keith at the centre, not us.” In his 1989 article, Jeff Moore ponders how Keith Strong caused him to rethink normalization: “After spending many years figuring out how to normalize people, I was now living with a man who did not want to be my project or my cause. He wanted to be my friend.”68 When the Moores discovered that many people in their community supported the idea of beginning a L’Arche community in Wolfville, they contacted L’Arche and began the long process of finally joining the L’Arche federation. They started small, by turning their house over to the new organization called Homefires and getting a winter works grant to put on an addition. Jeff Moore continued to work full time and teach at the university and they actually paid rent to Homefires along with his mom who got adopted by all as “Granny Joe.” “But what wonderful years those were for the community and our family,” Debra Moore recalls: We had a terrific community of support and were part of the development of the network of L’Arche homes in the Atlantic Region including Boston. In a sense we had a lot going against us at first. We had an unusual low-key beginning because there was a provincial moratorium on starting new community residential services, and very little funding. But things just kept falling into place. I remember Henri Nouwen saying, ‘If you do the right thing for the right reasons, you will be given what you need.’ We were given the people, the support, the competence and the courage to develop an amazing community – we were recognized in Nova Scotia as an exemplary community service within and outside of L’Arche. Gordon Haliburton is a former board member of L’Arche Homefires. He and Edith Haliburton were long-time members of St Andrews United Church in Wolfville. They had just returned from working in

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Africa to be closer to the extended Haliburton family in the Annapolis Valley around the same time that the Moores and their children, along with Strong and McNeil, arrived to live just up the street with Jeff’s mother. They quickly became friends. When the Moores decided to bring their little community into the L’Arche federation in 1981, Gordon Haliburton served on the board of the new L’Arche commuity. “The members of the board were mostly from the United Church,” he recalls.69 Members of the church were supportive and excited about L’Arche. Members of the community were part of the church. L’Arche used the church hall for events, such as an annual fundraiser featuring local ad-hoc band “Men will be Boys.” The wider community was welcomed to potlucks and prayer services midweek. Jean Vanier came to visit. One of the Haliburtons’ nephews married an assistant from L’Arche, and the whole L’Arche community was at the outdoor wedding, which included a pig roast. Soon there were five houses in the area. L’Arche was good for the church, the Haliburtons recall, because “it brought us out of our complacency.” People with disabilities had a higher profile, which led to “more acceptance within the community.” L’Arche in Wolfville was unique in being founded by United Church members and supported primarily by local United Church connections. As the Moores relate: In short, our story was that we were captivated by L’Arche – by the meaning, the experience and the lessons it gave to the world. We thought L’Arche would embrace ecumenism as it made sense. Many of the people with special needs were Protestant, so L’Arche had already made a decision to live diversity. It’s also true, right from the get-go, that L’Arche didn’t really know what to do with us. We had started a very successful L’Arche community both in attracting assistants and building extensive involvement in the community and churches. The community was financially stable. We had not come from another L’Arche community and I think we were one of the last communities to be welcomed into L’Arche this way. We didn’t quite fit the mold and we couldn’t quite figure out why, or at least we couldn’t talk about it. The Moores began L’Arche Homefires in Wolfville at a time when interchurch ecumenical coalitions were thriving at an institutional

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level, but understandings of ecumenism at a local level varied from place to place. Perhaps that is why in 1988, the Interchurch Interfaith Committee of the United Church’s General Council launched a project “to rediscover the nature of the ecumenical imperative in a time of ‘ecumenical winter.’”70 A painful example of the difficulties of being Protestant in L’Arche came out into the open during the 1987 election of a new regional coordinator for the Atlantic Region of L’Arche. Jeff Moore was willing and able and seemed the logical choice. The Regional Assembly included more than fifty delegates and was chaired by the zone coordinator who was a former Roman Catholic nun. She was outspoken in her opinion that Moore should not be elected, citing vague concerns about “spirituality.” At several points, she abruptly adjourned the meeting to go make mysterious phone calls that delegates believed were with L’Arche International or perhaps Roman Catholic leadership. To participants, it appeared to be an unexpectedly controlled process with many straw votes and multiple adjournments. Moore was elected, but after thinking about it overnight, he felt he had to decline because of the faulty and divisive process. He remembers: It was said afterwards by people in the know that L’Arche International was under some pressure at that time not to have non-Roman Catholic leadership or their long-term support as a Roman Catholic lay organization would be threatened. The overall issue of support from the Roman Catholic hierarchy was said to be a big concern of Vanier’s for the long-term continuity of L’Arche. In any case, the message was clear and we went back to focus on our own community and all of the extraordinary gifts we had been given. We were continually reminded however in all kinds of ways of our place as non-Roman Catholics in L’Arche. We persevered quite happily and successfully in spite of this due to some incredible people in L’Arche that embraced ecumenism, embraced our community and its gifts, and embraced Debra and me and the work we were doing.71 The rules of L’Arche in the early 1990s limited directors of communities to terms of three years with a two-term limit. By 1995, Debra Moore had been founding director for two terms and Jeff Moore for two terms. As their time of leadership was winding down, they found themselves left out of any discussion on succession:

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In June 1995 we were given a six-month sabbatical while an interim Director took over. Towards the end of our sabbatical, we were told by the Acting Director that Homefires could not afford to offer either of us a position. I suggested, because Debra did not want much and I was willing to get work outside of L’Arche, that it would cost Homefires less to keep us than not, as they would have some obligation to pay us severance. Unfortunately, while this was meant to be positive, it was taken as a threat and our relations with the Board began to really deteriorate. The board was clearly divided in the following months, many resigned and that was the end. We were heartbroken. Like with any acrimonious divorce, we have moved on and kept up relations as well as we could but it has not been easy. At the time when the Moores left L’Arche, Gordon Haliburton was teaching in Botswana. The story he heard from a distance was that the bishop of Yarmouth was very conservative, and wanted L’Arche Homefires to be more Roman Catholic.72 The Moores were on a sabbatical, and were asked not to return. It was very painful. They remember: The Haliburtons capture the reality pretty much. It’s true, the community was largely started by people associated with the United Church, including us (Jeff and Debra) as this was our community at the time. We wanted to build an ecumenical community, so we reached out to the Roman Catholic Church and welcomed people into our community and on our board that were Roman Catholic. On leaving, we saw Homefires as our community of choice, our family, and we had thought that we would continue to be involved in some way. In no way did we see ourselves dropping out of people’s lives. We just wanted to step down from the leadership and give others a chance. We had been doing it for fifteen years and it was time. But obviously there were forces in L’Arche, and then in Homefires that preferred us not to be involved in any way. A wise friend of ours used to say, ‘If you want to treat somebody badly, you have to think badly of them’ – basically vilifying the enemy. We did feel vilified, even shunned and were told to stay away and to have no contact with the community. This took us many years to recover from, as we were never told why.

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The United Church noticed that L’Arche events in the church hall stopped. Fewer L’Arche community members attended St Andrews. But although the connection with L’Arche dwindled, the Moores were loved and respected as part of St Andrews United, and the church community supported them in their new fair trade coffee venture, the Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-operative. St Andrews United Church closed in 2012 when four local pastoral charges amalgamated into Orchard Valley United Church in New Minas. There has been a lot of healing between the Moores and the L’Arche Homefires community over the years since they left. Again in Debra Moore’s words: Jean Vanier is an amazing man, a holy man with a beautiful lifegiving and healing message. L’Arche is magical – transforming the unwanted, the unvalued into precious friends and teachers. That being said – both Vanier and L’Arche have their limits, their needs and their responsibilities that shaped the reality of L’Arche. As United Church members, we can admire Vanier and L’Arche and learn from them – but it was almost impossible for us to take leadership in L’Arche unless we converted. We didn’t bring with us any baggage about the Roman Catholic Church. Jeff grew up in the high Anglican tradition which is very close theologically to Roman Catholicism. Many of the people we shared community with were Roman Catholics who we came to love and admire. Maybe we were naïve but we just assumed that because we had no issues, they would have none with us, and in fact we were helping them to bring about this vision of diversity, acceptance and love. We had no desire to take any big leadership in L’Arche but we wanted to stay in L’Arche. It was family. We also wanted to continue bringing the message of L’Arche to our community of Wolfville and Nova Scotia. Almost from the ­beginning (with Vatican II and all), I think Vanier and others in L’Arche have felt awkward about this. It seems they were more open in the early days to ecumenism – but then things changed in the 80s and 90s. It was sad for us to see L’Arche seemingly go backwards in their efforts. Looking back, it seems we just have to accept that L’Arche is fundamentally Roman Catholic. We have to appreciate them, even admire them, and forgive them for not becoming what we and maybe they hoped they might be.

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In 1997, the United Church’s Interchurch Interfaith Committee’s decade of work culminated in the report “Mending the World.” One of its principal authors was Bob Smith, who had been the young minister in Richmond Hill when Daybreak began and by 1997 was also a former moderator of the United Church. “Mending the World” assessed the priorities of Canadian mainline churches: “We find ourselves today in a time of what Mary Jo Leddy has called ‘ecumenical eclipse.’ The mainline churches of Canada, faced with aging membership and dwindling resources, have responded by turning inward. The United Church of Canada has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of survival. The vision of a church united and uniting in order that it may witness to the purpose of God for wholeness has been lost.”73 This seems in contrast to Canada’s active ecumenical justice coalitions, but it echoes the Moore’s local experience that the shared vision of ecumenism dwindled in the 1980s and 1990s. “Mending the World” looked to the original meaning of “ecumenism,” from the word “oikoumene,” which referred to “the whole inhabited earth”: “While not departing from our commitment to seek the unity of the body of Christ we are called to set as priority for The United Church of Canada God’s work of earth healing, sharing the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and making common cause with all people of good will, whether they be people of faith or not, for the creation of a world that is just, participatory and sustainable.”74 That accurately describes Jeff and Debra Moore’s initiative after L’Arche. Committed as the they were to a world that is “just, participatory and sustainable,” they began Canada’s first fair trade coffee roasting co-op: “Fortunately, we found something, the Fair Trade Coffee business, to consume our time, energy and passions and help us to heal. We hired a few of the core members to work at Just Us! and this began the healing with the community.” In 1997, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops joined the Canadian Council of Churches and Janet Somerville became the first Roman Catholic and the first lay person to be General Secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches. In 1999, in office space shared with the United Church General Council offices in Toronto, coffee and ecumenism met as the Canadian Council of Churches office began ordering its coffee from Just Us! Co-operative. The Moores conclude, “But in a real way, we have continued to live L’Arche. Our son Greg, who we adopted as a baby with Down Syndrome in 1989, has been such a gift to our family and our

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community. We deeply believe he is one of the finest human beings we know, not perfect by any means – but he truly loves everybody and will not stand for conflict, hurt or exclusion of anyone. What a joy it has been for L’Arche and Greg to come into our lives.” Looking back, they express a gratitude for L’Arche that has never left them: “In truth – L’Arche models a way of being. When we started Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-operative, we brought many of the values and beliefs we had learned in L’Arche, with one of them becoming a workplace that embraced diversity.” Their story with L’Arche continues to evolve: One of the most healing moments was when the L’Arche Homefires community celebrated the 20th anniversary and we were invited to come. By this point there had been some healing and so we decided to go. Jean Vanier had also been invited. We sat down and there was a seat left open beside us. Just as things were about to start, Vanier came down the aisle and sat down beside us. He then asked to see us after the celebration to hear how we were and what we were up to. I could see all those people that had hurt us and shunned us couldn’t believe that Vanier would spend time with us. Of course we know that this wasn’t the first time founders had been hurt and Vanier was so amazing at rising above it and valuing you as a person. In a 2004 article titled “Building Inclusive Communities of Life,” Marilyn Legge, professor of Christian Ethics at the United Church’s Emmanuel College, commended Just Us! as one of several communities “with Christian ties that express a quality of relationship that involves personal history, identity, mutuality, and fellowship.”75 For their work in L’Arche and Just Us!, the Moores have been awarded Acadia University’s President’s Entrepreneurial Award for combining entrepreneurial success with social and environmental responsibility, a Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission award for their ongoing commitment to education, innovation, and collaboration in the field of human rights, as well as honourary degrees from Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia Agricultural College) and Saint Mary’s University. I am grateful for the Moores’s willingness to share these painful and complex aspects of their story. How do we think about their experience? Part, of course, is a conundrum that is well known to

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leaders in the United Church: when ministers retire or leave a congregation, they (and their families) limit contact to give new leaders opportunity to establish themselves. This can produce an awkward ambiguity. L’Arche offered to find a place for the Moores if they had been willing to move, but they were well established in Wolfville. They did not expect the almost complete separation that ensued, with firm instructions to have no contact at all with their friends in L’Arche. But that problem is only part of the Moores’s story. Other painful parts involve the confused messages around ecumenism. Remember Doug Graves quoting Jean Vanier’s appreciation that the United Church has never asked for anything? Graves observed that requests for recognition or a formally structured relationship would not be in the culture of the United Church. Does the experience of the Moores in Wolfville suggest some problems with that aspect of the United Church’s social imaginary? Are there times when a clearly defined institutional relationship would help to support individual relationships? Perhaps a more identifiable relationship would have allowed some of the tensions or anomalies to come into the open and thus into conversation. Further, if the connections had been more conscious, could core members have been better supported to remain members of the United Church? Perhaps it can be framed in this way: at the ecumenical breakfast buffet, it is hard to enjoy your own bowl if your neighbour fears it might be inappropriate to pass you the milk and no one knows how to talk about it. henri nouwen, l’arche, and the united church of canada

Meanwhile, during some of these same years as the Moores’s story unfolded and the United Church discussed what ecumenism could accomplish going forward, well-known Roman Catholic priest and writer Henri Nouwen was a member of L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill. When he arrived in 1986, Sue Mosteller recalls, the community held a meeting and described for Nouwen a big problem at Daybreak: members came from many different Christian denominations and even faiths. Any celebration of any tradition excluded someone, and while the community wanted to help each member grow in their own tradition, the reality was often tense and frustrating. Mosteller remembers that Nouwen listened carefully, then

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suggested that the community change the word “problem” and instead use the word “gift.” For Mosteller, Nouwen’s insight changed her perspective entirely. The ecumenical and interfaith reality of Daybreak could be understood as something that God gave as a treasure for their life together. The community began to welcome their differences with new energy. Mosteller and Nouwen were close colleagues throughout his time at Daybreak, offering pastoral care to the community and friendship, wisdom, and guidance to each other. She recalls that building relations with the local United Church was an early priority for Nouwen: “When Henri came in the mid eighties, he went down and visited Richmond Hill United Church. There were a number of things that happened because Henri connected with the ministers.” Long-time Daybreak member Beth Porter grew up in the United Church and discovered L’Arche through reading the selections of Vanier’s talk to the 25th General Council in the December 1972 United Church Observer. She recalls that soon after Nouwen arrived, he encouraged the community to do an inventory of where each of the core members worshipped and their church affiliation. This led to several core members seeking baptism, confirmation, or membership in their own tradition.76 When invited to local church, Presbytery, and Conference events, Nouwen usually brought members of L’Arche with him or redefined the invitation to use L’Arche leadership and skits. He famously observed once that “People won’t remember a word I said, but they’ll remember that Bill Van Buren and I stood here as friends and equals and spoke together.”77 Sue Mosteller remembers difficulties in some of Henri’s ideas for Daybreak’s ecumenical liturgical events: I also recall that one of the hard things for the United Church ministers, and I don’t think Henri got it at first, was that at Christmas and Easter we had a reconciliation service. Of course for the Catholics that meant going to confession. But we invited the United Church minister, the Anglican Church minister, and sometimes the Presbyterian when there was somebody going to that church, to come to that service. Henri wanted to have the ministers available to people who might like to speak to them privately. Henri would give a little homily about reconciliation, about speaking the things within us that we weren’t so proud of to another person who was of God, who then could bless us and

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say for God ‘Don’t worry about that. I know about that but I love you anyway.’ Henri would give that homily then people could go individually to their minister. Who knows what some of the core members had to say? I don’t think it was always simple or easy. I know that occasionally United Church ministers just said, ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’ We had to listen and try to find what they would be comfortable with. Henri wasn’t wanting to force anybody. He just said, ‘People know you, they love you. You’re their minister, you represent God to them.’78 While Nouwen’s unusual reconciliation services initially appear to model inclusive Christian fellowship, on deeper analysis they reflect dynamics similar to the Moores’ experiences of Roman Catholic dominant culture in L’Arche. As Mosteller represents this scene, United Church ministers were invited to be included in a service shaped by acts of reconciliation that would be familiar to Roman Catholics. In other words, the Protestants could join in and be included, but their inclusion did not transform the event. According to Mosteller, Nouwen encouraged Protestant ministers to step over their discomfort by calling them to a sacramental interpretation of their role as ordained ministers: “You’re their minister, you represent God to them.” In most Protestant traditions, however, the minister does not represent God in that way. Ordination is not a sacrament, and the ordained person has not been ontologically changed. Rather, the minister is understood as someone to stand before God with their community members, rather than someone to represent God to their community. Even leaders as visionary as Mosteller and Nouwen could, with all good intentions, have moments when they were oblivious to the limitations of inclusion in the context of ecumenical differences. Still, Nouwen’s ministry at Daybreak built many respectful and enduring bridges between the United Church and L’Arche. United Church minister Keith Reynolds describes how he discovered both the United Church and L’Arche through Nouwen. After Reynolds graduated from Hope College in Michigan, he contacted Nouwen who invited him to visit L’Arche Daybreak. This in turn led to Reynolds joining the community for a time in the early 1990s. Reynolds recalls: I grew up in a community church in the States and had only heard of the United Church through some books that I had read, but had no idea of the United Church before I came to Canada.

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I came to know the United Church through a man named Lloyd Kerman who I lived with during my first year in L’Arche.79 At L’Arche, I met Jeffi and we were married. We left Canada in 1993 and went to Princeton where I had already been accepted. That was a wonderful year, but what called us back was probably two-fold: it was L’Arche and the United Church. I wanted to be a part of the United Church having gotten to know it that year in L’Arche, and we wanted to be connected with L’Arche in some way. I think both of those things were clarified for us when Jeffi and I went on retreat together with Henri Nouwen. After the first year I transferred from Princeton to Emmanuel at the Toronto School of Theology. Jeffi worked in L’Arche while I was a student, which also gave me opportunities to connect again with L’Arche through the year while I was studying and also during the summer.80 Nouwen also widened the ministry of L’Arche to welcome United Church ministers on individual retreat. For example, Doug Graves speaks of a “huge gift” while he was serving on the Division of World Outreach for the United Church. When Graves came to the quarterly meeting he would stay at Daybreak and have spiritual accompaniment from Nouwen. Graves attests, “This provided a huge integration of things for me. I honestly think there is a theological gift that is just now starting to be felt.” Graves found Nouwen’s writings on the “wounded healer” powerful, and Nouwen’s subsequent books about L’Arche deepened that focus for him as a minister. In 1991, United Church minister Gordon Turner wrote to Nouwen at L’Arche Daybreak when he was leaving his General Council Division of Mission in Canada role as program officer in evangelism and congregational development, and moving to congregational ministry in Vancouver.81 Nouwen replied by saying “I am convinced that there are some graces hidden in Daybreak for you that can prepare you well for your future ministry.” After consulting with his colleagues Sue Mosteller and Elizabeth Buckley, Nouwen suggested a month of retreat, structured with times in the Daybreak Seniors Club and times of prayer, silence, reading, and spiritual accompaniment “so that you have a concrete context in which to work and to explore in greater depth your relationship with Jesus.” Nouwen’s plan had to be approved by Daybreak Council. In a letter to Council, Nouwen explained the wider significance of his invitation to Turner as a pilot project,

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concluding, “I do believe that this is one very significant way in which our community can really offer a gift to the Church.”82 tendering reciprocity

Tender as a verb suggests reciprocity. A request can be tendered, sent out into the world for a response. This initiates a tender process. In response, a bid or an offer can be tendered. What is tendered is usually practical. This chapter has set out in a roughly chronological way some stories of what the United Church and L’Arche have offered and received from each other. United Church minister Loraine MacKenzie Shepherd, in her 2004 article “Church of the Margins: A Call to Solidarity,” commends “a reciprocal relationship of receiving and giving instead of distancing ourselves through a handout relationship.”83 She explores why the United Church’s reconciliation program with First Nations seems at an impasse. Quoting theologian Dr Musa Dube from Botswana, she suggests that “liberating interdependence” can grow as the question “How can we help?” is replaced with “What can we learn?”84 In this light, these specific stories about moments of reciprocal relationship between L’Arche and the United Church are instructive. What is given and received is quite different, because of the unique singularity of each organization. Both are helping the other, and perhaps both are learning. The United Church offered L’Arche houses, people, property, and practical support. L’Arche offered the United Church inspiration, counsel, committed members, retreats, prayer, and friendship. Often both experienced what was tendered as “gift.” Many of these stories are about the pleasure of discovering and learning from each other. But sometimes painful mismatches between what was included and excluded caused hurt and rupture. Those relationships took time, patience, and mature goodwill to begin reconciliation. The United Church has also tendered another significant contribution to L’Arche. Ever since United Church minister Louise Cummings first came to L’Arche Greater Vancouver in 1995, many Presbyteries of the United Church have recognized work by its clergy in L’Arche as a United Church ministry. By keeping seniority and pension fund contributions intact, the United Church has made it possible for at least three ordained United Church ministers to take up full-time leadership in L’Arche: Dennis Butcher in Winnipeg, Dan Kirkegaard in Saint John, and Lynn Godfrey in Hamilton.

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Dennis Butcher of the United Church was Community Leader of L’Arche Winnipeg for nearly a decade, from 2000–10. His sense of ministry was hugely influenced by Henri Nouwen in the 1970s, long before either was involved in L’Arche.85 He had first become connected to L’Arche in Edmonton when he was minister of Sherwood Park United Church. A member of L’Arche named Norman wanted to attend that church, members of the congregation volunteered to bring him on a regular basis, and because of Norman, Butcher became involved with L’Arche. Butcher remembers Henri Nouwen speaking in Edmonton at Grant MacEwan College in the 1990s: “There were a thousand people present and the evening started out with a dramatized scripture reading. Norman was the Christ figure on the stage which made it even more memorable. Unfortunately he died about a month later. They called him one of the original ecumenists – he came to the United Church on Sundays, then in the midweek he would go to Bible study at the Catholic Church, so at his funeral in the United Church, the Catholic priest and I co-officiated.” After Norman died, Butcher was leading a prayer night at L’Arche Edmonton when a man named Rick visited from the Michener Centre in Red Deer to see if L’Arche was a fit for him. “I didn’t think much about it,” says Butcher. “I led the prayer service, I met Rick, and I went home and he went back to Michener Centre. About a month later he walked into my congregation and from that day on he has been and still is a regular member of the congregation.” The Sherwood Park United Church youth group took part in L’Arche Edmonton’s “one and only fundraising walk.” Several members of Sherwood Park United Church have also served on the L’Arche Edmonton Board, two as board presidents. Butcher was next called to a United Church in Winnipeg. When they had to downsize from two ministers to one, he started looking for his next pastoral charge. At the same time, L’Arche Winnipeg was looking for a community leader, sending notices to Catholics, Lutherans, Mennonites, Anglicans, and the United Church. Butcher phoned and asked, “Would you seriously consider a non-Catholic?” because the L’Arche Winnipeg community “was at that time the only community outside of Quebec that was designated Catholic.” It had started in a convent that was donated by Catholic nuns right beside a large Catholic church. The story was that an Oblate Sister met

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Vanier at a Faith and Sharing retreat in Gimli, Manitoba,86 and felt a strong urge to give the Oblate Sisters’ house to L’Arche. The Mother Superior agreed and told the archbishop, who also agreed to give the house away. The sisters then invited the fledging L’Arche members to dinner – and when dinner ended, the sisters picked up their suitcases and left, leaving all the furniture and household supplies for L’Arche.87 It is not recorded who did the dishes. Butcher describes the relationship in this way: “So that parish essentially became the founder. Sister Marie Paradis, a Catholic sister that used to live in the convent, was identified as the first leader and that was her convent and her parish. It had a strong Catholic orientation and it was identified as Catholic.” By the late 1990s, the Regional Council and the board were rethinking the social imaginary of L’Arche Winnipeg, from a Roman Catholic community to a more ecumenical vision, but that direction had not been shared with all the community members. Some of the more long-term Catholic assistants in the community found the hiring of a United Church community leader especially difficult. On the other hand, Butcher ponders, if that ecumenical direction had been discussed more fully in the community, it might have received even stronger pushback. Fortunately, Butcher was known in the wider Winnipeg community through curling and ministerials both in the north and the south end, so there were good relationships already in place with many of the Catholic priests. Butcher thinks that the long-term assistants who were initially resistant eventually recognized that some of L’Arche Winnipeg’s major developments would need the support of the entire Christian community. In his words, “There have been strong buy-ins particularly from Mennonites and United Church in the community. Our fundraiser was a Mennonite, which I think was also a first. She was very successful and so the community is now seen as an ecumenical community. We bought the office, we built a million dollar building for the community space and the largest of our houses. We renovated two other houses to make them accessible. We raised 2.5 million dollars and that wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t moved out beyond the Catholic circle.” For many Canadians, Butcher’s description fits aspects of a social imaginary of Winnipeg itself, with bonds built through curling, a socially active Mennonite community, and co-operative inter-church organizations. Butcher’s decade of leadership turned out well for the community. He admits that it “was pretty demanding because you had all the regular stuff dealing with the government, as well as dealing with the

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L’Arche structure. Also, constant construction projects all the way through. But I was very happy to be community leader and enjoyed the nine-and-a-half years very much.” dan kirkegaard in l’arche saint john, new brunswick

In 2004, United Church minister Dan Kirkegaard and his family moved to his hometown of Saint John to found the first L’Arche community in New Brunswick.88 Like Wolfville, L’Arche Saint John offers an interesting example of the differences in structure and expectations between the United Church and the Roman Catholic Church. It began in a house that had previously been the Catholic priests’ residence. The Roman Catholic Diocese gave it to L’Arche, but not completely: should L’Arche ever want to sell it, the house would revert to the Roman Catholic Diocese. Thus the house could not be counted as a L’Arche asset, and the community could not borrow against it to fund their second house. This structural relationship was built into the property ownership documents. It was a different logic than the United Church used in Vancouver, where its Burnaby property was initially rented for one dollar a year, then sold to L’Arche, and that community now has no structural ongoing relationship with the United Church. A board member explained the ownership logic to Kirkegaard: to the Diocese, L’Arche was not a stand-alone organization. The Catholic Church remains on the deed, thus ensuring that L’Arche will continue. Dan Kirkegaard grew up in the United Church in Saint John. After high school, he travelled with the evangelical theatre group the Covenant Players all over the US. Returning to Canada, he attended Acadia University in Wolfville where he met Jeff and Debbie Moore. The connection with the United Church in Wolfville was very much part of Homefires, he recalls. Kirkegaard found that the other Nova Scotia L’Arche community on Cape Breton was “much more Roman Catholic” and remembers that the dynamics of denominational differences sometimes caused tension between the communities. Kirkegaard met his wife, a teacher visiting from Vancouver, at a L’Arche Homefires barn dance. The whole community came to their 1991 wedding at the United Church in Grand-Pré and core member John McNeil was Kirkegaard’s best man: “He stood with me and signed his X on the documents.” After they moved to BC, Kirkegaard

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worked at the L’Arche Vancouver day program and was ordained to the United Church by the British Columbia Conference in 1997 with L’Arche people on stage to pray and lay hands on him. Kirkegaard also served as Chair of the Board of L’Arche Vancouver when the board looked for members with more direct L’Arche involvement. In 2000, by this point with three children, Kirkegaard accepted a call to East Burnaby United Church, one of the United Church’s more theologically conservative renewal / covenanting congregations. “I came knowing that, and I was fine with that,” says Kirkegaard. But he was surprised that some members of the congregation were vocally opposed to new things. He recalls, “A few months into our second year, I got a list of complaints brought to me of apparently unacceptable practices, and one was that I accepted people with disabilities without any question.” Examples included his welcome of a young man from a group home nearby: “He had cerebral palsy and his voice was hard to understand and his body, awkward.” In his pastoral ministry, Kirkegaard supported people who were connected to church but not well-accepted in the church, and spent a lot of time with them. “And within a year of being there, we adopted a four-month old baby with Down syndrome,” Kirkegaard adds. He addressed this from the pulpit, saying that he was “happy people recognized that our ministry is with people with disabilities. These people are blessed by God.” Meanwhile, the New Dawn community in Saint John had been working since 1991 towards establishing a L’Arche community, and in December 2004, Kirkegaard became the founding director. Kirkegaard worked through the regulatory complications of starting L’Arche in a province that did not distinguish between people with mental illness and people with intellectual disabilities. His family welcomed a young woman with mental illness to live with them for two years. Enormous fundraising was needed for the fledgling L’Arche community. L’Arche Canada’s new membership document unexpectedly confused and alienated long-term community supporters. Kirkegaard spent every other Sunday travelling to United Churches and churches of other denominations throughout New Brunswick, speaking about L’Arche and building connections. If we consider again Doreen Massey’s articulation of place, we can see that Kirkegaard forged for L’Arche Saint John a complex layering of a Roman Catholic property, ambiguous government regulation, confusing L’Arche Canada directives, and widespread networking amongst numerous United Church congregations in the city and

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surrounding area. By making the new L’Arche community well known, ecumenically and especially among local United Churches, Kirkegaard worked hard to establish numerous strands of congregational connections and funding that supported the community, rather like a tent upheld by its various tie-lines. At the same time, Kirkegaard’s outreach challenged many United Church members to greater awareness of the experience of people with intellectual disabilities. Just two years earlier, in the World Council of Churches 2003 meeting in Nairobi, the WCC Ecumenical Disabilities Advocates Network published “A Church of All and for All.” This document acknowledges the effect that people with disabilities can have: “People with disabilities, and particularly people with learning disabilities, disturb and confuse the accepted order in many societies. Disabled people disturb human notions of perfection, purpose, reward, success and status.”89 Calling for Christian solidarity, it nonetheless goes on to strongly assert: “In our attitudes and actions toward one another, at all times, the guiding principle must be the conviction that we are incomplete, we are less than whole, without the gifts and talents of all people. We are not a full community without one another. Responding to and fully including people with disabilities is not an option for the churches of Christ. It is the church’s defining characteristic.”90 Kirkegaard’s leadership in L’Arche and in the United Church has been dedicated to boldly living and ministering this defining characteristic. Returning to Vancouver in 2008 was a wrenching decision for Dan and Sandra Kirkegaard, but one they felt was necessary because Sandra had not been able to find work as a teacher in New Brunswick. Kirkegaard was called half time to the Vancouver Japanese United Church English-speaking congregation for two and a half years, then full time to Tsawwassen United Church. He remains involved in L’Arche, leading community prayer, helping with retreats, and connecting with the Vancouver community as vice-chair of the Operations Board. He says “the connection with L’Arche is relational, not intellectual.” In his ecumenical vision, Kirkegaard considers L’Arche foundational to his “relationally-based ministry” and his commitment to “different ways of being God’s people.” ly n n g o d f r e y i n l ’ a r c h e h a m i lt o n , o n ta r i o

In January 2015, United Church minister Lynn Godfrey became community leader of L’Arche Hamilton, eighteen years after first being

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introduced to L’Arche.91 Godfrey arrived in Sudbury in 1997 and her friend Louise Cummings, who was leaving, asked Godfrey to replace her on the Board of L’Arche Sudbury. Godfrey remembers, “I really didn’t know anything. The board was fairly active in the community, and I was invited to lead the spiritual component of a community weekend.” She went on two formation events – one with Jean Vanier in Montreal, and the other with Sue Mosteller in Guelph. She describes her experience: I was hooked by the whole aspect of mutuality and living in partnership with each other. It was the gift of the core members, the joy of the community, the spirituality. In the church, we have a hard time even praying before the start of each meeting, but in L’Arche spirituality is very deep. In L’Arche Sudbury, prayer was such an automatic thing that happened. It wasn’t talking about good ways to live: it was struggling to do it. Another draw for me was a sense of trust and risk, being invited to use my gifts where people didn’t know me well. While at her next congregation in London, Godfrey again connected with the local L’Arche community, leading worship services for the community every month or so. After another move to a congregation in Hamilton, Godfrey became a friend of L’Arche Hamilton and after a few years, L’Arche Hamilton asked her to work full time as homes coordinator and spiritual guide. In 2015, Godfrey became the community leader of L’Arche Hamilton. The United Church continues to support L’Arche by recognizing Godfrey’s L’Arche role as ministry. Godfrey reflects on her ministry in L’Arche: What keeps me in L’Arche is the relationship with the core members. And I see the young people being transformed by the core members, and I just really want to be part of that, and help them to do that. The young people come in and live as assistants, and then they go off and do other things, but they take this experience with them. When they keep in touch, they don’t keep in touch with the leadership team: they keep in touch with the core members, because those are the ones they have the relationship with. It’s a real privilege to be supporting the core members so that they can do their magic with these people. I find my life in community is joyful. It’s tough, but there is joy and love and it

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makes it all worthwhile. Instead of just talking about the gospel, we struggle to be authentic about what the gospels teach us or try to teach us. People have the impression that it’s difficult to work with our core members, but the core members are the ­reason we are here. I can only work in the office so long before I need to go out into the day program or into a house!92 j e s u s , p r ay e r , a n d o n g o i n g e c u m e n i s m

A few months before Bruce McLeod and Bob Smith had their latenight conversation with Vanier concerning the way in which he spoke of Jesus, an unsigned editorial in the January 1973 United Church Observer was titled, “The United Church Has a Special Role in 1973.”93 It began with an assessment of the ecumenical situation: “When church historians a century hence survey this period of Christian history, they will note two things: the growth of goodwill among major Protestant, Anglican and Roman Catholic churches; and the widening gulf between liberal and conservative evangelical Protestant churches.” The editorial encouraged United Church congregations at a local level to work with other denominations on “a continental evangelism program” called Key 73. A few pages later, another editorial titled “The value of saying Jesus” quoted Vanier’s talk to General Council the previous summer: Recently Jean Vanier put it: ‘Those who live in insecurity turn to God.’ He added that when he visits hospitals for the aged he finds it helpful just to put his hand on the head of an old person and say, ‘Jesus.’ Even in these times of affluence in the relatively secure western world, great numbers of people live in personal insecurity in the midst of economic plenty. The church … has good news of security and hope for them. But it is sad to note that in our time so many churches with a rich evangelical heritage seem unable to say ‘Jesus.’94 Decades later, this possibility of speaking comfortably about Jesus is carried in many L’Arche communities, not just by Jean Vanier himself. When Maggie Enwright was minister of Comox United Church on Vancouver Island, she “found in L’Arche the freedom to talk about Jesus, a place to be Christocentric.”95 In her church community she has “total freedom to talk about the Spirit, and some

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freedom to talk about God or Creator, but talking about Jesus gets tricky because people say they feel like a fraud in relation to Jesus. But at L’Arche there is space to be Christocentric and it is embraced.” She notes with wry amusement that she used to feel “too new-agey” in the United Church, but now “not new-agey enough,” and worries that L’Arche could try to be so vaguely multi-faith that it loses something essential to its identity. From her perspective, “If L’Arche becomes as multi-faith and new-agey as many United Church congregations then it won’t be as nurturing for people like me.” United Church minister Dan Kirkegaard made the same point in 2018, appreciating Jean Vanier’s persistence in speaking about Jesus in a way that remains rooted in his Christian traditions while being broadly accepting of other faiths. Henri Nouwen did not need the help of L’Arche to talk about Jesus, but in L’Arche he found something new in his relationship with Adam, a man with profound disabilities. Nouwen wrote, “because of the vulnerability of Jesus we can see Adam’s extremely vulnerable life as a life of utmost spiritual significance … I know that I couldn’t have told Adam’s story if I hadn’t first known Jesus’ story. Jesus’ story gave me eyes to see and ears to hear the story of Adam’s life and death.”96 Theologian Kwok Pui-lan observes that every person has multiple, shifting identities.97 Individuals are complex and can change, and the same is true for communities. Nearly every L’Arche community in Canada outside of Quebec has some history of connection with the local United Church. Those connections come and go, depending on the religious affiliation of core members, the interest of local leadership in nurturing those connections, and practical logistics such as whether L’Arche members need a ride to church. In this regard, the experience of Comox United Church is interesting. United Church minister Maggie Enwright comments: I was on the local L’Arche Spiritual Life Committee and we had a big debate there about ‘Is it helpful for core members to be paraded around to different churches?’ They used to go as a group, so one Sunday a month, three of the four core members and some assistants would come to our United Church. They had not a shred of self-consciousness about standing up at welcoming time and saying ‘Y A Y !’ Or Cory saying ‘Maggie! Maggie! Amen! Alright!’ It just didn’t faze Cory to stand up and do that. I think

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it was a great thing, and the congregation would say, ‘Good! The L’Arche people are taking one pew today!’ But it raised questions for the Spiritual Life Committee. I tried to hear their concerns, that it maybe wasn’t the best for each core member not to be able to put down roots in a congregation. Through a discernment process they decided that each core member would choose one church and be part of that community consistently. One person decided she would come to our church. The other ones don’t come anymore. I wouldn’t say it has deepened her relationship with the church, because although the intention is to come to the United Church, it is sporadic. Now that they aren’t all going one place, they have to rely on people who know them to bring them and that hasn’t really happened. Doug Graves noted in 2010 that problems still spring up even in well-intentioned efforts towards ecumenism: It’s going to be so hard to overcome the Catholic ethos. Even when they try they stumble over it. We had a service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity at L’Arche Greater Vancouver recently. It was my turn to lead the service. The person who oversees the local L’Arche Spiritual Life Committee was away and so other members of the Spiritual Life Committee, which is a very strong committee, had taken over. Anyway, at the last minute Sister Normande said, ‘Oh my God, we haven’t planned communion, we haven’t planned the eucharist for this!’ She said ‘We’ve got to have the eucharist’ and the other members of the Spiritual Life Committee said, ‘Of course we do!’ It was with the best of intentions. Normande said, ‘Because that symbolizes our coming together.’ And I said, ‘Not in L’Arche it doesn’t.’ Not anywhere! And she is such an ecumenical person. She just hadn’t made the connection. She hadn’t stopped to think that a communion service in the context of unity doesn’t work. In the Roman Catholic tradition, if it’s a ‘special’ service we’ll have communion. They said that I redeemed it when I offered the reflection. I just talked about how we struggle for unity in the midst of some of the realities like this one. People will rightly describe L’Arche Greater Vancouver as one of the most actively ecumenical of all the communities but they still have these moments like that, when something just doesn’t connect.

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Jean Vanier continues to think about his experiences with the United Church of Canada. In his 2017 book of autobiographical reflections, Vanier titles one section “Painful Unity,” writing: One of the best presentations I can remember took place at the United Church of Canada’s General Assembly, in close cooperation with L’Arche. How moving to see our witness received with such intensity and listening! Soon after, we had an ecumenical retreat with Catholic and Anglican bishops, as well as moderators from the United Church. I remember the pain many felt when we could not share Communion at the same table, despite the spiritual unity we had experienced.98 Of course, sometimes people simply take ecumenical decisions into their own hands, open to follow God’s call. Judith Leckie, founding director of L’Arche Vancouver, tells how she became a Carmelite nun in England but more recently has come back to worship in the United Church of Canada: About those of us who grew up in the United Church and then became Catholic: I think that had I remained in the United Church I would never have been in contact with L’Arche. But I was exceedingly grateful for my United Church background, which gave me a bit of a different perspective. But it was the richness of the Catholic tradition that gave me what I needed at that time to help me to see L’Arche as Jean was trying to witness to it. When I left L’Arche in 1979, it was to go to the UK to enter the Carmelite Monastery at Quidenham. There were in fact, several other women there who were also former L’Arche people. I remained in Carmel for almost 30 years and was very grateful indeed for that. But our little monastery had to close, and I realized that I was not prepared to go to another community because I had become pretty unhappy with the institutional aspect of the Roman Catholic Church and its male domination under the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict. So, ultimately I returned here to Toronto and though I do from time to time go to the Catholic Church, I most regularly attend the services at Rosedale United. There I find the nourishment and community that I need for the moment.

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When Helen Humphries, one of the early core members of L’Arche Daybreak, moved off the Daybreak farm into one of Daybreak’s houses in town, she became a regular member of Richmond Hill United Church. It was only a block away from where she lived. After the service and fellowship time, she liked to walk a block further to slip into the latter part of the Catholic mass still in progress at the Roman Catholic Church. Either a blatant rule-defier or an insistent ecumenist, Humphries confidently joined in to receive the sacrament at communion time. Clearly she felt at home in both churches. Each week she also chose spontaneously at which church to tender her United Church offering envelope. This provided another ecumenical link as the amused church secretaries got to know each other through sorting out Humphries’s offering. In the space of a few short blocks up and down Church Street, Humphries walked an ecumenical path that refused to take sides and instead double-dipped to feed her remarkable spirit. New connections between L’Arche and the United Church constantly sprout up. In 2017, Donna Tourneur, minister at Trinity United Church in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, replaced Doug Graves on the four-member L’Arche International Church Leaders group. She joined Ruth Patterson, a Presbyterian minister who in 1976 was the first woman to be ordained in Ireland and director of Restoration Ministries, a non-denominational, Christian organization committed to peace and reconciliation; Pierre d’Ornellas, a former theology professor who is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Rennes, France; and Stephen Conway, the British Anglican Bishop of Ely. Tourneur is the only member of the Church Leaders group who is married with a family, and the only member currently in pastoral ministry. She grew close to the L’Arche community on Cape Breton from 2003–14 when she was at Stewart United Church in Whycocomagh. After more than a year of representing the United Church of Canada on the L’Arche International Church Leaders group, Tourneur said she had not used any United Church documents about disability or being an intercultural church.99 As argued earlier in this book, even the most articulate and insightful documents are often overlooked in both L’Arche and the United Church. People connect through relationships and stories.

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Accepting a role on the L’Arche International Church Leaders group meant taking on the challenge of building connections between L’Arche and the United Church, so Tourneur renewed her interest in L’Arche. In May 2018, she successfully nominated Jenn Power, the leader of the L’Arche Atlantic region, with her husband Silas Donham who runs a work program at L’Arche Cape Breton, for the Atlantic School of Theology’s “Honourable Mayann Francis Faith in Action Award,” which “honours exceptional community outreach that is recognized as having provided significant benefit to the wider community.” Along with their wide-ranging community work, Power and Donham have been going to family camp with their children at the United Church’s Berwick camp for years. Power notes how often L’Arche comes up in presentations by United Church leaders at camp events.100 In September 2018, Tourneur invited Jenn Power and a L’Arche core member to speak at the last meeting of the local Presbytery.101 They used the central L’Arche words of relationship, transformation, and sign, urging their listeners that every community is called to these three things through reaching out, being vulnerable, and remaining always open to transformation. Yet, they emphasized, no one can observe their way to transformation: it is a participatory exercise. A few weeks later, also through Tourneur, Power and another core member spoke about hope to a local Council of Churches gathering. They pointed out that hope isn’t needed when things are easy: hope is needed in hard places and times of hopelessness. Moments of transformation don’t spring from nothing, they announced, but are the result of long commitments to hard work in community.

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3 Just Stories? Tender: a tender ship has a high centre of gravity, making it responsive to change and easily affected by crew position.

Narrative theory reminds us that stories have narrators and audiences, in a relationship between what is told, what is heard, and by whom. “Storytelling invites us to become not just agents in our own lives, but narrators and readers as well,” insists cultural theorist Richard Kearney.1 Are stories ever “just stories,” or does every story imply levels of meaning, something more resonant? Thinking about the ambiguous, often conflicted, and complex stories included in chapters 1 and 2, in what way are these stories “just” in terms of the United Church and L’Arche? In what ways do they celebrate diverse experiences; in what ways do they reveal hidden fissures and pain; in what ways do they build solidarity, mutuality, and community; and how do they risk increased vulnerability? Who tells the story? “Whose story am I?” ask John Swinton, Harriet Mowat, and Susannah Baines. They continue: All of us live in a complex matrix of narratives and counternarratives that merge together, sometimes coherently, sometimes quite incoherently, to give us a sense of who we are and why we are in the world. In terms of personal identity, there is a real sense that we are the stories we tell about ourselves and about one another. But we are also the stories that others tell about us. Precisely who accurately tells your story? Is it you? Is it your family? Is it the government? Is it the church? It is of course all of these groups of people. Our lives comprise of a constant stream of narrative negotiations as we try to work out who we are and how we should act in and on the world.2

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This chapter offers stories of United Church people who have been inspired and shaped by relationships in and with L’Arche. We saw in chapter 2 that stories of L’Arche often include personal and corporate times of pain, misunderstandings, breakages. This chapter explores why times of grieving are especially rich times of storytelling, then continues to explore several stories using anthropologist Gerry Arbuckle’s articulation of identity stories and revitalization stories. These lead into consideration of stories of conflict and confusion. The chapter concludes with stories of laughter, because those too are central: in L’Arche and in the United Church, as in most human communities, pain and laughter are rarely separate. What do just stories have to do with justice? As Wayne Morris writes in “Transforming Able-Bodied Normativity,” “Being vulnerable to one another can only enhance our lives if it is accompanied by a commitment to justice and a resistance to any abuse of human vulnerability.”3 “There are times when stories should be told,” begins the introduction to the United Church’s Voices and Visions, written in 1990 to celebrate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the United Church. It adds, “In a community of faith there is all the more reason to share memories. For one thing, we each know some of the stories, but we need to hear others to get a larger view.”4 United Church ethics professor Roger Hutchinson reflects, “We are probably as in touch with reality when telling our stories as when we are attempting to articulate our most basic convictions.”5 In discussing this project, United Church storyteller Ralph Milton noted that stories are not necessarily intellectual exercises and thus can be accessible to anyone. “Stop running into hyper-intellectualization!” he urged. “What matters is the life you live, how you live it, and how you are with other people. What matters is what’s in your heart, not so much what’s in your head. It’s not that we shouldn’t think about things, and try to be knowledgeable – but listen to what’s behind the story, what somebody unexpected can teach us.”6 Stories give shape and significance to communities as well as individuals. A “tender ship” has a high centre of gravity. It has an increased danger of becoming unstable because movements on deck will affect the ship’s balance and momentum. Crew members affect the ship’s stability. In other words, the ship’s balance and direction, like a community’s, is determined by relationships – and every relationship has a story.

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Keith Reynolds was a L’Arche Daybreak member before becoming a United Church minister. He narrates how dying in L’Arche becomes a celebration in story: In the actual dying part, I’ve always been moved with L’Arche with how important it is for people to come and say goodbye. So friends might come who’ve lived together for a number of years, people who know this person’s story, people who have lived with the person. I can give an example. When Linda, a close friend of my ex-partner Jeffi and I, died, we hadn’t lived in L’Arche for thirteen years. But Jeffi and Linda were very close. L’Arche remembered that and called Jeffi letting her know that Linda was dying and Jeffi came to be there with Linda. So remembering is a significant part not only of Linda’s life but Jeffi’s life and the life of L’Arche. I think that’s something that L’Arche could give as a model for people in the United Church to experience dying. When Linda could no longer tell her story because she was dying, Jeffi was there and could help the people who were coming to see Linda remember their story and Linda’s story: ‘Oh, do you remember when you and Linda did this? Do you remember when we took holidays together?’ So it became a very rich and beautiful time not only for those people who were staying with Linda like Jeffi, but for those people who came to say goodbye, in that there was someone who remembered Linda’s life and who could help tell Linda’s story together.7 Reynolds bears witness here to the importance of storytelling during the last stages of someone’s life, weaving others into the fabric of remembrance that holds and honours the person’s life as it draws to a close. Further, stories continue to shape choices and community events after the person dies. He notes: Because the body is so central in L’Arche, it’s important to care for the person’s body after they die in a loving and gentle way. So what clothes did the person love to wear? What things could we put into the casket with the person? What ways could we still remember the person? And keeping the body close during the time, so the body isn’t in another room while we’re remembering the person but we’re very close and we touch, we kiss the person’s body. It’s a very incarnational experience of being close to

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the person’s body. The Woodery, for example, at Daybreak Richmond Hill has made a number of caskets for people who have died so it comes from the heart of the community. I think about how flowers are part of these times, how the senses, visual representation, and pictures are involved. Stories are shared and plenty of time is taken so the person’s life is marked and stories are remembered and told – the funny stories that make us laugh, the stories about how the person maybe drove us crazy, the stories that made us love the person very easily. So stories and remembering become a big part of it. Friends are invited back into that time so it’s not just a remembering in the community in L’Arche but also includes friends who lived with the person a long time ago, and if they have any family, they are certainly part of that remembrance, too. In L’Arche it is particularly important to tell stories of a core member who has died because affirming their importance in that manner runs counter to the cultural marginalizion of a person with intellectual disabilities. Pamela Cushing, a professor of cultural anthropology and disability studies who lived in L’Arche homes across Canada for a year as part of her PhD research, remarks in more general terms on the importance of stories in the culture of L’Arche: “In this way, L’Arche is a cultural system that prescribes alternative moral norms to the mainstream, and provides categories of thought that construct how we experience life, and how we make sense of it. This, in turn, influences what parts of the flow of our lives we come to consider narrative-worthy, or meaningful experiences: in other words, what aspects will stand out from the continuous flow of daily life.”8 Notice how in his telling, Keith Reynolds affirms the value of the body for L’Arche people. In describing simple details like clothes selected and gestures of touching and kissing the body, he prioritizes the physicality that is often so important for people with fewer words. As Cushing suggests, stories not only affirm what is meaningful but also construct meaning. Reynolds continues, It becomes something not only for the community in L’Arche but it becomes a way to connect with the longer story of this person’s life and how they have affected people. It’s not surprising in a funeral in L’Arche that people come from all over the country. Sometimes people come from different parts of the world to

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come back and mark someone’s life because it matters and because of that embodied way of being together and the sense of mutuality and belonging. I think L’Arche has something to give to the United Church in how it marks a death and marks someone’s dying. I’m noticing in the deaths and funerals that I’m part of that there’s an awakening to something that people are longing for in marking a life. For people with intellectual disabilities, stories not only affirm their unique value but also carry a resonant undercurrent because of the particular social context that marks a life lived with disabilities. Feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva contends that “disability differs from other ‘differences’ in that it confronts us with mortality.”9 She continues further, “The fear of death, fear of human finitude, even fear of the limits of the human (in the face of certain severely poly-disabled) are, moreover, the dark side of this iceberg – this block so insurmountable as disabled persons and their families know too well – that is often the attitude of those who are not disabled in the face of disabled persons.”10 Kristeva names this power of mortality and consequent fear in those who are not disabled as a particular burden that is not always recognized yet is always carried by the disabled person. The disabled person presents an unsettling reminder of potential mortality by virtue of their obvious limitations and the reality that without support they would struggle to survive. Speaking especially for parents, she observes: “It is mortality on the march, which touches me in him or her, I am there, it falls on me, I accompany him or her, I love him or her as he or she is.”11 At L’Arche, in the face of an impending death, the gathering of stories becomes not only a memorial but an affirmation of each life as an ongoing triumph over mortality. In the context of Christian faith, which is the common language of L’Arche and the United Church, the stories celebrated in a person’s dying allow that while death is always at work in life, death is not the final reality. As the United Church’s A New Creed affirms, “In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone.”12 Reynolds’s articulation of the importance of storytelling and remembering in the time of someone’s dying parallels cultural critic and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who writes of “the duty to remember, as it is called, the duty of not forgetting.” Ricoeur adds, “I suggest we bring together the notion of the duty of memory, which is a moral

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notion, and those of the work of memory and the work of mourning, which are merely psychological notions. The advantage of this rapprochement is that it allows us to include the critical dimension of historical knowledge within the work of memory and mourning.”13 The work of memory and mourning is clearly tied up in the acts of storytelling that Reynolds describes. That work is a duty not in the sense of a begrudged obligation but in the sense of good words proclaiming the significant life and legacy of someone whom society tended to ignore. Further, many stories of people with intellectual disabilities offer what Ricoeur calls a “critical dimension of historical knowledge.” For example, writing about Ontario’s institutionalization of people with intellectual disabilities, critical disability scholar and former L’Arche assistant Madeline Burghardt writes that “vast narrative discrepancies exist” because “they emerged from a situation marked by significant power differentials.” Those with less power embody “the more painful side of the story.” The stories are thus “all evidence of the existence of oppression and injustice, and all reason enough to work towards preventing the re-creation of the situation which gave rise to discrepant narratives in the first place – that is, to prevent the re-emergence of institutionalization and incarceration for those considered different.”14 Peter Rotterman came to L’Arche Daybreak from an institution in Orillia, Ontario. He had grown up in his family, then lived in the institution for less than a year before becoming the second person with an intellectual disability to move to the new L’Arche Daybreak community. He rarely spoke of his time in the institution other than to gently admit that he had been unhappy. But he loved to describe his arrival at Daybreak and how that moment gave purpose to the rest of his life. He walked into his bedroom at Daybreak, a room he would share with Bill Van Buren, and saw that there were just two beds, not a long ward of institutional beds. Beside each bed was a bedside table with a lamp, and the lamp was lit. “I said to myself, ‘Welcome back to home life!’” Rotterman recalled. “And ever since then I try to make sure that everyone who comes to Daybreak has the same feeling: welcome back to home life.”15 three stories about identity

Theologian and anthropologist Gerald Arbuckle asserts, “In paradoxical reaction to the individualism, loneliness, and rootlessness of

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postmodernity, people are discovering the positive experience of storytelling. Storytelling in which myths are retold and applied to life may take one of three forms: identity stories, revitalization stories, and fictional stories.”16 I would argue that the vast flood of papers, talks, and books about L’Arche attest to the mythic power of the story of Jean Vanier and L’Arche. Of the individual stories that follow, the first three are in the form of identity stories, then the next two are revitalization stories. In considering identity stories, Arbuckle further specifies that “people can fashion their identity through storytelling by telling their own experiences for the first time, or they may turn to the narratives of others as a model to guide them.”17 In our first story, the story of Thelus George, we see a combination of both approaches as George takes a guiding narrative from Jean Vanier about her vocation and applies it in her own way to her sense of identity as a person with a strong gift of hospitality. This is a story of someone with the capacity to shape people’s understanding of their experience in community. Thelus George: Forming and Sending Jean Vanier was visiting Daybreak in 1991. At a community gathering, Thelus George shared with Vanier an anguish that was close to her heart. After living in the L’Arche community for more than two decades, she explained “Every year assistants come and I get to know them, and we are friends, and then they leave. It hurts my heart. I get very sad.” Vanier replied “Thelus, this is your vocation: to form them in love and send them out.” He was right. A faithful member of L’Arche Daybreak and of Richmond Hill United Church for forty-two years, Thelus George formed hundreds of L’Arche assistants and sent them out into the world. Hundreds of guests were welcomed with her homemade cookies. Unable to write, George spent her days reviewing important upcoming events that she wanted to remember, especially birthdays and visitors. She had a gift of hospitality. In considering how stories get told, Pamela Cushing points out how narratives teach: “Narratives teach through indicating what is culturally significant and relevant about a scenario, which also reproduces the norms and parameters of a particular cultural system. Narrators choose to include certain experiences or events and not others in

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stories, which tacitly teach new caregivers what counts as experience or moral behaviour and what does not count (in a particular moral world).”18 Vanier’s intervention with George is noteworthy because he invites her to expand her narrative framework. He invites her to shift her story from one of loss to one of sending, from one of suffering to one of mission. In an unexpected inversion, Vanier invites George to see herself not as left behind but as forming people and then sending them out into the world to love. In reframing her story, she can see herself as a caregiver welcoming people into her home with hospitality so as to form them in love. Thelus George was born in Toronto in 1924. Her father named her after the town of Thélus, near Vimy in northern France, a place that was important to him during his service in the First World War. When Thelus George died, Anne Todd, who for years went with George to Richmond Hill United Church, gave the funeral eulogy beginning with her early life: Thelus grew up in Toronto with her parents and older brothers Lloyd and Len. Photos from when she was a baby, then a child and then a woman, show Thelus with different members of her family – at home, on her Dad’s old Chevy, at Niagara Falls, at their cottage and latterly at the home of Lloyd and Coby, with whom she lived after her parents died. Lloyd recalls that Thelus was quiet and didn’t talk a lot at that time. We know much more of her life after she moved to Daybreak at the age of 48. In middle age, Thelus blossomed, discovering her many gifts and sharing them generously with those around her. Daybreak was a farm when she arrived in 1972 and Thelus would collect and wash the eggs from the barn and the chicken house. Then she would go on one of the egg routes around Richmond Hill to sell them, as well as produce from the garden in the summer. Soon Thelus was working at the new Daybreak bakery. She continued her career in hospitality and cooking, going on to work in the cafeteria at ARC, where she remained until her retirement. But Thelus didn’t just confine herself to the kitchen. She loved parties and was always planning the next celebration. She couldn’t keep still if there was good music on and loved to dance, whether with a rose between her teeth or with a visiting bishop as some photographs show. Thelus also formed strong bonds with young assistants, mothering them, teaching them and playing with them.

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One young German assistant used to tease her by pretending to be old and needing to use her walker, to which she’d unfailingly respond ‘you’ve got a long way to go, baby.’19 She occasionally travelled with Henri Nouwen to give retreats. On one trip, they were picked up in a limousine that had a telephone. This was before cell phones were popular, so a telephone in a moving vehicle was weird and astonishing. Nouwen encouraged her to use it to phone the Daybreak Senior’s Club. When she explained that she was phoning from the backseat of a limo, her friends roared with laughter. Anne Todd told of the last decade of George’s life: Thelus came a long way in her life. She was proud of the independence that she gained later in life, even living for some time at Centre Street house with four other core members but no live-in assistants. In her homes, she was able to care for others, to be the boss of her own kitchen and to have some control over her life. That all changed after she broke her hip and had to move into long term care where she remained for her final nine and a half years. Not being able to return home was a source of great anguish for Thelus. Thelus George’s ministers at Richmond Hill United Church, Linda Butler and Warren McDougall, remember her as a member of their congregation who received regular visits from the congregation’s lay pastoral visitors during her final nine years in a nursing home “just the same as any member of the congregation.”20 The pastoral visitors were interested in some of the L’Arche traditions they found there: “I think we have learned through this experience. Thelus has photo albums and that becomes an important way of visiting with her. It’s a different style of visiting: with other seniors, you wouldn’t use photo albums as their story base. And not to be quite as wordy, use photos, slow the pace to give her more opportunity to respond.” Two days after Thelus George died at the age of ninety, Butler spoke of her in her sermon at Richmond Hill United Church: “On Friday, I had the privilege of hearing stories about Thelus George when I attended a gathering in her honour at L’Arche. Person after person who visited with her in Elginwood remarked on how Thelus would always thank the staff for whatever they did on her behalf whether it was changing

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her position in bed or bringing her medication. She did this because this was the way she chose to live – with gratitude.” When she was in her seventies, George travelled to Thélus, France, where the mayor of Thélus welcomed her as a visiting dignitary. Anglican minister Alan Cook, her friend who travelled with her to France, offered a moving reflection on that trip and the meaning of her name and life in a wider global context: It was a cool summer’s day when we drove into that hamlet (population 1000) and found our way to ‘La Mairie’, the town hall. We’d written to the Mayor months earlier and he was there, ready to welcome us warmly. Thelus posed for photos outside the town hall, in front of the war memorial which bears the name of the village, which made a great memorial picture for Thelus of that very meaningful day. The Mayor drove us on a tour of the village and on to Vimy and the Canadian war memorial on the Ridge that dominates the plain. Thelus was smiling, but quiet as we looked around the battlefield. Thélus is a tiny ­little place; it’s off the beaten track, and shows nothing of great significance in itself. But if you take the trouble to go there, you find it had a crucial place in the middle of great events of historic importance. And in the middle of them, something hidden and mysterious happened, about 100 years ago, that changed the life of one young soldier, such that he never forgot the name of Thélus and made sure it was remembered in future generations and on another continent. Our friend Thelus, a woman of small stature, with little pretence to be someone of any great importance, proved to be, for those who took the trouble to come close to her, a woman of immense value, who found herself in the middle of the historic movement which is L’Arche. Mysteriously, she changed the lives of hundreds of people, including my own; and her name, the name of this little hamlet in France, will continue to be remembered in generations of hearts, on many continents, with thanksgiving and love.21 Stories shape how we see and what we understand. Thelus George lost many people who lived in her house and then left. We observe how her story gets enlarged into the story that Vanier offers her, to re-envision herself as forming people in love and sending them into the world. Vanier’s story encouraged George and helped her to reshape

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her own narrative of identity from a story of loss to a story of leadership. Alan Cook extends that to recognize and affirm her as an active participant in the history of the international movement of L’Arche. The use of stories in grounding identity needs to be considered carefully. The shaping power of narratives is strong and subtle, and sometimes goes unnoticed, underlying unexamined assumptions and preconceptions. Madeline Burghardt in “Brokenness/Transformation: Reflections on Academic Critiques of L’Arche” analyzes some pitfalls in projecting stories onto people with disabilities no matter how benevolent such stories may seem. Burghardt discusses how disability scholars have analyzed ways in which portrayals of disability can perpetuate a narrative of the person with disabilities manifesting surprising wisdom and thus becoming a means by which the ablebodied gain access to personal experiences of revelation or insight. Having traced this underlying narrative of disability, Burghardt then asks some hard questions of L’Arche: “Does L’Arche frame disability and the disabled person as an ‘epiphanic’ tool, wherein the personal growth of people without disabilities is acquired at the expense of those with disabilities? Does L’Arche encourage a narrative trope of the human kind? Are people with disabilities relied upon as ‘prostheses’ towards the fulfillment of other people’s stories and personal journeys?” She continues, “the question remains whether the discourse, and its coexistent metaphors, frames the way in which these relationships are lived out, and, most importantly, whether or not that framing limits the interactions and lives of people with disabilities. Such depictions carry the danger of inadequate representation, and can be limiting to disabled people’s full potentiality and contribution. As Williams (2001) notes, when disability is ‘reduced to a personal quest for meaning and truth, [t]he politics and history of … disability become marginalized.’”22 Burghardt emphasizes the need to change the narrative of a person with a disability, from being seen as an epiphanic site to being recognized as a person whose unique life is intrinsically part of their political and historic moment. She calls on L’Arche to be aware of the power that stories and “metaphors hold, both in the way in which relationships are lived out, and in the extent to which people with intellectual disabilities are recognized as full, complex, human beings.”23 This concern is not new. As early as 1973, Wolf Wolfensberger, a strong proponent of normalization, was also cautioning people in

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L’Arche not to over-spiritualize community members with intellectual disabilities. Wolfensburg admired L’Arche but he also warned that “once a person has realized that he can learn and gain by the presence of the retarded in his life, he may come to need the retarded … in order to be inspired, to be de-sophisticated, or to feel that one is rendering a worthwhile service, [and] then one will be tempted to keep the retarded in their state of retardation.”24 Shaping narratives that honour the fullness, complexity, and agency of people with disablities is an important challenge for L’Arche. If we look at Alan Cook’s story of Thelus George, its narrative shape is to depict George as a relatively insignificant person from an insignificant place who proves to be a person of immense value in hundreds of lives. This might seem initially like it scripts her into a paragon of welcome. However, upon closer consideration, the shape and point of the narrative is that George is an apparently small agent with unexpectedly widespread impact, networked both in countless individual relationships and as a contributor to the historic movement of L’Arche in the twentieth century. Similarly, Vanier’s story for George that reorients her vision of herself might be analyzed as an external imposition of another person’s narrative. Yet Vanier’s point is not to impose his own story but to offer George a narrative seed that reverses her story from helpless loss and gives her tools to tell and live her story instead as one of active contribution to the world. Jean Vanier articulates what he sees as a fundamental value that people with disabilities can have for society: “Living in L’Arche I have learned that it is a revelation for people with disabilities if you say to them, ‘There is meaning to your life.’ We are not just doing good to them as professionals. That is important, but it’s not just about that. It’s about revealing to them that they have value. They have something to say to our society. In some mysterious way, they are calling to me, to us all, to change.”25 This can be a delicate relational balance, rather like the tender ship noted above. Burghardt’s critique and caution against narrative co-opting of people with disabilities to make them sites, however inspiring, for the tellers’ own stories of personal or spiritual growth is a valuable check to see and support people with disabilities in their own self-determination and in making their own presence recognized and valued. While the caution not to co-opt someone else’s narrative is crucial, it is also true that lifting up people in stories is done all the time to get a larger picture, to affirm our common human experience, to share

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something about and with people we respect. It is a vital part of human social commerce to tell stories about each other.26 Certainly a rich dimension of community is to celebrate people in story. Telling stories is fundamentally humanizing, and dare we say normal, so to be attentive to people with disabilities in this way is potentially liberating, especially when they script, claim, and celebrate their own stories about themselves. Perhaps what matters is the purpose and direction of such stories, especially when telling stories about someone else. As the 2015 42nd General Council report “Theologies of Disabilities,” quoting feminist theologian Eileen Scully, puts it, “An alternative vision of community is ‘radical inclusiveness’ aimed at ‘the conversion of all present structures by the transformative power of ‘dangerous’ stories in order to create communities where all are able to know themselves to be loved by a God whose desire for them is fullness of life.”27 While Thelus George’s life at Daybreak could be reduced to a simple domestic story touched with loss, we have seen her story reset as a story of active mission, making her kitchen and the L’Arche community an inclusive centre for George to receive and shape the experience of many people over decades. There is yet another dimension to this story of Vanier’s words to George. Anthropologist Pamela Cushing has researched how storytelling in L’Arche is essential to the formation and training of assistants.28 Cushing writes, “L’Arche uses a variety of strategies to enculturate and socialize new caregivers into their ideology and practice, and narratives are one of them.” She explains that “informal narratives shared regularly among L’Arche assistants” are productive, because they “create a positive, alternative social and moral reality and cultural environment within the organization. Narratives shape local knowledge and health care in L’Arche by replacing conventional, homogenizing, deficit-focused conceptions of developmental disability with a humanized notion of individual people who have abilities and gifts, with distinct personalities and care needs … These sorts of narratives in L’Arche do not erase difference, but rather work towards reframing and revalorizing difference. This encourages caregivers to live with difference in new ways, effectively expanding their moral imagination.” While Cushing’s research focuses on assistants, some of the most profound (and hilarious) stories in L’Arche are told by core members. Through stories told at community meetings, gatherings, worship, celebrations, and meals, not only assistants but all community members encounter deeper values of L’Arche and so grow in

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compassion, maturity, and often humour. Most assistants do not stay long term, so often it is the core members like Thelus George who hold the stories of who came and went, memories of community members who have died, and unforgettable moments with diverse people from their decades of life in community. Louise Cummings: “How Do We Live with Meaning in the World?” Louise Cummings was inspired by stories about L’Arche that Jean Vanier told at the Naramata retreat in 1973. For decades since, people have been inspired by stories of Cummings’s own life.29 Louise Cummings has over forty-five years of involvement in L’Arche while retaining her identity in the United Church. She first met Jean Vanier at the 1973 Faith and Sharing retreat at Naramata, that first “ecumenical” retreat, with 400 Roman Catholics and forty “others.” You will remember that Cummings and her mother squeaked in from the waiting list when Cummings was still a teenager. She turned twenty just after the retreat. As she describes it: I was active in the United Church of Canada as a kid, spiritually seeking in university in Victoria at that time. Getting into the retreat and meeting Jean felt like a sign, and I knew I would be going to L’Arche in the fall. During the retreat I met with Jean and he said, ‘How is your French?’ and I said ‘Okay, but I can work on that’ – so he said, ‘See you in September.’ In those days, it was that simple! I went to Trosly, and I was there for about a year. In that very Catholic environment, I really discovered how much I loved the United Church of Canada. We would have prayer in a little chapel in the evenings around this huge statue of Mary that in my memory took up most of the room in the chapel. Trosly is a little Roman Catholic village, so there was for me no question of whether to receive communion. That was the only church, so I just went.30 The next year, Cummings moved to the new L’Arche community in Ivory Coast. Dawn Follett had gone with Gus and Debbie Leuschner in February 1974, and Cummings joined them in September. Follett and the Leuschners had grown up Protestant, Follett in the United Church, but by 1974 the three of them had been inspired by L’Arche

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to join the Roman Catholic Church. “At that time, the only sensible thing was to convert,” Cummings remembers, “because the Catholic Church was discovering contemplative prayer and it was alive, and we were experiencing a living faith in a way that wasn’t as vividly present in the United Church at that time.” But Cummings did not choose to change denominations, finding herself “more in love with the United Church, because I am contrary-minded and partly because of that Naramata retreat experience, when the Catholic-Protestant divide was so painfully present.” She describes how “A lot got stirred and moved and changed through that. So for me, going away into a hyper-Catholic France, then into Ivory Coast where the Protestant churches were like nothing I could recognize – I was a foreigner wherever I went. I tended to go with the rest of the community to Catholic mass on Sundays, and we had mass every week in the community as well. I emerged from that having learned a whole lot about contemplative prayer.” Cummings stayed in Ivory Coast for four years. She recalls, “By the end of that time, I was just longing for the United Church, longing to come home to my family and home to a church I recognized.” She remembers her first United Church service back in Canada in 1978. She walked into Deer Lake United (which was then Central Burnaby United Church) “and the first Sunday I was there, they lit the candles. Liturgical renewal had happened while I was away! They were singing the L’Arche hymn – ‘Lord Jesus of you I will sing as I journey’ [now #641 in United Church hymnal Voices United]. I was home. It was amazing, that moment – it all came together. It’s a good thing there are those moments once in a while!” She thought to herself, “Okay, I am done with L’Arche.” Cummings went to Simon Fraser University, worshipping on Sundays at Deer Lake United where she was “the young person.” She taught Sunday school and served on the board. “That congregation called me into ministry,” she muses. Cummings had never thought about ordained ministry until one day when she took a group of young people to an ordination service “because I thought it would be good for them to see it, and I came out having experienced another writing in the sky – what do I need to do to be ordained? No clue what I was getting into, but I was clear this was the next road to follow.” There was not a conscious connection between her L’Arche experience and her call to ordination, but she still remembers the reading in that ordination service, and how it called her. It was about posting watch-people on the walls to pray

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for peace. Thinking about it now, she ponders, “It’s a kind of L’Arche thing, the praying for peace.” Further identifying the impact of L’Arche, she adds, “Certainly, a lot of my skills in ministry and where I focus my attention, listening to stories, the valuing of each person, especially paying attention to the voice on the edges of the community – this emphasis has been really important. The other thing that clearly continues to influence me in preaching is keeping it simple. The kind of preaching I do is very much about speaking to people’s hearts – the simplicity of the gospel.” Much to her surprise, she found herself back in L’Arche circles, becoming a friend of the L’Arche community in Burnaby after her return to B C . In her words, “What happened is that someone in Bouake in Ivory Coast died, and I needed to be with some people who knew it was important that this little man on the other side of the world had died, so I came to community prayer one night. And that also was like coming home. So I wasn’t quite done with L’Arche after all.” She lived in as an assistant one summer, and was involved as a friend of the community in many ways. When she was ordained in 1985, she thought, “NOW I am done with L’Arche!” Cummings went to Cochrane in Northern Ontario, “a little town where there was no L’Arche community,” she chuckles. “There was a group home, but I stayed away.” Looking back, “In hindsight, I needed those years to learn the art and craft of ministry in the church. But in the middle of those years, Jean Vanier came to give a talk in North Bay, and I thought ‘Oh, one last time, I’ll go hear him,’ and that finished me. It wasn’t him, it was the people getting up with him on stage singing. They were singing ‘Make Me a Channel of your Peace,’ and they weren’t terribly good musicians, their voices not very strong – but they meant what they were saying.” Cummings accepted a call to a church in Sudbury, and the Sudbury L’Arche community called the day after she arrived and asked her to serve on the board. There had been no previous connection between L’Arche Sudbury and United Church, “but they knew I had connected with L’Arche in North Bay. So I went for dinner at Emmaus house in Sudbury and I was done with staying away.” After the 1988 United Church decision that sexual orientation was not a barrier to ordination, the United Church experienced years of debate, discussion, and pain, and Cummings needed a break: “I felt like I had been in a church where there were nothing but arguments for a long time. These were not healthy dynamics and I didn’t know how to address them, and I

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was just weary, weary, and what I needed was to rest my heart and soul.” She adds with a laugh, “I thought ‘I will go be part of a L’Arche community somewhere – THAT will be restful!’” She visited L’Arche in Burnaby to explore how living there might work. At community prayer were people she had known twenty years before, “there they were – Gwenda, Rick, Ken, Barry, everyone. Ken went and found an old photo of when I was a summer assistant and brought it out. The moment said to me ‘You are really ours, come back’ and so I did.” Cummings moved to L’Arche in Burnaby in 1995. As she puts it, “My 800 pounds of books preceded me and I lived in a L’Arche house. That’s always been challenging. It is delightful in many ways. The first year was my sabbatical, and that was restful, just being with people, so it was healing and wonderful, but from then on it has been a struggle.” Cummings offers her overview of the gift of L’Arche: “L’Arche has a lot to offer in terms of how do we live together, what does it mean, and how do we live with meaning in the world.” In an article in Letters of L’Arche, Cummings reflected on how L’Arche models unity: Unity, in my experience at L’Arche, is not an end in itself. It is not a goal that stands alone. Neither is it an ideal that we simply cannot hope to achieve. Unity is a by-product when we are faithful to our own giftedness, to our mission, and to our commitment to be in loving relationships in community. It is a deep reality which we already live. It is a gift, a surprise that comes when we have just about given up. It comes and goes from the center of our awareness, like one of our members, Barry, weaving in and out but ever-present and calling us to pay attention. And like another, Marvin, it asks of us an effort, the effort of listening to each other and staying with each other.31 Cummings encourages L’Arche to connect locally with youth and young adult ministry because “there is a yearning among young adults still around community.” Younger people are eager to explore ways of living together in intentional community, Cummings muses, mentioning the new monasticism as an example of this emerging interest. For several years, the United Church’s Naramata Centre offered “Winter Session,” a three-month program for young adults that included two weeks in a L’Arche community. Some participants returned to L’Arche either to work or as volunteers. But the ongoing

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relationship with L’Arche became painful for Cummings personally. The section “Conflict and Community” later in this chapter includes more about how Cummings persevered both in L’Arche and in her call as an ordained minister in the United Church. Mary Bastedo: Part of that Open, Progressive Spirit Theologian Michael Hryniuk has commented that the biggest difference between the United Church and Roman Catholic Church is: coat racks! His point is that when you enter a United Church, the coat racks are on your way to the sanctuary, so you are invited to hang up your coat, feel at home, stay around, socialize. In that way, most United Churches are physically structured to build community. One might assume that people attracted to L’Arche would also be attracted to the United Church, with its strong emphasis on community, social action, openness, diversity, and justice. But perhaps it is that very Protestant freedom of conscience that makes it easier for United Church members such as Mary Bastedo to change church affiliation. L’Arche began as Vatican II was springing to life, bringing energy and renewal to the Roman Catholic Church. Mary Bastedo had an extensive formation in the United Church before joining L’Arche and then the Roman Catholic Church. She grew up in Kitchener, Ontario in the 1950s and 1960s, walking to Trinity United Church Sunday School with her younger brothers. “I am always grateful for my upbringing in the United Church,” she affirms.32 “It was a very solid foundation in my relationship with Jesus, just knowing Jesus, and the beautiful way that Jesus was presented to the children. I carry that with me, and I am always grateful for that.” Bastedo was confirmed at Trinity, but remembers even in her early teens finding it unsatisfying intellectually. In her mid-teens, her whole family became Unitarians. She began studies at the University of Toronto in 1967, and remembers her early years of university as a time of being caught up in the student radical movement, questioning everything including religion: “It led me to a place of confusion and alienation. All my energies were caught up in this negativity about the university system. I finally realized I needed to get out of there. My desire was to move out of the ivory tower and closer to the poor.” Bastedo moved to Vancouver. Her uncle Herb Breithaupt was a United Church minister, and “was a huge influence. He would give sermons

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about Jesus that would just make me sit up.” Breithaupt put her in touch with a friend of his from Emmanuel College, United Church minister Bob Burrows at First United Church in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Burrows immediately hired her as a cook for their “Cool-Aid Feed-In.” The staff included diaconal minister named Elsie Rosenberg, United Church minister Glen Baker, and “our guru” United Church minister Jack Shaver. Bastedo worked there from 1970–72, feeling her opinions were respected and that she was fully included as a member of the team.33 She loved what the United Church was doing, but it was not touching her growing “thirst for something deeper spiritually.” Her work shifted as funding became available, and she worked on projects finding housing for transient youth and going with fellow musicians to do music therapy for people housed in large institutions for the handicapped. She explains, “It was a huge shock for me to see this institution. That really motivated me to do something more for people with disabilities. And the whole L’Arche movement was about taking people out of these terrible institutions.” A friend of Bastedo’s had met Jean Vanier in India and wrote saying, “You must meet him.” Bastedo read Jean Vanier’s Tears of Silence, and started reading the Bible again, beginning with the Gospel of John. “It really brought Jesus alive for me again. I didn’t find the United Church met me as a place of worship in that search, though it was a great place to work,” Bastedo recalls. Over Christmas of 1972, she visited L’Arche Daybreak and met Sue Mosteller, who suggested she could help the new L’Arche community in Edmonton. Bastedo moved to Edmonton in January 1973, where she found a “wonderful energy” in the new, unstructured, chaotic community: “The leader was a strong Irish Catholic woman and her husband. They had adopted eight children and had five of their own, and then they wanted to do something more, so they started a L’Arche community!” Bastedo discovered the Roman Catholic eucharist for the first time. “For me it was quite profound,” she remembers, “There was a lot of chaos and confusion and conflict, but then we’d gather in this little basement chapel and this wonderful priest came and we’d celebrate the eucharist, and it was so transforming, it was tangible. Suddenly there was peace, and we would recover why we were here, the meaning of it all.” Three weeks after Bastedo arrived, Jean Vanier came to visit, then went on to the 1973 Faith and Sharing retreat at the United Church’s

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Naramata Centre, and Bastedo was able to go with him. Her experience there was very different than Louise Cummings’s experience of being Protestant at that retreat. For Bastedo, the retreat was “transformative,” as she continued to discover the Catholic eucharist. She doesn’t remember whether anyone from the United Church was there, although she assumes there must have been. But like Cummings, she was profoundly moved by the retreat: “I was so impacted by Jean Vanier as a person, by the way he spoke about Jesus. It’s this mysterious thing, he talks about Jesus in such a way that you really do encounter Jesus in his word and his person. And then going back to live it out in community – the gospel was really coming alive.” The following year, Bastedo went to the 1974 retreat that Vanier gave at the United Church’s Cedar Glen Retreat in Ontario. It was intentionally ecumenical, with one hundred people: one-third United Church, one-third Anglican, and one-third Catholic. She recalls, “I remember giving a little morning reflection about how I knew people from all these groups, and wasn’t that grand! And afterwards this nun came up to me and said, ‘That’s lovely, dear, but at some point you have to choose which church you belong to.’ That went into me, and I began to ask the question of whether I would join the Roman Catholic Church. I think my liberal upbringing really formed me to see there are many ways to God. I had a freedom in me to choose.” After taking classes, Bastedo decided to join the Catholic Church. As she describes it, “It felt like coming home. There was a depth I found there in prayer, the sacramental life, I would say the presence of Mary really drew me, the whole concept of the communion of saints, that you can be in communion, and certainly the eucharist itself was a very powerful draw because I experienced the eucharist in such a powerful, incarnational way, and seeing the impact of the eucharist in our community life.” There was a further aspect of Roman Catholic spirituality that drew Bastedo: I would say the Catholic Church has an awareness of the body that very much fits the spirituality of L’Arche, which is very much about welcoming people in their physicality. We’re asked to care for people, helping them with baths, feeding, preparing meals, cleaning – it’s all very material. There is a theology and awareness that we are the body of Christ and God is present to us through the body. I felt very supported through the Catholic

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Church’s spirituality. It seemed like the obvious path to go – I’ve tried to follow the Spirit in my life, and that is where the Spirit was leading me. She felt “quite comfortable” becoming Catholic, even though her parents didn’t understand it. Her uncle Herb Breithaupt phoned her to say that in any church there is the more open, progressive wing and the more rigid, closed wing. “He encouraged me to be part of that open, progressive spirit, no matter what church I was part of,” says Bastedo. “I think I have lived that out.” t w o s t o r i e s o f r e v i ta l i z at i o n

Now we turn to two examples of what Arbuckle would call revitalization stories. He points out that such stories attend to people’s “need for hope in the midst of their life crises.”34 The story of Lloyd Kerman is one of profound loss followed by remarkable revitalization. Lloyd Kerman: I’m a Good Man Lloyd Kerman was born in 1932, and grew up as the only son on his family farm in Oshawa. His family were members of the United Church. He was good at farming, working alongside his father and being well loved by his mother and five older sisters. When his father died, his mother kept the farm going for a while, but it was too much for her. It was sold, and in 1982, at age fifty, Kerman moved to Daybreak, bringing with him his “Kerman and Son” sign. Although Daybreak had a farm of chickens and cows, few of the community members had any farming background. Kerman was bewildered. He had never thought of himself as handicapped, at least not like the people he now found himself living with. They were strange and disturbing. It was utterly different from his home, and Kerman became profoundly depressed. He began to hear voices telling him he didn’t deserve to live. He was afraid. Community members remember that Kerman was nearly silent for several years, though he was uncomplaining, co-operative, and worked hard on the farm. He slowly became good friends with Michael Arnett, a man in his house who spoke slowly and effortfully, and needed extra support because of his frequent seizures. As Sue Mosteller reminisces, “Lloyd had time to listen and Michael had lots to say.”35 Other community members

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and friends of the community also grew to love Kerman and worked to help him find a sense of value and home. Lloyd Kerman’s capacity to listen to his housemate despite his own devastating loss allowed him to discover in his own pain a ground for compassion. United Church theologian Thomas Reynolds remarks: Our human vulnerability opens us to each other, enabling the possibility of love. It allows us both to receive and to give love, fostering mutual dependency. And the kind of relationship that is characterized by mutual dependency is one based in an openness that suffers the other, that undergoes its difference and vulnerability. True, we have no direct or immediate access to what another feels. Human beings are creatures physiologically distinct and different. Yet it is also true that we share a human condition constituted by vulnerability and weakness. Because of this we are beings capable of becoming transposed to identify with experiences that are not our own.36 A good psychiatrist was also invaluable for Kerman and everyone around him. Slowly, slowly, he found peace and discovered that his life was a blessing to others. Once he asked me to accompany him to see his psychiatrist when he had been at Daybreak for around eleven years. He invited me to come into their appointment and listen to their conversation. They talked about what Kerman was doing, what he was eating, and how he slept. Then the psychiatrist, who clearly liked Kerman a lot, asked, “Do you hear voices?” “Yes,” he answered. “What do they say?” pressed the psychiatrist. “They say I am a good man,” said Kerman. Lloyd Kerman was not only a member of the United Church, he was also a quiet evangelist for the United Church. United Church minister Keith Reynolds remembers: My life in the United Church began through living in the L’Arche Daybreak community. L’Arche holds a vision that each person has a gift to offer in mutually transforming relationships. I came to know the United Church through a man named Lloyd Kerman who I lived with during my first year in L’Arche. Lloyd went to Richmond Hill United every week. Because everybody else in the house was Catholic and I wasn’t and Lloyd wasn’t, they needed someone to walk with Lloyd to church and I said I could do that.

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So Lloyd really brought me into the United Church, I would say, and was a big part of not only my time in L’Arche but of giving me a home in the United Church. Reynolds adds, “Through Lloyd and others, I began to grow in my appreciation for the United Church’s history, ecumenical roots, commitment to social justice, global partnerships, and desire to live amidst the tensions of faith.” Lloyd Kerman’s story pivots on a time of midlife dis-remembering. In moving from his family farm to L’Arche Daybreak, he not only had to give up his identity as son in his close family, but he was also stripped of his family-supported sense of himself as a competent dairy farmer and partner in the farm. Paradoxically the “Kerman and Son” sign that Kerman brought with him to the Daybreak community became a sign of all that was lost – farming, family, sonship. Instead of seeing himself as a person of significant abilities, he found himself grouped with people identified in terms of their disabilities. So much was lost that he became lost in psychosis and could no longer remember that he deserved to live. But this story of dislocation was not the end, for in listening to another community member in his suffering and in listening to himself with good psychiatric support, Kerman was able to recover his belief in his personal goodness. Kerman was a man of few words, but his simple story, “I am a good man,” confirmed by his community and manifested in his playful sense of humour at Daybreak, became a revitalization story that saved him from devastating loss and despair. Kerman’s story is ultimately a “comedy” in the sense of a narrative that rises from a low point of misfortune to a new, higher equilibrium. Aristotle in his Poetics asserts that the best plots, the best stories, are ones in which the action leads to a culmination where there is both a significant recognition and a reversal of fortune. He discusses this in terms of tragedy where the protagonist comes to a devastating recognition and reversal that casts him or her out of society into isolation. Aristotle says he will also deal with comedy but does not complete that task in the Poetics. Nevertheless, one can readily extrapolate similar terms for comedy, that the best comic stories are ones where the action leads to a culminating happy recognition and a reversal to improved fortune that gathers the protagonist more deeply into social community. In a way, Kerman’s story is simple, moving from his family home to his psychosis where he misrecognized himself as no better

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than a dead man, to the upswing of finding compassion for a fellow housemate and enjoying the joking of his household, to the true recognition of himself as a good man. He experienced a reversal of fortune from the depths of despair to finding his place in a community of broken yet liberated people. Doug Graves: A Theology of Imperfections and Weakness In The Toronto Star, 1 June 2014, Pamela Cushing remarked: “The rescripting of how the public imagines disability must be messy and diverse if it is to be believable. Most people will not buy a story that someone prefers life post-brain injury or post-losing a limb to cancer, but they will listen to a story about how that life has changed in complex ways, some of which the person prefers or are more meaningful.”37 Doug Graves’s personal narrative is, like Kerman’s, a revitalization story. Gerald Arbuckle notes that for people struggling with life, “these stories give a deeper meaning to the sadness in their lives.”38 Graves’s story follows his professional and personal dislocation because of deepening disability, then his revitalization in an ongoing connection with L’Arche. Doug Graves was an active and successful United Church minister, and then he began to experience post-polio syndrome. In mid-career, he found himself unable to work at the job he loved. Now labels like disabled and handicapped applied to him. It was devastating. Here is the beginning of this story in his words: In the fall of 1967, I was studying theology in Montreal and Jean Vanier was giving a series of talks in Montreal at Catholic churches. There was some notice up on some common board. I can’t remember exactly how it was named, but it was clear there was a new model for disability, for life with people with disabilities. Jean Vanier was experimenting with new things. So I was quite struck. I’ve had a disability all my life. I had that evening free and there was only one place where it was going to be in English, only one English Catholic church. So I went. I was quite struck that night by his theology, his vision, and his sense of relationship as being central to the life of the spirit – essentially a life of relationship. He was already describing Philippe and Raphael and others as ‘prophets.’ They’d been a source of the Word for him out of their struggle and their weakness and their pain. So there is a very strong theological connection.39

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After this first encounter, Graves studied in Switzerland at the World Council of Churches’ Bossey Ecumenical Institute in 1969. Returning to Canada, he bought Vanier’s early books and listened to tapes of Vanier’s address to General Council in 1972. Graves remarks, “I lived on those tapes. I don’t still have them, because they wore out, those old tapes. I listened to them over and over. And I read the books, followed Vanier’s career.” Vanier’s words resonated with Graves’s personal experience, as did Henri Nouwen’s early books like The Wounded Healer. Graves further explains: I had polio as a child and it left me with a significant scoliosis and a short right leg. But I recovered and my life progressed quite well. I went through high school, university, theology, was ordained as a United Church minister in 1969. Then seven years into my ministry I had to have major spinal surgical correction to correct the scoliosis and there were some complications with that and by 1980 I had to go on disability. I wasn’t able to work for five years. Graves worked as a teaching assistant at Vancouver School of Theology, but these were difficult years because he did not know whether his physical condition would improve, or whether his severe disability would be permanent, preventing his return to ministry and shaping the rest of his life. By 1986, new surgical techniques led to another surgery that improved his condition enough to return to ministry, first for a part-time year at Vancouver’s First United Church and then for a full-time call starting in the summer of 1987 at Southhill United. In 1988, a young man in foster care with intellectual disabilities due to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome invited Graves to accompany him to community prayer at L’Arche Greater Vancouver. This simple request was to change Graves profoundly. His connection with L’Arche expanded. As he relates: I accompanied him for a few weeks. Normande Bedard is a nun who has been involved with L’Arche Greater Vancouver forever and ever. She spotted me, figured I looked like a possibility and so asked me if I would lead community prayer one night. So I did. Very quickly they put me into the regular once-a-month slot, and I’d come and lead community prayer. They asked me very early on whether I would like to go to one of the houses for dinner and I said sure. So I went to Nazirah House for dinner after

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community prayer one night, and then when Hollee came on as director, she said ‘How would you like to be connected? You have a choice: you can go to a different house every night when you come to do community prayer, or would you like to be connected to one house?’ I made a wise decision. I decided to get connected to one house rather than a little bit to all of them and chose Nazirah House. Very soon after that I started going every week on Wednesday. I went to community prayer whether I was leading it or not and largely followed that model since 1988. In the early 1990s, in addition to his Nazirah House connection, Graves became involved with leading retreats for L’Arche, first nationally in Canada, and then for L’Arche International. Leaders at both levels felt it was important to have Protestant pastoral ministers as well as Catholic ones for the retreats. Graves also served on a North American L’Arche spirituality commission for ten years. In the early 2000s, the L’Arche International leader “wondered if I would agree to come on the International Church Leaders group because Jean wanted someone from what he called one of the ‘ecumenical churches,’ churches that had come through a union.” These wider connections in L’Arche have been anchored in his primary place of belonging at L’Arche Vancouver: “The main involvement for me though is still the weekly visits to Nazirah House. Assistants have come and gone, but the core people have all been there all the time that I’ve been there so I have this deep long relationship with people.” As the years went by, Graves’s post-polio symptoms increased his physical disability, so that from using canes he needed a scooter. He sums up the importance of the L’Arche community to him in living with these changes: “L’Arche gave me the model for my theology and ministry. It gave me both the practical and theological model for integrating my disability into the way I live my life and into how I articulate my spirituality. The notion that we’re wounded healers makes perfect sense to me. As clergy, we’re strong at our broken places, and our disability, once we come to terms with it, is a gift not a burden. So I understand all of that at a very personal level. I’m sure it’s affected the way I do ministry.” He reflects on the United Church: “So what is the place of disability or failure in an activist church? Let’s start with failure. We didn’t succeed. We didn’t transform the country. We thought we would. We really did. You read the early documents in the United Church, and we were pretty sure we’d have a Christian nation before

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we were through and all Christians would probably be together. But we’re not and we didn’t, and we struggle with what is our role is now.” Graves concludes, “I can’t imagine my life without L’Arche. It’s been such a source of life. Once a week I go to these people who have lived with disability all their lives and they have learned to be happy, not always, but have learned to love God and have learned to love each other. I’m trying not to over-romanticize it. I went past the romanticizing part a long time ago. It’s just very real. I think L’Arche is a light, I really do, for all of its faults, its struggles.” stories of conflict and confusion in community

But lest L’Arche begin to seem too narratively coherent, I cannot end a section on the significance of storytelling in shaping identity and revitalization in L’Arche without telling a story of unexpected inversion at a 2017 gathering of L’Arche International leaders. First, remember anthropologist Pamela Cushing’s assertion that “L’Arche uses a variety of strategies to enculturate and socialize new caregivers into their ideology and practice, and narratives are one of them.” At this L’Arche International meeting, one of the European leaders quoted a new assistant who had confided that she had never been part of an organization that so continually used stories to present its identity and to shape new assistants. The high-level leaders present nodded sagely because yes, throughout the world L’Arche likes to call itself a storytelling community. Everyone expected a story to follow, one affirming the value and truth of L’Arche storytelling culture. But then this leader continued to quote the new assistant, who had added that she had also never been anywhere where the exemplary and inspirational stories bore so little relationship to what she was seeing day to day! This unexpected end to her story got a response – not exactly a gale of laughter but what could best be described as a communal snort of recognition. We turn now to several stories of conflict and pain for two reasons. First, if negative or ambiguous stories are suppressed, then storytelling can become a means of control, setting the parameters of acceptable discourse. Second, telling confusing or painful stories can be a way of stepping back “to get a larger view,” as the 1990 book Voices and Visions suggested. Not only can such stories offer perspective, but they

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also can reveal possibilities for transformation. A hymn often sung in the United Church claims that “what we choose is what we are, and what we love we yet shall be.”40 Conflicted stories help hearers discover ambiguities and contradictions, stimulating them to imagine and aim towards something beyond current reality. It is easy to idealize L’Arche with its exemplary articulation of care and community. It seems harder to idealize the United Church, perhaps because it is often harshly self-critical. Nonetheless, for both L’Arche and the United Church, as for any human community, ambiguity and conflict are woven into their fabric. L’Arche encourages its members to open their hearts, but open hearts can be hurt. As we saw in chapter 1, the very first encounter of Louise Cummings with L’Arche at the 1973 Naramata retreat was rooted in both ecumenical failure and dialogue. So Cummings was aware of the complex nature of community even before her subsequent involvements with L’Arche. Decades after her time in L’Arche Ivory Coast, after years at L’Arche in Vancouver, there was a time of significant pain for Cummings in 1997. At that time, many L’Arche communities had someone in a full-time pastoral role as community minister.41 For a couple of years, South Burnaby United Church had designated some of Cummings’s time as L’Arche Greater Vancouver’s pastoral minister while also serving on the L’Arche community’s Spiritual Life Committee. Cummings is reluctant to speak of the painful change of relationship, but allows Doug Graves to explain: “You were almost the L’Arche community minister. You were already functioning as the community minister, all that was left was to confirm you, and it was brutal what they did to you.” Cummings concurs, “It was the night before the community was going to confirm me. It was brutal.” Community leaders in L’Arche Greater Vancouver were working with a consultant on the organizational structure of the community, including the role of community minister. The consultant expressed major concerns about creating a situation of competing authority, and the risk of clericalism in creating such a role. Would it undermine the responsibility of lay members for the spiritual life of the community? Cummings explains that was a question L’Arche had struggled with for years: what is the authority of the leader of the community and the pastoral minister, and how do you balance that? Graves adds, “But L’Arche International had just published a whole paper solving that issue, or delineating it, and one consultant just didn’t agree with the work that International had done.” A change on the international

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level was announced just before Cumming’s confirmation into that role, and the Burnaby community leaders decided at the last minute that the role wouldn’t go ahead. Graves exclaims, “To me, it’s amazing that you hung in with faith after being treated so badly. People have rallied around you since then, no question, but at the time there was no regard to where you might be in all of that. At the time, I expressed more anger than you did.” Cummings agrees, “I was just so stunned.” Then she continues, “Out of that, I came to a greater clarity that I really am called to a ministry of word, sacrament, and pastoral care, and I needed to be exercising that. I was not going to be doing it in L’Arche.” Cummings chose to remain a member of L’Arche even if she wasn’t going to be community minister there. Many people would have left, and Cummings could easily have made that choice. She was midcareer and respected and loved far beyond L’Arche, so she was not dependent on L’Arche for her vocation, her sense of self, or her theology. She recalls, “I lived in a house for seven years, full-time in L’Arche for the first three, then half-time in L’Arche and half in a church in Langley, then I gradually moved further out.” Cummings remained a regular on the roster to lead community prayer, and for over fifteen years she led L’Arche retreats for assistants. But living the dual call, a call to a L’Arche community and also to United Church ministry has been hard all along “because L’Arche wants total commitment, total presence – that’s what it’s all about. And if I cannot commit that completely, then maybe I should go and be a minister, be fully somewhere else. My church in Langley was a new church development with its own challenges. Living with the changing church is part of the challenge of ministry in these times.” For Cummings, part of the constant struggle was “managing my own expectations about community and what can I expect from the community, what does it mean to be part of this community, how can I be part of this community, how am I best serving – these big questions come back to me frequently, personally.” Choosing how to live with conflict and hurt is essential to any kind of community life. Dan Kirkegaard, a United Church minister and former L’Arche community leader, observes that in L’Arche it’s possible for people to be in absolute disagreement but still be comfortably in community together. He continues, “Part of my experience in the United Church has been I don’t always experience the freedom to do that, to disagree absolutely and still be a community. For me, I have

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experienced that in L’Arche because it’s driven, not by the intellect, but by the heart.”42 In pondering what makes for freedom to disagree, Kirkegaard identifies long-term commitment as a key component: We can’t get over the hurdle of conflict in our organizations that are driven by intellect. I don’t know if that’s completely so but there’s something in that that just churns away at me. We don’t speak the places that are vulnerable but when we hit those places we close them down, quiet down and go about what we need to do anyway. But in L’Arche they can be spoken without somebody being torn apart about them. In church we can’t even speak them because we’re going to be torn apart by it. There’s something that I’ve experienced between the two different understandings, approaches, and expressions of community – that, no we don’t have to absolutely agree, but we can still choose to care, to give care and compassion and grace, and offer it daily without the demand to move, to shift. I think that’s part of the grace absolutely. Are we willing to live that kind of grace or do we have to be right, at some point? And I guess both have to do with longterm commitment. Are we committed to hanging in there? The person with a disability who doesn’t carry the intellectual baggage that might create those barriers doesn’t have to be right. It doesn’t matter whether I’m right or wrong. That’s who you are and this is who I am. We can still live together. For Kirkegaard the key to getting through conflict together is in still choosing to care for others without demanding they change their minds. Part of the wisdom of engaging conflict well involves realizing that a resolution may not be immediate. Doug Graves tells a story of the importance of waiting and taking time in a situation of disagreement. In the early 2000s, he was asked to do a same-sex wedding at the United Church where he was a minister. He had done them before but not at that church. He explains: My view was that it is not for me to decide if the church is a ­suitable place, if the congregation needs to come to terms with it. It’s a small congregation so it’s not a board issue. It’s a congregational decision. So we did a little bit of discussion at various times and then we came to a vote with as many members of the congregation as wanted to be part of it. When the vote was taken

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it was a secret ballot. It was twenty-six in favour of doing it, five against. So I told the couple I wasn’t going to be able to do it. This may seem a surprising decision when a solid majority of the congregation was in favour. Graves explains his reasoning, and how his experience in L’Arche helped him to think beyond the simple binary of counting votes: When we took the vote, I explained to the congregation that they would have a vote on this but I would prefer if they would then allow me to decide beyond that, and they were fine with that. So it was twenty-six to five and in my view having heard the tenor of the discussion, five was too many opposed for me to go ahead at that point. That was the L’Arche experience for me: it was about consensus as opposed to majority vote. And the opposition the first time around – I knew who they were and it would be very painful for me to override their voices. They’ve been in that church longer than I have been in that church. No one else was really upset that I chose not to do it at that point. The same-sex couple weren’t from the church and there were other places they could go. As a church community, we revisited our decision two years later and the ‘yes’ vote was almost unanimous, and I said, I feel comfortable with proceeding now and it was fine. Graves says here that his experience of community discernment in L’Arche gave him the wisdom to wait for consensus. What mattered also was timing and process. Graves notes: The leadership I offered had to do with community and what we value and how we make decisions. Sometimes majority rule is not the best way to solve the dilemma. We’re very used to that in the United Church. We pass our propositions. Some colleagues disagree with me still and feel that I should have abided by the majority. But in terms of how it turned out, our community is still very much together. Even the ones that aren’t particularly happy that I do that are okay with it because they weren’t battered over the head with it. There was a process and discussion. They agree to disagree but they’re still part of the community. I’m not sure they would have stayed if we had pressed ahead at that earlier point.

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During the initial discussion, some people had kept fairly private, but later as the discussion came up again one of the church’s longterm members shared that it was really sad for her that if her son and his partner ever wanted to get married they couldn’t do it in her church. People didn’t know her son was gay and in a relationship. Then someone else revealed that they had a lesbian granddaughter. Graves observes that by taking time and building consensus, “it just freed people up.” He realizes that in such situations in the church he has drawn on “how I’ve seen decisions made in L’Arche and how you try to involve everyone. And if a lot of the core people just don’t know what this is about you’ve got to hold off.” For Graves, what matters is drawing people together in the right time to a shared decision. The L’Arche wisdom that Graves draws on has developed over decades of struggling to find ways to build consensus with people with a wide range of abilities and limitations. This is not easy. As Swinton, Mowat, and Baines observe: This process of narrative telling and negotiating becomes problematic within the lives of people with profound intellectual disabilities, that is, people who, at least in terms of communicative capacity, are limited in their ability to narrate their own stories. Maybe a better way to put it is that they are limited by the communicational contexts within which they are embedded. As such they find themselves unable to narrate their own stories without the assistance of groups of people all of whom may misunderstand their stories and who frequently tell stories about the person that are different, contradictory and sometimes untrue. People with profound intellectual disabilities can easily become the victims of constructions of their stories that they do not own.43 Theologian Jill Harshaw also notes the tension of some people speaking for others, but concludes that “in the end we face a choice between speaking about (although not on behalf of) people who cannot speak for themselves and excluding them from our consideration altogether.”44 As Graves experienced, L’Arche tries, however imperfectly, to listen carefully to how community members’ stories shape community decisions – one could say these stories shape the identity and revitalize a community. He carried that paradigm into his ministry. United Church minister Ian Macdonald was one of the songwriters of the Common Cup Company, a musical group that he founded with

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United Church ministers Bob Wallace and Jim Uhrich, and Anglican priest (later bishop) Gordon Light when they were all in ministry in Winnipeg in 1979. Macdonald came to South Burnaby United Church around 1993 at the beginning of Advent to begin a ministry that lasted eighteen years. The first day, he was surprised to see Louise Cummings, whom he knew from a committee they had served on in Toronto and because their grandparents, all legendary in the United Church of Canada, were great friends. Beginning that first Sunday of Advent, he discovered that as minister at South Burnaby he was automatically on the religious planning committee for L’Arche Greater Vancouver, and welcoming everybody to worship at church on Sunday went with the role. This was news: in his interviews, no one had mentioned L’Arche at all. Of course, he knew about L’Arche: “we United Church people, we know everything!” he laughs.45 But in reality, “I had no idea. I thought that coming to a church in Advent was a real sharp thing to do,” assuming everything would be in place for the familiar liturgical season and responsibilities would already be assigned. “But I found they had expectations that had me running like crazy!” Macdonald further describes: I said that I didn’t know anything about what had been done or what could be done in worship, so give me three months to figure this out for myself and what I’m called here for – a new congregation and L’Arche, too. I was interested to see how they came into the sanctuary and what they did. There seemed to be definite orders of arriving, and some people had their favorite pews like a 1925 congregation, and it was very important. The one who caught my eye was Bill Collins. He would arrive just a little late, maybe 35 seconds late. Trevor Dawson, the organist, would be playing and Bill would come up right behind him and say in his loud, gruff, deep voice, ‘Good morning, Trevor!’ and Trevor was always startled, every Sunday, but always came back with ‘Good morning, Bill.’ Trevor died my third year there, and at the service Bill said gently, in that unique voice he had, ‘Good-bye, Trevor.’ Macdonald noticed that Louise Cummings always tried to sit next to Bill Collins, and he paid attention because “Louise is the kind of person that you can glom the whole gospel from her if you stand

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around long enough.” She explained to him, “It is so awesome to sit in worship next to Bill, to feel him giving himself to the presence of God.” Macdonald was moved because “she was describing what we all hope happens in worship.” He recalls, “So Bill became my entry point. He was one of the four original people who started L’Arche in Vancouver. He was from Edmonton, about 6’2”, a big man, gentle, funny – but you didn’t know that until you’d been around for a while – not jokes, but ways he found to get his twinkly eyes on you. And what he’d pick up about me, that I think I hide so cleverly.” In a conversation in 2012, Macdonald reflected on a time of frustration with L’Arche. He recalls, “I was very involved with L’Arche, and I was trying to get them to provide a place for someone, but the first two visits didn’t go well at all. It takes time to get used to someone, and there were cultural differences and language differences. Not being used to community, she had very strange ways of being in community. We still have a lot more to learn about the grace of welcoming people, and L’Arche is not exempt from that struggle either.”46 The challenge that Macdonald describes sounds like the first stage in the United Church’s articulation of the intercultural church in “Leadership From the Margins”: “God is calling us to find new ways of being church together.”47 It goes on to name what must happen next: “It is not simply a matter of continuing with traditions we have become comfortable with, and allowing others to join us.”48 Beyond welcome, “The intercultural vision challenges us to go much deeper. It challenges the dominant culture to recognize that it has become too comfortable, and that no culture has a monopoly on wisdom. We are challenged to let ‘outsiders’ lead, and to accept the vulnerability of not having all the answers.”49 Macdonald urges, “We have to get into the mindset that we have to learn from everybody, because folks, we haven’t done it right or well.”

“laughter

i s a n i m p o r ta n t f o o d ”

Macdonald’s “mindset that we have to learn from everybody” is not an earnest, stressful obligation. Rather, that quality of open listening and spontaneity can be the foundation of lively and energizing times in both the United Church and L’Arche. In 2008, Jean Vanier suggested, “maybe we will change the world if we are happy … Maybe the most important thing is to learn how to build communities of celebration. Maybe the world will be transformed when we learn to

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have fun together.”50 Swinton, Mowat, and Baines suggest that “counternarratives do the work of repairing broken or misleading narratives and as such become a place of rupture and change.”51 A kind of lightness or amusement sometimes follows experiences of dislocation or incoherence. One of the key ways in which unexpected inversions gather community is through laughter. Mikhail Bakhtin points out that “this universal character of laughter was clearly and consistently brought out in the carnival rituals and spectacles and the parodies they presented.”52 He contrasts it to seriousness: “Laughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth; it cannot be transformed into seriousness without destroying and distorting the very contents of the truth which it unveils.”53 He explains the power of laughter as freedom: “Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the great interior censor.”54 Laughter in the context of liberation or affirmation of treasured values and relations is often a shared expression of pleasure. For Jean Vanier, pleasure is rooted in an Aristotelian framework as the consequence of significant activity and is experienced most fully in the context of shared life.55 Celebration, for Vanier, is a fundamental expression of shared life, and important celebration can be more or less formal. This has been illustrated from the early days of L’Arche in an unusual tradition. Vanier explains, “When we’ve had oranges for dessert at L’Arche, we sometimes start chucking the peel about at the end of the meal. Everyone gets into it. An Englishman once asked me if this was a traditional French custom. I don’t know about that! But I do know that it is one way to bring people out of their isolation to express themselves joyfully – especially if they can’t communicate with words. People who cannot participate in interesting conversations can participate through play. When a piece of orange peel arrives on their nose, they are delighted – and they throw it back.”56 Stories abound of distinguished visitors who carry a weight of responsibility relaxing and laughing uproariously while enthusiastically pitching orange peels around the room. Former moderator Gary Paterson’s mother lived with a disability from polio in her early adulthood. Paterson believes she taught him “how to see beyond that to the incredible person” while realizing that part of what made her so incredible was precisely the disability. In a similar way, what makes L’Arche laughter so profound is that it grows out of the full community context of difficulties and conflicts.

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Reflecting on his later experience of L’Arche, Paterson focuses on the gift of shared laughter: “I need to listen more carefully to hear the gift of people with an intellectual disability. I’ve had an experience of that gift over and over, and Vanier sparked some of that. I remember eating with a L’Arche community, and the gift of simple enjoyment of friendship, we’re here to laugh and be together, break bread, share food, tell jokes. It isn’t a ‘let’s dissect the news of the day’ conversation, but it filled hearts.”57 Lynn Godfrey, United Church minister and community leader of L’Arche Hamilton, notes that prayer together in the home and shared fun are both aspects of the spirit of L’Arche: “Praying together around the table or in living room after dinner – just that simple practice of being together sharing our joys and sorrows is a very healing thing. And the art of celebration – having fun together! Just laughing and being silly.”58 Linda Butler comments on her role as a local United Church minister and the way that L’Arche core members, in their loud and joyful familiarity, invert social norms around how to greet a local clergy person. Butler appreciates their openness for its contagious energy: I happened to be in a restaurant with a friend, and some L’Arche people came in and they happened to see me and it was like ‘LIN DA! L I NDA ! L I NDA !’ And I get these people running over – hug, hug. And I think, how often in my life do I first of all have anybody who’s excited to see me instead of just ‘oh there she is,’ and then it was just like I made their day. And I get touched, hugged in this great excitement and joy. I think that’s a gift to all of us to have that. Like Amanda who’s come in, she sees me across a crowded room, and voom she’s found me. I think that’s not bad to have within a congregation. To have a couple of people who are like this who have that openness, and ‘Wow you’re here’ and their faces light up. It’s not a bad thing. That’s a gift in a congregation because it’s kind of contagious to have somebody who does that. Here Butler identifies how a couple of people with uninhibited openness can be a positive influence that stirs others to drop their reserve and be more loving. “Before starting L’Arche I was rather serious. I prayed, I did philosophy, I taught. When I started living with people with disabilities,

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I learned to fool around and to celebrate life,” remembers Jean Vanier. After many decades he identifies “three activities that are absolutely vital in the creation of community. The first is eating together around the same table. The second is praying together. And the third is celebrating together. By celebrating, I mean to laugh, to fool around, to have fun, to give thanks together for life. When we are laughing together with belly laughs, we are all the same. We’re all just belly laughing.”59 Hilarious stories are told and retold as an essential part of L’Arche culture. Soon after his retirement, Ian Macdonald cheerfully recalled, “Did L’Arche change my ministry in the United Church? You bet it did! I realize that there is a lot more grace in the world, and mercy, than I had a right to expect – or knew about. It was really wonderful to have a community as gifted as they are. I could relax and be myself there, not worry about making an impression or making anyone laugh, but know that we were going to play together and it would be a wonderful time.” He also cheerfully acknowledged that L’Arche knows how to let people come and go: “I saw [member of both L’Arche and South Burnaby United Church] Mary Hillhouse recently, and she said that she had a hard time with my leaving ‘for the first week.’” In the 1990s, L’Arche Daybreak’s retirement program (called the Seniors’ Club) met daily. Of the seven retired core members three were United Church, one was Anglican, one was Jewish, and two were Roman Catholic. In an article for Letters of L’Arche, I described the shared laughter and storytelling that shaped our days: Peggy and I watched a TV program a few years ago that claimed that up to 20% of Canada’s senior citizens are clinically depressed. Peggy observed that none of the seniors in the Retirement Program of L’Arche Daybreak are constantly or chronically depressed, because ‘we have each other.’ Last year the L’Arche zone coordinator, originally from France, came to lunch with the seniors. We know that the French want a good, hot meal at lunch, so we cooked him a big lunchtime dinner and bought him a very tiny bottle of French wine. Then we told him our jokes. These jokes were things that we found genuinely funny, day after day, aspects of the annoying and wildly lovable eccentricities that we know so well in each other. We showed him how the footrest of Peggy’s reclining chair could pop up and send her walker shooting across the room. Roy and Lloyd demonstrated their outrageous

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ritualized daily greetings. We chuckled over how strangers assumed that Thelus and Francis were my parents. Annie had over time announced 110 self-proclaimed nicknames: as Doug read the full list, we giggled, we roared, we almost fell off our chairs. This is not the laughter of surprise at a new joke or an incongruous juxtaposition. This is the laughter of deep familiarity, of jokes that were probably a bit funny the first time but over weeks and months work their way into our bones and become HILA R I OUS. The Greek root of hilarious means cheerful and generous with a gracious attitude: these are jokes that are generous, expanding the spirit, the bonding laughter of life together. Every Monday, we light a candle and pray together from our varied faith traditions, remembering people and situations, local and global, that we hold in our hearts. But I began with our jokes, because while we do many things, the most important thing we do is to know each other.60  Laughter is a language, even for people without words. Laughter can be familiar and intertwined with daily ritual, affirming the quirky particularity of each person. In his Poetics, Aristotle asserts that recognition and reversal in tragic stories offer catharsis through pity and fear. Had Aristotle kept his promise and also written on comedy he might have proposed that the recognition and reversal of the best comic stories instead raise surprise or wonder, often accompanied by cathartic eruptions of collective laughter. In the case of the stories of Thelus George and Lloyd Kerman with which we began this chapter, or the Daybreak Seniors Club in their familiar rituals of joking and mirth, we find stories of people who experienced years of marginalization in their lives and yet claimed both recognition of their full humanity and reversal from their exclusions, forging their rightful places in a more diverse and inclusive social playing field. Vanier suggests how the laughter of L’Arche is based on inversion: “There is something funny about humanity. Little as we are, poor as we are, with all our ‘animal’ needs, we are called to be more than angels; brothers and sisters of God.” He adds, “It seems so ludicrous and wonderful, so crazy and so ecstatic. And the most rejected are called to be at the heart of the Kingdom. Everything seems upside down!”61 Those seniors were on a lifelong frontier of social change, some gaining freedom from twentieth century labelling, some from confining institutions. Their shared laughter is in no way a denial of the pain

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and conflicts they have suffered, but rather the expression of lives of remarkable resilience, seasoned maturity, and tender buoyancy. Shared laughter can put the stories of life into perspective. Both Bakhtin and Vanier identify the collective power of laughter to gather and form a group and engage the future. Laughter can be liberating, a way of overcoming silence, laughing about all that you have suffered and can’t even explain, but which you endured and now you are free. People who do not communicate in words may be able to communicate through laughter. Vanier sees shared laughter as feeding and gathering people together in community. In his words, “Laughter is an important food. It is healing and nourishing for all the members of a community to burst out laughing until the tears run down their faces. We are not laughing at each other; we are laughing with each other.”62 Do not oversimplify these experiences, however. Many people can be uncomfortable if they have previously experienced laughter as exclusion and ridicule. Dominant privilege can assert itself in the context of humour. Vanier is explicit in warning: “we are not laughing at each other.” United Church minister and L’Arche leader Dennis Butcher enjoyed good-natured teasing and being teased as a sign of affection and belonging, but he discovered that many people who had experienced life in institutions were very sensitive to any hint of aggression or scorn in humour: I tend to be a person that has a fair sense of humour. Perhaps because many of our L’Arche members have experienced mean teasing in their growing up experience, they haven’t been very open to playfulness and teasing. There is the odd one that enjoys teasing and a laugh and so forth, but I have found many of them do not appreciate joking around and teasing, which is a fairly important thing in my life. I had to kind of put that on hold during my time in L’Arche because I would try once or twice with certain individuals and find out that it was a no-go zone. I mean they certainly had playfulness, but some always seemed to be very serious. I am finding that the new younger members that are coming in from family homes have quite a sense of humour and playfulness. One guy walks around all the time with a pretend microphone. He is always talking into his microphone or interviewing people and so forth. For most of the ones that came from an institution, I think life there was pretty stark and humorless

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so I suspect it was likely the by-product of institutionalization. We have had some people that came from there who hardly spoke a word and they kind of blossom in the community. Very talkative and outgoing but still unfortunately lacking playfulness or humour. I wonder if it takes a certain amount of self confidence, and a lot of that was unfortunately driven out of them in the institution; it was a case of survival and a feeling of perhaps betrayal by the family for putting them in there, or isolation. Remember Burghardt’s assessment of how discrepancies in stories about life in an institution reflected the inherent power imbalance. Humour can likewise function as part of a power differential. Of course, in L’Arche that power differential can go both ways, as Bill Van Buren’s turkey joke leaving visitors in suspense made clear.63 stories of intellectual desires and fears

As I say near the beginning of this book, what L’Arche has offered and continues to offer is not so much a social service or a theology, but a way of being. But as I listened to people’s stories, something that I hadn’t anticipated also emerged. Apart from the relatively few people who personally know someone with an intellectual disability, stories of this particular form of disability do not really interest most United Church members. Fair enough: Aristotle argued that true friendship requires a likeness of minds. But Aristotle had an oddly reductive notion of friendship, as even Aristotelian scholar Jean Vanier would agree.64 Some churches involve people with obvious intellectual disabilities in worship and ritual. For example, First Metropolitan Church in Victoria begins each worship service with its Christ candle lit by Stephanie or David, who alternate weeks. Both have Down syndrome. At Sylvan United Church in Mill Bay, B C, a member of the choir had a noticeable intellectual disability. Stan could become lost simply coming from the choir to communion in the little church. Someone from his loving community would jump up and gently companion him without fuss. All this was an adjustment for the community: Stan had a long and distinguished career teaching English literature before Alzheimer’s disease muddled his mental acuity. The United Church is an intellectual church, with liturgy, hymns, and even church bulletins that assume a high level of literacy. As I

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discovered that this project wasn’t of much interest to most people, I wondered if there was something deeper going on, an anxiety specific to intellectual disability. I started with Ralph Milton, asking “Is the United Church afraid of intellectual disability?” and before I finished articulating the question he was answering, “YES, absolutely!” Former moderator Gary Paterson articulated a paradox in his usual blunt, poetic, pithy manner: My dad is half-way into Alzheimer’s. His favourite question is ‘Gary, when are you going to retire?’ and we’ll have that fifteen times. It is at times irritating, but not really, in truth, to my surprise. It has become the means by which he has become a much more tender person … It’s quite remarkable. My father is more of a gift for me, or there is a new kind of gift in my father through this dementia. I don’t think it’s a gift for him. So the notion of living with dementia myself, or my partner having dementia, is terrifying. Even Jean Vanier acknowledges fear of his declining abilities in his public letters: “I don’t know how I will fare when I can’t ‘do’ anything for people anymore. Giving retreats, meeting with people in our communities and others in challenging situations all gives me life. None of us knows that final passage of weakness and how we are going to live it.”65 Vanier says that tenderness has helped him see his intellectual life in a more integrated way: “I see now that this communion with people with disabilities, and the tenderness implied, has helped me to find a new inner wholeness, a unity between my affectivity and my intelligence.”66 In “Whose Story Am I?: Redescribing Profound Intellectual Disability in the Kingdom of God,” Swinton, Mowat, and Baines write: It seems then that the art of listening to and telling counterstories reveals the heart of the gospel. It is only as we slow down and take the time to be with one another; only as we come close enough really to listen and respect one another that we learn to tell one another’s stories well. Such listening and storytelling includes the ways in which we listen to and tell the story of God. And of course, the place where we learn such listening is in our friendships … It seems to me that one way to describe

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discipleship is this: Disciples are those friends of Jesus who are charged to live out and to tell different stories about the world.67 Stories of intellectual disability are counterstories in societies that assume competence and efficiency.68 Doug Graves muses, “There’s not enough reflection on how God accompanies us in our weakness. That’s something we need to honestly come to terms with, not simply in terms of cutting budgets, but in terms of where we meet our spiritual life in all of that.” A theology or spirituality focusing on stories of intellectual disability doesn’t readily occur to the United Church. Stories of changing intellectual abilities are not part of our repertoire. Most people fear the prospect of losing control of their own story. But if we think that some degree of intellectual disability is a normal part of aging, United Churches are full of people with present or future intellectual disabilities. How might a United Church minister who has loved L’Arche face and tell the story of his own increasing intellectual disability? In 2012, Ian Macdonald wrote a note titled “My Journey” to his family and friends: As I write this my father-in-law prepares to enter palliative care. I envy him his 92 years; they illuminate my own dilemma. At 68, I have an uncertain future. A year ago changes in my behavior prompted visits to psych wards and referrals to specialists. The likely verdict is Lewy Body Dementia (L BD ) - a mind and body wasting disease. Since the disease affects the ‘executive function of the brain’ I have difficulty making decisions. My family is afraid to leave me alone for any length of time for fear of decisions I might make. Our life has changed dramatically this past year, particularly my role in the family … I am learning to trust that every moment is a blessing, even these moments. Love abides … I confess to you my fears about the way ahead but know these must be faced. I believe there is still more life to bear and appreciate, more love to share and to speak. Bless you all.69 Ian Macdonald died in March, 2016, coincidentally just two weeks before Doug Graves’s sudden death of a heart attack.70 Macdonald’s obituary describes him as “a source of wisdom and fountain of silliness.” The laughter and poetic wisdom that were foundational to his

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ministry probably drew him to L’Arche as well. His obituary continues, “From his first ministry in Winnipeg onward, Ian saw the Church not as a building but as community for peace, social justice and love. He embraced laughter as a way of revealing and embodying the deep truths of the heart and soul. There is a Celtic tradition that creation is simply God’s laughter. When we laugh we move closer to God. Ian lived that truth.”71

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4 Secret Agency and Surprising Subjects Tender: a train’s fuel-source located behind the locomotive

In 2013, Jean Vanier received the Pacem in Terris Award that honours a global peacemaker. At the rather august ceremony, Vanier took a remarkably festive stance in his acceptance speech as he articulated how the core members shape the spirit of L’Arche: Bishop Amos, many of those to whom you awarded this prize before me were heroes for peace. Some were imprisoned for their courage and determination for peace; some were assassinated. How is it you turned to us? We are a strange and crazy bunch in L’Arche. The road of peace which we have learned in L’Arche is a very simple one. You see, we are not very austere or stressed, struggling to be heroes. We eat wonderfully, we drink merrily – of course Coca-Cola, orange juice and, now again, wine and beer, moderately – we sing loudly and frequently out of tune, and we dance wildly and we play as much as possible. Feast days, birthdays are all occasions for parties and for fun. We pray with all our heart but not long hours. We do put our trust in God who is watching over us. Of course we do work in our workshops, and therapies can be serious and hard work. Each person is called to grow in inner peace and wisdom and of course we all grow to old age as time comes. There are sometimes heavy days when the wind blows strong and we feel we are floundering, but at the last moment the gentle hand of God saves us. The heart of L’Arche is to rejoice and to celebrate unity.1 Vanier describes here how the people of L’Arche are agents of social transformation, “pacem in terris,” peace on earth, through their life together.

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What L’Arche can offer the United Church has “more to do with a way of being than a lesson to be learned,” asserts disability theologian John Swinton.2 He adds, “when you look at L’Arche, to some extent you see something of the nature of God. The Church should not look like L’Arche but should understand what L’Arche looks like and why it looks the way that it does.” Like the often-overlooked locomotive tender that fuels the engine, core members are the power behind L’Arche, the fuel providing the energy of each community. L’Arche looks the way it does because of the agency of individuals with intellectual disabilities living in community. Philosopher Richard Kearney claims that stories shape both agency and community, noting how Aristotle “argued, in his Poetics, that the art of storytelling – defined as the dramatic imitating and plotting of human action – is what gives us a shareable world. It is, in short, only when haphazard happenings are transformed into story, and thus made memorable over time, that we become full agents in our history.”3 L’Arche communities worldwide excel at imitating what Kearney terms “the haphazard happenings” of their lives together. Anyone who has spent time in L’Arche has seen core members take centre stage in L’Arche skits at community meetings, celebrations, and worship, sharing their lives by transforming them into stories in words or in mime. “This becoming historical involves a transition from the flux of events into a meaningful social or political community,” Kearney continues. But the agency of storytelling, with or without words, does not simply express a shared vision of community and society. Pay attention to who has agency to create the story, insists cultural studies professor Nirmala Erevelles: “It should matter to us who is speaking, because otherwise we would leave unanswered the critical question of agency and its relation to social transformation.”4 The term “agency” itself is contested, as numerous cultural theorists deconstruct the idea of a unified, unconflicted autonomous actor or subject.5 The fact that agency is a slippery concept will not surprise people in L’Arche or the United Church. As we saw in chapter 3, conflicting narratives are part and parcel of both L’Arche and United Church experiences. Narrative discrepancies are recognized as part of the power dynamic experienced by any minority group, whether they are core members occluded from creating their own stories or Protestants at early Vanier retreats. Further, the physical experiences of people living with a label of disability show that possibilities for agency are shaped by ever-changing contexts, as we have seen with

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United Church ministers Doug Graves and Ian Macdonald, and L’Arche core members including Thelus George and Lloyd Kerman.6 In a similar way, this chapter does not suggest the primacy of one meaning of agency any more than it argues for a single identity for each individual. Instead, this chapter explores six variations on the theme of agency rooted in stories of lived experiences: the agency of prayer, causal agency, the agency of inversion, the question of agency in “weakness,” distributive agency, and responsible agency. t h e a g e n c y o f p r ay e r

Jean Vanier was intrigued by this project exploring the United Church and L’Arche. He wrote to me, “L’Arche and its growth are the work of God. We work for unity, we work that those who are weakest are respected and appreciated. They are called to find their place in our churches. They have a gift for these churches and reveal Jesus in a unique way. So our foundation is spirituality and theology.”7 Ian Macdonald is quoted later in this chapter expressing appreciation that the L’Arche community prayed for him: “They had all kinds of ways that they prayed for me, and that was wonderful because the hardest things of life happened to me in those years.” Notice “in all kinds of ways.” Don’t pass that over too quickly: Macdonald and the community believe there is agency in many kinds of prayer. Prayerful agency is thus available to everyone. Professors Myroslaw Tataryn and Maria Truchan-Tataryn point out that in the Christian East, “All of creation participates in the radical effect of Christ’s embodiment and therefore all bodies, in their limitless variety, are equally valuable icons of God.”8 The mystery of full spiritual belonging is accessible, they explain, because “The physical body is integral to worship … Even the hesychastic practice of the heart is synchronized with the rhythmic intake and exhalation of breath. Bodily impairment cannot preclude participation in the rituals of faith. Breathing, therefore (even if with a respirator), becomes the only requirement for membership in the community of the faithful: in the life of the Trinity.”9 United Church minister Warren McDougall noticed that L’Arche members modelled in his church a greater freedom around praying and speaking of the heart: Certainly the way folks in L’Arche present just that openness, accepting of people just the way they are. Another aspect is their

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willingness to pray out loud or to talk faith. Sometimes we’re more tongue-tied about saying anything. The words may be very simple but they do speak it. So when we have prayers of the people, at L’Arche everybody prays. I don’t always understand what’s being said but we all become part of it. Sometimes it’s a phrase that keeps getting repeated – we had that in a service here and one of our people from L’Arche went on way too long. But you’ve got that phrase ‘Open your heart’ and I thought this is pretty neat to have that kind of openness or willingness to say something about your faith.10 Anyone who knows Gord Henry of L’Arche Daybreak can recognize that his signature mantra stands out in McDougall’s memory: “Open your heart.” Gord Henry’s simple prayer is profound. Whatever is going on, it always works to pray, “Open your heart.” In 1970, Gord Henry’s sister Joan Vogel was a twenty-year-old member of First United Church in Port Credit, Ontario when she decided to spend the summer at L’Arche in Trosly, France.11 She was comfortable in her church. She grew up admiring the stained glass windows, attending Sunday School and then teaching Sunday School. Her younger brother Gord had Down syndrome, and her parents Pat and Warren had joined with other parents in the 1950s to begin S P A R C , the South Peel Association for Retarded Children. The S P A R C parents founded the Red Oaks School for children with disabilities, and as a child Joan fundraised for her brother’s school then ran recreation programs there when she reached her teens. In 1969, Steve Newroth came to show the film “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed,” and Joan was inspired to go to Trosly the next summer. She had met Jean Vanier a couple of times, but she had never been on a plane and her knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church was limited to having one Roman Catholic friend. But in Trosly, she joined a small group of people who gathered to pray. “There was no stained glass, just a little room with a candle,” she recalled forty-eight years later. “It was very different than my United Church experience. Just silent prayer. It didn’t have to do with being Catholic or Protestant, it had to do with God.” She returned to Port Credit the next November, but remained changed by what she gained in Trosly. In her words, “I’ve had that ever since, what L’Arche developed in me. I was ‘formed’ in L’Arche, as they say. My experience in 1970 is not one experience that I moved on from – it has grown over these years.”

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United Church minister Dan Kirkegaard has often been part of leadership teams for L’Arche retreats. Typically, these retreats will include a daily spiritual talk, times of silence for prayer, and times of small group sharing. The sharing sessions are not intended to discuss each other’s experiences or thoughts, but rather to listen and to be heard. While sharing and listening is central, no one is compelled to share. Silent sharing is welcome, because people understand that speaking is often complicated for many reasons. It can be difficult, Kirkegaard notes, for people to find ways to articulate their faith, even for people who usually have no trouble with verbal communication. He sees that challenge reflected in the United Church as well, where people are often hungry for non-judgmental spiritual sharing, but lack a context and vocabulary to begin. In the social imaginaries of both L’Arche and the United Church, prayer has agency. As Vanier insisted at the Pacem in Terris Award ceremony, “We pray with all our heart but not long hours. We do put our trust in God who is watching over us.” The United Church website opens with the banner “The United Church of Canada: Discover the power of prayer, action, and community,” while another page offers timely prayers for current needs around the world.12 Underlying many of this chapter’s stories around agency is a confidence that prayer is foundational to both the United Church and L’Arche as communities of faith. the causal agency of people with intellectual disabilities

The word “agency” reminds us that L’Arche as an organization functions in two key ways: as a social service agency subject to government oversight, and as a community of people with and without intellectual disabilities intentionally acting to share life together. The servicedelivery use of agency implies that the active body in L’Arche is its organizational structure and mission. But the word “agency” is much more complex and interesting when applied to the people of L’Arche: it raises the question of whose action matters. In literary terms, it asks who are the protagonists of the story. In a related way, the United Church in the twenty-first century has committed itself to becoming an intercultural church, explaining that “the intercultural vision calls us to be aware of who is at the centre and who is at the margins, and to empower those at the margins to lead us into change.”13 This vision

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raises questions of agency: who empowers whom, who leads, and how does that happen? The agency of people with intellectual disabilities is often not recognized because of an unacknowledged hierarchy of intellectual over emotional or relational capacities. Recent studies in “Causal Agency Theory” suggest ways to analyze what happens when core members act as agents: “Causal agency implies more, however, than just causing action; it implies that the individual acts with an eye toward causing an effect to accomplish a specific end.”14 Consider the agency of two core members at L’Arche Daybreak who sought adult baptism and confirmation in the United Church. Warren McDougall, a minister at Richmond Hill United Church, describes Amanda Winnington-Ingram’s commitment to being baptized and confirmed: “I had a youth Confirmation class of nine young people who were all ten years younger than her. Intellectually she wasn’t getting all the same stuff that everybody else was but she loved being there. It was a different experience for her than it would be for everyone else but I think she appreciated being part of the group. She certainly wanted to be baptized, where you got the feeling with some of the others in the group that they’re there because their parents wanted them to be there. But for her it was just so meaningful.” In terms of causal agency theory, Winnington-Ingram’s personal choice for baptism and confirmation, in contrast to those just following their parents’ wishes, shows the kind of self-determination that is fundamental to causal agency. It is also a striking example of what causal agency theory would call agentic action: “when acting agentically, self-determined people identify pathways that lead to specific ends,” taking up action that is “self-directed and enables progress toward freely chosen goals.”15 A second example of a L’Arche core member actively pursuing baptism in the United Church is that of Gord Henry. After more than two decades in L’Arche, in the 1980s, Henry decided he wanted to be baptized. His parents had raised him in the United Church. Close family friends were Anglican priests and of course L’Arche Daybreak was founded by the Newroths, who were Anglican. Gord Henry was also frequently an altar server for Henri Nouwen and for other Roman Catholic priests who visited Daybreak. He was comfortable in many Christian denominations, and because each of these Christian denominations recognizes each other’s baptisms, he could choose freely which church best suited his spirit. To decide where and with which church

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community his baptism should take place, Henry went on a retreat in Erie, Pennsylvania with Roman Catholic priest George Strohmeyer. As co-founder of L’Arche Erie, the first L’Arche community in the US, Strohmeyer had visited L’Arche Daybreak often since the early 1970s. He and Henry knew each other well. Strohmeyer remembers Henry’s retreat at the Wellspring retreat house in Erie. He spent time in the chapel, listened to tapes of talks by Jean Vanier and others and to music, and talked with Strohmeyer each day. After this period of discernment, Henry chose the United Church. Strohmeyer does not remember details of Henry’s decision, but he remembers that Henry felt at home in a United Church that was just a block away from his Daybreak house. He felt part of that community as well as his L’Arche community. Henry’s neighbours went there, people in the congregation knew his name, and there was social time after the Sunday service to greet each other over snacks and coffee. Gord Henry’s intellectual disability did not hamper his capacity for extended deliberation leading to a clear decision. Indeed, his careful process showed the fully volitional character of his active agency. Agency seems straightforward here: someone wants something and finds a way to make it happen. But causal agency theory further considers “how people become self-determined; that is, how they define the actions and beliefs necessary to engage in self-caused, autonomous action in response to basic psychological needs and autonomous motivation as well as contextual and environmental challenges.”16 In both stories, baptism is recognized not only as an individual choice, but as an initiation into a wider community with its “contextual and environmental challenges.” Henry’s agency here is more diffused than it might initially appear. Achieving his goal depended on a network of connections and support. Similarly, Winnington-Ingram expressed her desire in a social context and her agency was dependent on a variety of relationships. That is not unique to Henry or Winnington-Ingram. Strohmeyer, McDougall, and every other person involved are also dependent on a variety of relationships to support their agency. As Jackie Leach Scully convincingly argues in “Disability and Vulnerability: On Bodies, Dependence and Power,” vulnerability is intrinsic to all human life and every person relies on supports provided by social infrastructure and shared resources.17 Later in this chapter, more complex theories such as distributive agency explore multiple factors in possibilities for action in any given situation. Yet causal agency theory is an important starting place for

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recognizing the many ways in which people with intellectual disabilities take effective action, especially since historically their capacity for agency has been denied, undervalued, and unsupported. Keith Strong, a member of L’Arche Homefires in Wolfville and a faithful United Church member, might initially appear limited. As Jeff Moore recognizes, however, Strong’s agency is undeniable. “Keith is a real man about town even though he has significant intellectual limitations and he cannot speak,” Moore wrote in a 1989 article.18 Keith takes the bus to work, goes downtown by himself, and enjoys going to movies or bowling or to a neighbour’s for dinner. Moore adds, “He is a con­firmed member of the local United Church and regularly takes part in ushering and collecting the offering, a service he performs very well (after some practice). All in all, Keith has quite a full life.”19 But for Moore what is particularly remarkable about Strong’s agency is how he “seems absolutely convinced that he has every right to be who he is”20 and to make his intentions and choices known without being understood completely at the level of speaking. Moore explains: While Keith understands most of what is said to him, his vocabulary is limited to a few words like ‘ma,’ ‘home,’ ‘out,’ ‘cow,’ and of all things, ‘big shit’ (which he uses quite appropriately and fairly discreetly). However, Keith is very verbal, a natural politician, with what amounts to pretend talk, and given time he usually gets his point across. We have struggled with different speech therapists, alternative means of communication, and various forms of oppression to try to prevent embarrassing situations, but to no avail. I have had to learn to accept Keith for who he is – to enjoy him for who he is … In a sense, I have learned that being different is not Keith’s problem; it is mine. The fact that he cannot talk but is more than willing to try to communicate with others, is a real gift.21 Moore recognizes here that the core of Keith Strong’s agency is not in conversation but in the acting out of his human particularity. Moore concludes, “He has a lot to offer others, not only in spite of his differ­ences, but indeed because of them. He teaches ev­eryone he meets to go beyond superficial differ­ences and appreciate our diversity, and more importantly our oneness.”22 Strong bears witness to the value of both diversity and unity through his comfort with being who he is.

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There seem to be two kinds of agency here. One is the causal agency of Strong’s clearly communicated intentions and actions. But Strong is not continually making choices to be an agent. Some of his agentic action is based on who he is, a non-volitional agency of being. The agency of simply being is appealing. As we have noted already, when United Church ministers or other tired professionals come to L’Arche and feel loved and valued for who they are rather than only what they do, they are often overwhelmed with relief and the pleasure of belonging. An overemphasis on the agency of being, however, can be limiting. If people with disabilities are affirmed only for who they are rather than what they might choose to do, then their personal choices and specific desires can be overlooked. In a 1981 interview, Jean Vanier describes how people who are marginalized can become agents of change who will paradoxically free those at the centre from their own self-imposed barriers. It requires the active agency of people at the margins: “Now, what can happen is, if people listen to handicapped persons, and don’t put them into the sort of ghetto situation, if they can listen to the prisoner and the immigrant, then they begin to see that maybe these people have value, and that maybe their own cultural values are not the right ones.”23 A striking example of a L’Arche core member who acted to get others to listen and let go of their prejudices is L Y of the L’Arche Toronto community, who challenged several young people when they derided her as “retarded.”24 In “Negotiating Mutuality and Agency in Care-Giving Relationships with Women with Intellectual Disabilities,” Pamela Cushing and Tanya Lewis tell of how LY turned to face and respond to those who demeaned her.25 In her own words, LY recalls, “Some kids called me retarded. I don’t like people to call me that cause it hurts. I got me power there with me. Sandra [caregiver] was with me and we walked. I told Sandra I hate the kids calling me that name. I talked to Sandra about the kids. I cried. She helps me [with] my control. She asked to me that I stay calm. So I stay even. Then I talked to the kids. I told the kids, ‘Stop! My name is Loretta.’ And I shake hands. They apologized.”26 The assistant Sandra tells how L Y processed her emotions to take action: “At first Loretta wanted to ‘hit those kids in the face.’ As we sat there talking it through on the bench, though, she moved through her anger to a place that seemed to me to be beyond ‘letting it go,’ a phrase she often uses to help her leave difficult things behind. The way that she gathered up her courage and risked further ridicule by

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going back to the kids and telling them that they had hurt her made an impression on me that will never fade.”27 Cushing and Lewis point out that “both Sandra and Loretta were clearly negotiating power not only within their relationship but also in the decisions to intervene – to go back to stand up to the teens, and to decide what to say.”28 They affirm L Y ’s freedom in daring to confront her detractors and her “ability and agency in choosing to go back and challenge the kids.”29 It is important not to sentimentalize the agency of people with intellectual disabilities. L Y standing up for herself is a story of power, of a woman taking charge to turn the tables on those verbally abusing her and challenging them to stop, listen to her, and change their behaviour. It is a story not of disability but of ability and maturity, ability to be an agent of transformation overturning prejudice and demanding respect. “Diversity is the hard work of building relationships, bearing one another’s anger and pain, confronting complicity, and creating politically effective strategies for justice-making,” stated the “Theologies of Disabilities Report” to the 42nd General Council of the United Church in 2015.30 In turning back to engage her tormenters by telling them her pain and anger, LY takes effective action, building a moment of relationship that confronts them and brings justice and forgiveness to bear in a transforming action of diversity. Theologian Nancy Eiesland in The Disabled God, articulates the important principle that people with disabilities like herself (no longer ambulatory) need to be respected to find their own self-determined agency. She asserts, “Persons with disabilities have become subjects of our own lives, identifying our own needs and ambitions, and naming ourselves. People with disabilities today use language that highlights our own self-understanding as people with full and ‘normal’ lives, rather than the social stereotypes, which emphasize passivity and dependence.”31 Eiesland goes on later in her book to focus theologically on the agency of Christ, particularly how he rises with a body that can still show its wounds, and thus is both impaired and glorified.32 French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva commends Eiesland for her depiction of Christ as the “disabled god,” identifying the wound of the risen Christ as not a lack but an “integral part of his Glory itself given and perceived as a singularity.”33 Theologian Sharon Betcher points out the dangers of assuming that the “disabled other is somehow not able to articulate his or her own needs and wants” which in turn “allows the proxy – the one who presumes to act as

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voice of the voiceless – to fill in the discourse using the proxy’s own psychological imaginings.”34 Eiesland and Betcher warn against disempowering appropriation, advocating strongly for the autonomy of people with disabilities. Former L’Arche assistant and theologian Jason Reimer Grieg provides a caution, however, pointing out that Eiesland and Betcher focus largely on people with physical disabilities. He insists that for people with intellectual disabilities, especially if their impairment is severe or their verbal abilities are very limited, relational and social supports are needed to assist them in taking up as much agency as possible. Greig cautions “that for both Eiesland and Betcher, self representation” is made so primary that people with profound disabilities who are simply unable to speak for themselves get overlooked.35 People in L’Arche have noticed and articulated issues of voice, voicing for others, and agency since the early 1970s. Steve Newroth, the founding community leader of L’Arche Daybreak, wrote that the mission of assistants in the community “is to establish an environment which calls forth life, autonomy, participation and creativity.”36 He specified that “perhaps it is accomplished when assistants learn to listen not only to the voice but to the silent calling of the heart, expressed in action, anguish or play, telling of their deeper needs.”37 For Newroth, the challenge is not to presume to be a voice for others but first and foremost to listen to what the person with disabilities communicates through their various expressions and actions. Jean Vanier also expressed concern that often people with intellectual disabilities were not listened to in their own voices. In a letter from April 1972, Vanier told of attending a large conference in Erie in the United States where he was struck that “professionals and associations for the handicapped are always speaking about the handicapped, and not letting them speak for themselves.”38 He went on in the letter to lament that people with intellectual disabilities were not involved in the conference at all – not saying anything about their lives, not joining the banquet, not helping with music. Compared to the carnivalesque pleasures of L’Arche, Vanier found the final evening uninspired: “there was a big banquet for more than two thousand five hundred people but no real celebration or dances with handicapped people.”39 His preferred situation of “letting them speak for themselves” implied that if people with disabilities could have been their own agents in the conference, then the conference could have been more festive, its high

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mindedness overturned by the life experiences and energy of the supposedly simple-minded people who were central to the scholarly discussion but entirely excluded from participation. the dynamic agency of inversion

Lois Wilson comments, “The gospel is happening in L’Arche communities. These are people who are marginalized and alienated and set aside as non-productive. Jean Vanier talks about what he learned and didn’t expect to. We don’t expect it because we are able to navigate intellectually in a more forthright way. So it’s always a great surprise.”40 Even thoughtful analyses of power structures may underestimate the capabilities of people with intellectual disabilities. As Nirmala Erevelles explains, “in light of the poststructuralist critique of humanism, the challenge becomes how to retheorize agency without reproducing traditional notions of essentialized subjectivity. This challenge is especially significant to persons with disabilities who have struggled in the disability rights movement to reconstitute for themselves empowering subjectivities, as the struggles for self-advocacy and the right to independent living demonstrate.”41 Lynn Godfrey, United Church minister and community leader of L’Arche Hamilton, tells a story of being caught by surprise by the unexpected wisdom and agency of one of the members in her community. She relates: We were going to do our four-year planning at a Mandate meeting, and one of our leadership team didn’t show up! She was late. We waited twenty minutes and she still didn’t get there and we waited. The whole community was there. These are important meetings and inside myself I was going ‘Where the heck is she? She knows it’s important, why isn’t she here!’ We started without her maybe thirty minutes late, and about fifteen minutes later she came in. You know what you do when you’re late for a meeting, you tiptoe into the back. Well, one of our core members saw her, stood up, and went over and gave her a big hug. And inside of me, I felt about this high, because I was right there, full of judgment and all he wanted to do was welcome her. I was all full of judgment, and he was just full of love. And he didn’t care that she was late, just that she’d gotten there.42

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This is not just a cute story of a nice person with intellectual disabilities giving a hug. In Godfrey’s story, a reversal of leadership unfolds as the core member takes charge of welcoming and affirming the late person. In Erevelles’s terms, this is a story of someone reconstituting his own empowering subjectivity. Godfrey finds her sense of annoyed superiority suddenly toppled by the agency of the core member whose initiative embodies the community’s higher values of forgiveness and inclusion. In recalling the story, Godfrey celebrates a reversal as her own judgmental leadership is upstaged by the core member’s leadership “just full of love.” Godfrey analyzes the moment: “Time and time again that happens – what is really important here? It’s important that you’re here, it’s important that we are together. It is our core members who teach us, who lead us in those areas.” As Godfrey recognizes, often the agency of core members leads by example, welcoming and calling the community together.43 In this situation, agency is not simply to engage in autonomous action towards self-directed goals. While the action is intentional, to make sure the tardy person knows she is welcome and loved, the effect goes beyond a linear, goal-directed action or even an empowered subjectivity: it launches a communal dynamic of inversion. Developing the concept of inversion explored in chapter 1, we can see that a fundamental energy of Godfrey’s story lies in its inversion of expected hierarchies of power and authority. The seemingly low moves into a higher position of teaching or leadership. But this is not simply a two-person dynamic: it affects Godfrey and others in the setting of a community meeting. The reversals that Keith Strong embodied in Jeff Moore’s earlier story and that Godfrey describes here hold wider implications, with analogies to the energy of carnival. A variety of anthropologists and cultural critics have explored how traditional carnivals in western cultures provided a liminal space that allowed all kinds of unexpected behaviour to upend regular social hierarchies, so that for a time the world was symbolically upside-down and topsy-turvy.44 Much of this field of carnival studies draws its inspiration from the Russian critic Mikhail Bahktin, who in Rabelais and His World advances a foundational understanding of carnival and its dynamics reaching back to Renaissance and medieval times. Bahktin declares, “As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.”45 He describes

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the social context of carnival: “The hierarchical background and extreme corporative and caste divisions of the medieval social order were exceptionally strong. Therefore such free, familiar contacts were deeply felt and formed an essential element of the carnival spirit.”46 Similarly, because current Canadian social order retains strong divisions between people with and without intellectual disabilities, the “free, familiar contacts” of L’Arche can feel like a liberation from that established order. One of the things that struck me in this research is how often ordained United Church ministers long for the “suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms” that they glimpse in L’Arche. This carnivalesque energy is nearly always due to the agency of core members, as social inversion frees people at the top of social hierarchies without burdening someone else to have to rise to the top. Lynn Godfrey admits that the appeal was so powerful that “L’Arche made me want to leave the church!” The contrast between her church and L’Arche highlighted how picky and small-hearted congregational life could be and how easily it fell into a negative spirit of condemnation when things weren’t ideal. For Godfrey as a full-time United Church minister, L’Arche “gave me an experience of a different way of being” and allowed her to cast off her sense that “everything has to be perfect in worship.” The more free, egalitarian, accepting experience of L’Arche “offered a more positive alternative.” United Church minister Ian Macdonald also felt liberated when he was invited to L’Arche, because he could give up feeling that he had to be in control of worship and hand it over to the community instead. He explains, “L’Arche was looking for a Protestant way of worship. I became the needy one who was coming to worship because I never had any time to prepare for it, so I’d go in, read the gospel, sing one song, and then preach.”47 His lack of preparation forced him to be creative: “I had group dramas going like crazy. ‘Okay, you guys are the hills of Nazareth! You guys are the road to Damascus.’ Or ‘When I say this, you all yell, ‘Who are you, Jesus Christ? What have you come to do with us?’ It was just wonderful, such a cheerful way of learning.” Some people from the L’Arche Greater Vancouver community were also members of South Burnaby United Church, so Macdonald’s experience of leading worship in L’Arche shifted his approach to find more pleasure in his congregational ministry as well. As he puts it, “More people got involved in worship – they knew I wasn’t the kind of guy who would create committee meetings, and I found that very freeing, too, to get that kind of mix.

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If one part of the world you are responsible for can be approached with such an open way to learn, then other places can, too. So it made me more adventurous. I’d say they freed me.” As United Church ministers, both Godfrey and Macdonald identify important occasions of respite when their authority is overturned in the L’Arche context. Philosopher Charles Taylor attests to the importance of times of reversal, suggesting that people need such moments to maintain perspective on the temporal, human-constructed nature of social order. He notes, “To dismiss completely the festive in its original form of ‘reversal’ risks depriving people of a special time and space where they might realize that the established moral and social order is not some kind of perfect code but an interlude between different kinds of codes, none of them perfect. Carnival was a time when things could be stood on their head and great secular powers put in their place.”48 In The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, Barbara Babcock also notes that “all symbolic inversions define a culture’s lineaments at the same time as they question the usefulness and the absoluteness of this ordering.”49 In other words, agents of inversion “remind us of the arbitrary conditions of imposing an order on our environment and experience, even while they enable us to see certain features of that order more clearly simply because they have turned it inside out.”50 In this context, let us consider another story of baptism and the surprising agency of inversion, in which L’Arche Greater Vancouver member Bill Collins showed Ian Macdonald how the sacrament appeared from inside the water. Collins had lived with his parents until he was in his early thirties, and then in various other places before coming to L’Arche twenty years earlier. Macdonald remembers how he and Louise Cummings went to Collins’s house to meet with him about his desire to be baptized: So we go over there, and walk through his house to Bill’s room, and knock on the door. He says, ‘Come in’ and it’s all blue. All blue. A L L blue! And he welcomes us and he’s grinning away and he says, ‘I live in a river.’ Of course, he knew that I had a United Church McGeachy Scholarship for studying water and everything like that. They had all kinds of ways that they prayed for me, and that was wonderful because the hardest things of life happened to me in those years. So he told us about how he lived in the river, and we sat down and we were laughing about that,

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and he said ‘Even my sheets!’ and they were blue as well. So this is fine, and I said, ‘Bill, you say you want to be baptized. What do you think – why do you want baptism?’ Bill thought for a second. ‘It would refresh me!’ In forty years of pastoral life, I’ve never heard a better answer. Collins imaginatively takes charge of the symbolism of baptism, laughingly declaring of his all-blue room, “I live in a river.” He invites Macdonald and Cummings to join him where he is already immersed in a rich water symbolism. Macdonald realizes that Collins chooses baptism because it is in keeping with his spiritual vision – as Collins says, “It would refresh me!” For Macdonald, that symbolic immersion offers an unexpected inversion in which he finds himself pastored by Collins, whose profound statement is the best Macdonald has heard in forty years of ministry. Bill Collins’s agency here is at once purposeful, communal, and highly imaginative. Macdonald describes the actual baptism in his book, Living Waters: Daily Reflections for Lent: “On the day Bill was baptized, members of his house stood up with him and told the congregation how they saw Christ in Bill. They spoke of seeing his love expressed in simple, caring acts. When we baptized him, we used lots of water. It was everywhere. My gown was soaked, his housemates were laughing, and there were tears in everyone’s eyes. Bill’s baptism refreshed us all.”51 Supporting self-determination among people of all abilities provides an ongoing challenge of mutuality in any community, however. Anyone who has been involved in collaborative decision-making knows that it can be a slow process, because it requires attentive listening to each other across differences. Lynn Godfrey reflects, “When core members are here, we think differently. We are all here together, not making decisions for, making decisions with. Not talking about people, talking with people. And that just changes everything.” Expanding that experience from L’Arche to the wider church, Godfrey observes: I think the United Church has an interesting parallel to L’Arche in that sense of mutuality. Our mission work has been much more a work of mutuality since the 1960s. We don’t go out as United Church folk anymore, we work with partners, so there is a sense of mutuality in the way we do global outreach. We would never go anywhere without talking to people there first, would never presume we know. I see some parallels there – whenever

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we talk about mutuality or have people at the table. The United Church has learned, been challenged to learn about mutuality in our relationship with First Nations people after our apology in 1986 in Sudbury where the First Nations said, ‘We don’t accept your apology. We acknowledge it, but you live it out, folks.’ And so we have learned to walk with brothers and sisters as United Church people. Godfrey highlights the difficult nature of this kind of attentiveness, admitting, “We talk about mutuality but we find it as hard to live as anyone.” Yet she recognizes that an inversion of efficiency can be effective. The slowness of some core members can assist a community toward its goals, especially in decision-making: “Our core members slow us down, and very wisely. It’s an incredible gift and privilege to be with them, because when we slow down we listen to the spirit better, we appreciate the moment better. There are so many gifts to that. And you can go back and forth: I find myself going to the practice of discernment. Discernment comes from Catholic roots, spirituality – the idea of slowing down, appreciative inquiry is the secular way of putting it.” This agency of slowing down paradoxically makes “disability” an asset for community discernment. The intellectual slowness of core members is valued as an important contribution and a point of leadership. Shifting how time is perceived displaces the efficiency of the “able” with the result that all “listen to the spirit better.”52 “Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal,” wrote Bahktin.53 Gary Paterson, former moderator of the United Church, bears witness to how a simple yet symbolic moment during worship caused him to rethink what has “higher credit”: I have a memory of a young woman in my congregation, who lived with a lot of disabilities. By fluke on the day she was to be the reader of scripture it happened to be 1 Corinthians 12 – the body has many parts and we need to honour all parts. She was a slow reader, and by the time she finished you thought, ‘Nothing else needs to be said. She has embodied the Word.’ It didn’t stop the preaching but it changed it completely. So perhaps a word that we need to keep hearing is the value – but it’s not value exactly – openness and possibilities of grace are never dependent on the things that we think are most valuable or have higher credit in our society.54

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Like Godfrey, Paterson suggests that an experience of reconsidering what is credited as low and high, including time itself, models something potentially renewing for the wider United Church. In this case, he is grappling with the reality of a dwindling church: “Many would say that this person with a mental disability is a phenomenal and complete gift. Our Church is going through a period of collapse, tailspin from which I believe something new will come forward. But we will be much smaller. Maybe half our congregations in the next decade will close their doors. The resurrection will be hard to find. So do we learn something from being smaller, with moments of intimacy and grace? We’re not going to be the mega-churches with all the maximized so-called abilities.” Most United Churches do not see this situation of “collapse, tailspin” as a time to invoke carnival. But the curious wisdom of carnival is that downward dynamics such as collapse can be the first step of liberating inversion and, as Bakhtin asserts, renewal. The transformative dynamic of carnival is more than simply inversion as a role reversal. Cultural critic Stuart Hall suggests that carnivalesque energy overturns and levels relationships so that people experience a sense of unity without hierarchies and distinctions. Hall points out, “What is striking and original about Bakhtin’s ‘carnivalesque’ as a metaphor of cultural and symbolic transformation is that it is not simply a metaphor of inversion – setting the ‘low’ in the place of the ‘high’, while preserving the binary structure of the division between them. In Bakhtin’s ‘carnival’, it is precisely the purity of this binary distinction which is transgressed. The low invades the high, blurring the hierarchical imposition of order.”55 As Hall describes it, the dynamic of the carnivalesque is a kind of dance between people previously divided by hierarchies of social privilege. An experience of actual dancing engaged members of Ian Macdonald’s church as L’Arche members became more active in their church community. Macdonald reports: It changed the church to build closer relationships with L’Arche. From contacts once each Sunday morning, to more – Seniors’ teas evolved into Seniors’ dances – they’re up there dancing around, pushing each other around in wheelchairs. It’s really wonderful to see! And did people in the congregation resist? No, no, they didn’t. That was another big learning. If it’s real life, people will plug into it. Those who need to keep themselves apart will find ways to keep busy in the kitchen, but they are thinking

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through it in their action, too. And isn’t it the best way for people to get to know each other, dancing? Note the transformation here from stationary tea drinking to dancing, with people of differing abilities “getting to know each other.” The transformation comes through a reversal that brings social levelling in which L’Arche core members take centre stage to lead the dancing. According to Macdonald, while those who want some distance are free to support the event by working in the kitchen, many older church members are delighted to join in the dance. Hall further highlights the mutual character of carnivalesque dynamics as “revealing the interdependency of the low on the high and vice versa, the inextricably mixed and ambivalent nature of all cultural life.”56 Here, beyond reversal, is a reorientation where upending removes binary distinctions altogether, revealing interdependency. Critical disability theorist Margrit Shildrick challenges binary constructions of people with and without disabilities, reaching instead towards new ways of thinking: A more critical approach takes the further step beyond the straight-jacket of binary differences to explore the fluidity of all forms of categorisation. To think from the field of the other – people with disabilities – becomes, then, not an exercise in standpoint theory that would create new hierarchies of privilege, but a way of thinking otherwise that strives to exceed the very experience of boundaries. Nor is it a matter of seeking out a single approach that will better answer to the demands and hopes of disabled people, but of creating the possibility for questions, directions, and breakouts as yet unthought.57 agency in weakness

Remember Jean Vanier’s three stages of building a L’Arche community: “The first thing is doing acts of justice, taking people who have been treated cruelly out of those situations. Then the second thing is that the assistants are changed. And the third thing is that we come together, and we don’t know who is changing whom and it doesn’t matter, but we have fun. This is part of the complexity.”58 This “complexity” includes a transformation that has gone deeper than a reversal. Everyone is changed in a way that fosters community – and complex fun.

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Vanier is not afraid to name people with intellectual disabilities as weak or even broken, because in his understanding these qualities do not demean or diminish anyone. Rather, weakness can be the starting point of radical transformation. Vanier insists that people who are weaker can have a vital role in liberating the stronger: “The vision of God is to go down the social ladder to take the lowest place in order to be with the weak and the broken. Then God rises up with them to build a new community which does not forget or exclude anyone.”59 Vanier articulates a dynamic of inversion in which recognition of brokenness, rather than dividing, can bring people together at the point of their weakness. Thus, “the weak” is not a pejorative term for Vanier. In fact, Vanier affirms, “weakness is at the heart of each one of us.”60 That is true not only for individuals but for communities such as churches. When Paul in 1 Corinthians 12 says that those parts of the body that are the weakest are indispensible, Vanier applies this to mean that “people who are the weakest and least presentable are indispensible to the church.”61 While Vanier has been asserting the fundamental spiritual value of poverty and weakness since the 1960s,62 the World Council of Churches (2003) and then the United Church of Canada (2012) both affirm that “at the heart of Christian theology is a critique of success, power and perfection, and an honouring of weakness, brokenness and vulnerability.”63 Vulnerability has also become an increasingly important term in the United Church over the past decade. The “Theologies of Disabilities Report” declares the importance of vulnerability in promoting difference and disability in churches while also acknowledging that vulnerability carries risk and ambivalence: “The dual meanings of being vulnerable emerge as we craft relationships across difference and disability in communities of faith. One can be vulnerable in the sense of being, and feeling, threatened. More hopefully, vulnerability feels as if trust is inherent and the ability exists to open oneself up to love. How can this latter sense of vulnerability be fostered among diverse people?”64 Vanier explores vulnerability in the context of mutual relationships. There are weaknesses that seem positive such as gentleness and compassion, as Vanier asserts: “People who are powerless and vulnerable attract what is most beautiful and most luminous in those who are stronger: they call them to be compassionate, to love intelligently, and not only in a sentimental way.”65 But in a more complex way, Vanier also finds that the weaknesses of others can reveal that “if in every person’s heart there is a thirst for communion and friendship, there

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are also deep wounds, fears and a whole world of darkness which govern our lives in a hidden way. Coming to know this shadow side, and then to accept it, seems to me to be a step towards true knowledge.”66 Vanier also explores the even more painful reality that “In many communities there is someone who is more fragile than the others, who seems to provoke all their aggression and becomes the butt of their blame, criticism and mockery.”67 He adds, “Once the aggression, bullying or rejection is unleashed, it is very difficult to control.”68 Vanier is careful not to be idealistic or naive about complex aspects of anyone, especially people with intellectual disabilities. He asserts, “Some have been victims of so much contempt and violence, which they have stored up inside themselves, that there can be an explosion of violence, especially when they first come to live in a L’Arche community. Anger and depression remain with certain people with a mental handicap for the whole of their lives.”69 Many people with intellectual disabilities are sexually abused at some point in their lives. Although exact statistics vary, all show a percentage far higher than for the general population. Sexual abuse affects the individual capacity for agency. As David Brooks writes in the New York Times about sexual abuse in general and its debilitating effects in a particular situation, “Two writers I greatly admire criticized the woman … for not exercising more agency. If she was uncomfortable, she could have put on her clothes and hopped in a taxi. But that’s not how agency works. It’s not a card you pull out of your pocket and lay on the table. Agency is learned, not bred. And one of the things that undermines agency most powerfully is past sexual harm. The abuse of intimacy erodes all the building blocks of agency: self-worth, resiliency and self-efficacy (the belief that you can control a situation).”70 This would suggest that for many people with intellectual disabilities, claiming their own agency and acting intentionally in the world may take more courage, healing, and inner strength than might be immediately evident. Theologian Wayne Morris provides an important caution against romanticizing the woundedness and vulnerability of people with intellectual disabilities. While fundamentally agreeing with the positions of Vanier and United Church theologian Thomas Reynolds that vulnerability is core to being human, he nonetheless makes the point that vulnerability also often involves raw pain and unmitigated suffering. Morris explains: “I have also worked with people with profound learning disabilities, and it is not always a path of personal and mutual discovery in which we realize more fully who we are and what

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it means to be human. I have witnessed, for example, the frustration, the vulnerability, of a person who does not have any language when they cannot tell you that something is wrong or that they are in pain.” He tells of an incident one night when one person expressed her pain by trashing the house and trying to harm others and herself. Morris reflects, “She couldn’t talk it through or think rationally about it; all that she could do was lash out. This experience of being alongside someone with a profound learning disability in this state did not leave me feeling as though I had discovered what it means to be fully human and live a life that flourishes. Instead, I felt angry and frustrated with God, with the situation before me, and, in being pushed to my limits, discovering within myself qualities I did not like about myself.” From such an experience Morris warns, “Being vulnerable and wounded is not always a good place to be. Historically it has exposed people with disabilities to violence and abuse from others, but it also exposes us to pain and frustration that sometimes we are all powerless to do anything about. Being vulnerable and wounded is no constant rose garden of discovery of what it means to be human.” Morris allows, “Reynolds and Vanier are right, I think, that in vulnerability and in being open to another we discover more of what it means to be human.” Yet at the same time he advises, “But it is important to recognize alongside this, that being vulnerable can be a place of hurt and harm, inflicted by others at times, and at other times, simply a part of what it means to be in a vulnerable state.”71 In Befriending the Stranger, Vanier expresses a similar ambiguity: “The mystery of the weak and the broken is that they call forth not only the deep well of love and tenderness in us but also the hardness and darkness.”72 Vanier tells in particular that when he assisted a severely disabled man who often howled in anguish, his cries “pierced me like a sword” such that “perhaps they reawoke all the pain and anguish of my own childhood, hidden away behind all the barriers within me.”73 The result was that the disabled person’s anguish touched an anguish in Vanier that “in me became anger, violence and hate.”74 French feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva would understand Morris’s and Vanier’s experiences.75 As a psychoanalyst, she sees people’s reactions to the disabled person opening a psychic wound: “Each disabled person is a singular person experiencing his or her situation in a specific, different, unique way. Yet whatever the disabilities, they confront us with incomparable exclusion, different

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from the others: the disabled person opens a narcissistic identity wound in the person who is not disabled.”76 Kristeva is in no way blaming the person with the disability, but rather is interpreting how non-disabled people react to them. She goes on to explain that the disabled person psychically wounds others in that “he inflicts a threat of physical or psychical death, fear of collapse, and, beyond that, the anxiety of seeing the very borders of the human species explode.”77 Kristeva suggests that just in their being, a person with disabilities can threaten the “very borders of the human species.” This notion of threat is in keeping with Kristeva’s earlier concept of abjection,78 which can explain the repulsion and rejection to which marginalized people are subjected. Kristeva points out that the psychic threat and interaction between the disabled and the non-disabled is profoundly isolating for the disabled person: “And so the disabled person is inevitably exposed to a discrimination that cannot be shared.”79 In a comment in Our Life Together, Vanier mentions “an excellent article by Julia Kristeva” and commends her understanding that “to live with people who are irremediably wounded, you have to be in contact with your own irremediable wound.”80 He observes, “We are changed as individuals and as communities by the very person we reject” with the result that “we are then able to welcome what we reject in ourselves.”81 Vanier also vividly describes the limits of individual agency, suggesting that feeling helpless in front of anguish can be an invitation to deeper community: “When we listen to stories of terrible pain and know we can’t do anything about it, we touch our own vulnerability. We have heard the scream of pain, but we don’t know what to do with it. None of us knows what to do with the deep brokenness of our world. Maybe that realization can bring us back to community. We can do nothing on our own. We need somewhere to be together.”82 For Vanier, such wounds can create fear and isolation, or anger and violence, or can open people to each other and provide a foundation for mutuality between people of all abilities. Think back to United Church minister Maggie Enwright’s story in the introduction, where she admits, “Not to get too dramatic, but it probably changed my life.”83 She explains, “How? By witnessing how valuable people are who don’t have accomplishments or smarts.” The reason that their value was so transformative for Enwright was in part because society had labelled them weak, poor, and broken. But they were not acting as people stripped of agency: rather, they were actively affirming and welcoming Enwright and knew her name. Her hidden weakness was

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low self-esteem, and what liberated Enwright was to hear not that she was weak, but that she was valued. Because of such agency, United Church theologian Thomas Reynolds urges that intellectual disabilities “need not be suppressed and normalized.”84 Vanier recognizes the role of social stigma in limiting the agency of people with disabilities. In Becoming Human, Vanier observes that “those who are weak have great difficulty finding their place in society.”85 He sees cause for concern in a society which upholds only the strong, the whole, and the rich, pointing out that “the image of the ideal human as powerful and capable disenfranchises the old, the sick, the less-abled.”86 In a similar way, the United Church in “Open and Accessible: Ministries with Persons with Disabilities” recognized “the social model of disability,” suggesting that often “it is not the impairment that creates disabling conditions, but rather the barriers encountered within our society that prevent full and equal participation for all.”87 In a 1998 interview, host Pamela Wallin asked Vanier why a good and great God would create people with intellectual disabilities. Vanier immediately inverted the question, asking “if God is good and God is great, why did he create people who don’t listen to others, who reject those who are weak? The problem is not with people who have disabilities.” The problem, he claimed, “is the prejudice and fear in peoples’ hearts. We do not want to listen to people with disabilities.”88 When Vanier received the 2015 Templeton Prize, he asserted in a news conference statement, “Our society will really become human as we discover that the strong need the weak, just as the weak need the strong. We are all together working for the common good.”89 Anthropologist Pamela Cushing points out how in L’Arche “Jean was not saying we should just tolerate people with disabilities, he was saying they bring something to the table.”90 She highlights the reversed expectations of this agency, identifying it as an inversion: “Instead of saying this person can’t walk or that one can’t talk Jean’s inversion was that these could be seen as gifts.”91 For Vanier, gifts are not the opposite of weakness but instead are connected: “The most precious gift in community is rooted in weakness. It is when we are frail and poor that we need others, that we call them to love and use all their gifts. At the heart of community are always the people who are insignificant, weak and poor.”92 Doug Graves muses, “My whole development of my own spirituality around my own disability, which has been lifelong, has been

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profoundly influenced by L’Arche. So there isn’t any of my preaching or worship leading, that hasn’t been influenced by L’Arche.” He suggests that the experiences of United Church members in L’Arche could provide a shift in perspective with theological implications: “I do think that there is a theological component: a theology of imperfections, weakness, bearing woundedness – all of which the United Church could do well to hear, because our whole image of ourselves is about progress, perfection, changing the world.”93 But here be dragons, or at least some tender questions. L’Arche offers what Graves terms an implicit “theology of imperfections, weakness, bearing woundedness.” How does that connect to the powerful agency of someone like LY? LY confronted the prejudice of the teens and told them her name. The result was a moment of mutual respect as the teens apologized and they shook hands. In overcoming the divisive hierarchical dualism of able and disabled, LY and the teens modelled, however briefly, an inversion that included an unexpected change as they recognized each other as full human beings. In an interview in the October 2013 United Church Observer, Jean Vanier remarks on the capacity of people with disabilities to change others through developing relationships: “There is a mystery behind people with disabilities. I find that in many ways, they are a presence of Jesus. We see their fragility, their pain – and yet at the same time, we can say that they speak of God. As we enter into relationship with them, they change us.”94 In contrast, two years earlier the December 2011 United Church Observer published a piece by Chelsea Temple Jones titled “Church is for Everybody.” In it, Jones identifies the problem with statements that remove the individuality of anyone: “A common mistake inside church walls is to assume that people with disabilities have a stronger or weaker connection to God, or that their approaches to faith are somehow simpler or less varied than anyone else’s.”95 Jones does not find fault with Vanier or L’Arche. In fact, she credits L’Arche as “perhaps the most successful example of mixing disability and spirituality in Canada.”96 But Vanier’s comments could be misinterpreted as embodying the exact problem that Jones articulates. Vanier’s use of “weak” slides from a shared characteristic that potentially unites all humans and communities, to a way of referring specifically to people with disabilities.97 Thus, while Vanier’s affirmation of weakness has inspired many, it has also drawn important

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criticism. One of the most notable and sustained critiques of Vanier’s premises is offered by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva contends that Vanier’s model of care, with its affirmation of weakness, functions within what she terms “the paradigm of the lack,” which she characterizes as saying, “We possess (aptitudes, powers) but he (she) does not have, he is lacking.”98 Kristeva challenges Vanier’s “unconsciously universal” model that views a person with a disability in terms of their weakness, thus identifying them as lacking or deficient.99 No matter how well intentioned, this “risks enclosing the disabled subject in a position of being the ‘object of care.’”100 According to Kristeva, the basic defect of Vanier’s model is that it “ends up in infantalization” of “the disabled subject” and “prevents them from being open to their ‘powers,’ that is to say to their singular potentialities” and “singular creativity.”101 Further, she also raises a concern that the assistants could over-spiritualize the relationship, because “the logic of this model nourishes the fantasy of an ideal pleasure, a claimed fusion-confusion of healthy ‘possessors’ with the ‘bereft/needy,’ a supposed communion.”102 For Kristeva, what counters the paradigm of lack and the temptation to mistake a projected fusional relationship for communion is an alternative paradigm: “the singularity of being” of each person “which goes as far as including the deficit itself.”103 Drawing on the primacy of irreducible particulars articulated by medieval philosopher Duns Scotis, Kristeva insists on “the right to irreducible singularity”104 and “the incommensurable singularity of each person, disabled persons included.”105 Radical singularity, for Kristeva, counters the subjection of the person with disabilities to being simply a figure of lack or a projection of the caregiver. Singularity restores, reveals, or discloses that subject as being the agent of his or her own particular life. In the October 2013 United Church Observer interview, Vanier declares that “L’Arche is essentially a place where you come to love and to accept people exactly as they are, with all that is broken in them. Not to change them, but to accept them. To build relationships of trust.”106 He is referring to both core members and assistants. Allowing people their full singularity and accepting them as they are establishes necessary conditions for collective relationships of trust. Doug Graves commends accepting each other’s limitations, but also counsels that such acceptance should not preclude healing or growth: “I’ve never been a big advocate that we have to do things perfectly. It’s okay to stumble along. We have to reflect on what we’re doing.

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The Christian church is a place where woundedness is accepted and we embrace each other whether or not we get better. But it’s not a bad thing to get better. Maybe that’s sometimes a challenge that L’Arche could deal with to bring the most out of people – it may be one of the places where L’Arche is weak by being too accepting of certain limitations.” The word “weak” is ambiguous: Graves’s use of it in this case means deficient. His point, however, is that while L’Arche accepts people as they are, each individual has the potential to develop and grow. As Kristeva notes, an overemphasis on weakness can produce passivity instead of freedom, focusing on the disabled person as a deficiency, which thus reduces their unique person, singular being, and particular agency. Critical disability scholar Madeline Burghardt notes that disability scholars have recognized for some time the power of language to shape the lives of people with disabilities, so L’Arche’s “focus on people’s brokenness is a source of unease within disability scholarship.”107 Burghardt does acknowledge that in Vanier’s framework “it is clear that the brokenness to which he refers is that which belongs to all people”108 and that people of all abilities can most deeply meet each other heart-to-heart through that common weakness. Yet Burghardt still warns that “as commendable as it is to recognize the vulnerability and brokenness in each other, it is rather a different undertaking to have one’s brokenness named on one’s behalf.”109 We can return to L Y ’s story to see the significance of L Y’s action using Burghardt’s lens. When the teens taunted L Y by naming her impairment in a bullying way, she took the initiative to speak for herself, telling “the kids” how their naming hurt her and how they cannot reduce her identity to a single pejorative term. She names herself, telling them that her name is Loretta. For Vanier, weakness fosters interdependence and therefore leads to community, and what follows from community is pleasure. The particular pleasure of L’Arche, according to this outlook, comes as a result of the activity of sharing life, acknowledging weakness, and living in mutual relationships. Vanier’s Aristotelian use of the word “pleasure” in that context, however, raises questions for Kristeva as a psychoanalyst. In both the introduction and chapter 1, we quoted Vanier’s letter to Kristeva in which he affirms “pleasure” as a secret of L’Arche.110 A few years later in Signs of the Times, Vanier reiterates, “I was once asked what were the deepest motivations for living at L’Arche.” He

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replies, “The principle motivation? Essentially it’s pleasure. For Aristotle, pleasure and joy are identical. In current parlance, we devalue pleasure; joy sounds more spiritual.”111 Vanier implies that he invokes pleasure precisely because it is devalued as the less spiritual, perhaps more embodied word. Choosing another word as a key motivation of L’Arche could avoid the potential ambiguities of embodied relationships. But isn’t that intrinsic to the gift and pleasure of L’Arche, that it is not an idea or theory but an unflinching commitment to living something together in the flesh? Vanier makes the same point about the word tender: “Tenderness is the language of the body.”112 L’Arche boldly announces that it is “founded on the body.”113 This is also how carnival works, through the sometimes dangerous pleasure of enfleshed inversions and physical embodiments of social transformations. In a letter dated 10 August 2009, Kristeva challenges what Vanier means by pleasure and how it is possible in L’Arche.114 For Vanier, pleasure is a consequence of an activity. Such an activity should achieve something significant and generous. In the context of L’Arche, pleasure would be a consequence of the activities of building community together. In Made for Happiness, he asserts that “pleasure completes or crowns the act.”115 While for Vanier from his Aristotelian framework, pleasure completes activity, Kristeva the psychoanalyst sees pleasure as rooted in desires originating in the psyche. In her letter, Kristeva frames her questions as ones that preoccupy parents of persons with disabilities, asking about the boundaries between affection, projection, abuse, respect, joy, and pleasure.116 In psychoanalytic terms, she questions whether Vanier is aware of how pleasure is linked with desire in all its multiple and ambiguous dimensions such as narcissism, or even masochism and sadism. She further points out how people may find pleasure in their own unthinking psychological projection-identification. The danger that Kristeva names here is that a caregiver’s unchecked desires and unexamined attendant pleasures could overwhelm the singular voice and agency of the person with a disability.117 This kind of conscious or unconscious domination is a risk not only in personal relationships, but also in community structures that can reduce individuals to stereotypes that make others feel better. The United Church “Theologies of Disabilities Report” states that churches often do not notice their inbuilt “obstacles to nurturing a safe space for people who live with disabilities.” These include ways in which they “may be stereotyped as objects of pity, a source of divine

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inspiration, or recipients of charity rather than embraced by the community as active and contributing members.”118 A further innate tension exists between Kristeva’s vision of “the incommensurable singularity of each person, disabled persons included” and a collective commitment to building community. Dennis Butcher was a United Church minister in Winnipeg and then community leader of L’Arche Winnipeg for almost ten years. For Butcher, people with disabilities are agents of transformation for the church when their particular gifts are received: Unless people with some level of disability, physical and mental, intellectual disability are amongst us then we are less than what we could and should be, because people, in this case with intellectual disabilities, have gifts to share with the world and to share with the congregation. I have seen it in South Burnaby United where Ian Macdonald was and in Sherwood Park United. It is a leaven and salt when you’ve got someone like my friend Rick running around. He carries with him a cloth because he is often drooling and you need to have somebody like that in the congregation. I think it makes us more human and more accepting. It is more the real world. It is a place of service where people get back more than what they give. Congregations that have a close association, there is a joy and a spontaneity; people are less inhibited and more accepting if we have people of that ability in the congregation.119 What Butcher articulates here echoes the United Church’s “Open and Accessible: Ministries with Persons with Disabilities” report that declares “it takes all of us together to begin to reflect the image of God.” The report continues that in this “inter-dependence” and “this community, we all have important contributions to make to the whole as we see the Christ image in one another.”120 Butcher claims that churches discover a joy and spontaneity “if we have people of that ability.”121 In fact, he goes even further, describing his singular friend Rick to insist, “You need to have somebody like that in the congregation.” For Kristeva, a focus on singularity does not pre-empt community, but instead can nurture solidarity with others.122 She builds her sense of collective action around each singular being, articulating mutual relationships where individuals do not subsume each other but

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connect lovingly so that each can flourish. She declares: “I accompany him or her, I love him or her as he or she is. Through my love for the other singular, I carry him or her to their specific, singular, development – and to mine, equally specific and singular.”123 For Kristeva, respecting and supporting singularity among people builds solidarity. She calls for a “progressive concept” that would “reinvent love as the union with the singularity that is completely other” and concludes that “for the inclusive solidarity with the weak, it is a matter of substituting the love of singularities.”124 She sees this “process of substituting another mode of life … which Jean Vanier practices in his way” as a “horizon and hope for all.”125 In a similar way, Lois Wilson remarks that as a United Church leader what inspires her about L’Arche and its core members is how “people go in there on a one-to-one basis, living with and learning things from them so it’s a reciprocal thing.” Wilson adds: Some of what L’Arche offers reinforces the dignity of each human being and the centrality of compassion in human relationships, going both ways. That’s what it’s really about. L’Arche has a very human touch, and we can sometimes miss that if we’re not careful because we have a cerebral approach. But L’Arche is a demonstration of what I think life is about: compassion, hosting, being hosted, living with – that is its meaning, what it is about. And also living in community where each person’s particularity is affirmed, but they are also brought into life-giving relationships with people very different than themselves, so it’s not just an individual affirmation but also the emphasis on community. With humour, Wilson acknowledges the resilient singularity of each person: “A community with diversity affirmed without making ‘them’ be like ‘us,’ because that would be impossible.” Vanier and L’Arche claim community as a setting where each person can flourish in their particular beauty. In his 2013 Pacem in Terris Award remarks, Vanier says, “My nearly 50 years here in L’Arche have made me discover the wisdom of love and of tenderness, the wisdom of simplicity, the wisdom of goodness and of fun in people who are weak and fragile … They have revealed to me and helped me welcome my own weaknesses. They have transformed me as I began to live relationships of mutual friendship with them. They have

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brought me to discover that our societies are upside down.”126 L’Arche is a place of social inversion, a place of vulnerability, pleasure, and fun. Perhaps unexpectedly, Kristeva identifies a carnivalesque agency in the “abject” figure of the rejected person, asserting that they have an exposing effect that “shows up with a comic gleam the religious and political pretensions that attempt to give meaning to the human adventure.”127 From Vanier’s Aristotelian perspective, the pleasure of L’Arche is an enlivening experience that comes through wholeheartedly sharing life with others, “the feeling of being alive which flows from an activity that is going marvelously well.”128 He insists: “True pleasure or joy can only spring from an action that is really unifying and peace-making for the individual, one in which they can engage fully without splitting off or fleeing from more difficult aspects of themselves.”129 Kristeva ultimately commends “this love, which is continuously clarified and questioned” in the “exceptional experience of Jean Vanier.”130 She says Vanier is pioneering something that has “a secular version” in the film Untouchables, produced with the support of L’Arche partner, Association Simon de Cyrene. The movie tells a story in which the positions of privilege based on binaries – such as Black versus White, high versus low class, minimal versus advanced education, poverty versus wealth, and ability versus disability – are inverted into entertaining intersectional hilarity. Kristeva images this inversion of social pretensions as an alchemy, the science of turning base metals to gold, exuberantly celebrating “the love, with the humour and gaiety that result from it, this roar of laughter, which breaks through pain, this joyful alchemy, all this embodies marvelously the philosophy of sharing in the singular.”131 distributive agency

Both Vanier and Kristeva affirm the transformative agency of singular people in community together. The idea of “distributive agency” articulates a way of understanding networked agency, the kind of joyful alchemy where the individual elements become together something more complex. Distributive agency is more than interdependence or even intersectionality, however. Distributive agency’s multi-relational notion of agency complements the more individualistic causal understandings of agency – whether through intentional action or agency in weakness.

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Political scientist Jane Bennett asserts, “A distributive notion of agency does not so much reject this model of efficacy as shift its focus. Instead of honing in on a single effect, it pays attention to a linked series of them, for an unstable cascade spills out from every ‘single’ act. To take the cascade as the unit of analysis is to locate intentions within an assemblage that always also includes their wayward offspring. An intention becomes like a pebble thrown into a pond, or an electrical current sent through a wire, or a neural network: it vibrates.”132 For Bennett, such networks constitute and determine possibilities for agency by involving complex webs and multivalent influences that involve various social relations but also extend beyond to include the natural world. Similarly, Margrit Shildrick explains that in recent critical theory “the embodied self – rather than being goal-driven and singular as it would be in a modernist model – becomes a network of flows, energies and capacities that are always open to transformation, and that figure what [recent theorists] call desire.”133 Both Shildrick and Bennett choose to focus less on desire as intentional action and more on how any action necessarily unfolds in a field of interrelating actants, forces, and energies. Bennett declares, “To focus on the cascade of becomings is not to deny intentionality or its force but to see intentionality as less definitive of outcomes. It is to loosen the connection between efficacy and the moral subject and bring efficacy closer to the idea of the power to make a difference, to generate changes that call for responses.”134 Agency is distributive because it ripples out through complex networks, or “assemblages” as Bennett puts it: “To be clear: the agency of assemblages of which I speak is not the strong kind of agency traditionally attributed exclusively to humans. To make such a claim would be simply to anthropomorphize. The contention, rather, is that if one looks closely enough, the productive power behind effects is always a collectivity.”135 Bennett is describing an assemblage of not just individuals and their intentions, but the “productive power” enabled by a network of interrelations. Distributive agency, as what Bennett would term the “productive power” of a “collectivity,” can be seen in the liturgical dance of L’Arche Daybreak’s Spirit Movers. Ministers Warren McDougall and Linda Butler recount how their Richmond Hill United Church congregation was transformed when the Spirit Movers lead part of a worship service. Some of the Spirit Movers are also members of that church.

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McDougall explains the context, “We’ve had services here that were L’Arche-led services. People’s expectations are different because L’Arche people are being given leadership, so they know it’s going to be a bit more chaotic and not as smooth.” Butler describes two times when the Spirit Movers danced: They taught it to the congregation … It was the second time that they’d done this dance, ‘The Face of God.’ The first service they did it, people were just in tears. This time we got to do it with each other. And it was very powerful, and without L’Arche, I could not have done that. Like if I said to them ‘Hi, let’s do this dance today, and we are going to do this,’ they would have said ‘Linda’s asking us to do something bizarre and we’re not going to do it.’ But it was the Spirit Movers – and the Spirit Movers did it and invited them in, and the congregation just did it. McDougall and Butler describe how the dance was effective because of collective interactions, not only of the dancers with each other but also with the congregation whom they brought into the action.136 The movement of the dance includes the interaction between the dancers, then their extension of the dance and its connectivity to the congregation. This spontaneous free play of dancers, worshippers, and the space of the sanctuary filled with motion creates what Jane Bennett calls an assemblage: “This assemblage is an ecology in the sense that it is an interconnected series of parts, but it is not a fixed order of parts, for the order is always being reworked in accordance with a certain ‘freedom of choice’ exercised by its actants.”137 The usual focus on words during a United Church service is superseded by the physical communication of the dancing bodies. In the different context of C R I P SiE (Collaborative Radically Integrated Performers Society in Edmonton), Lindsay Eales reflects on her experience of a mixed dance troupe, articulating how people of diverse abilities dancing together figure mutuality and interdependence. Although I do not know of any connections between this dance company and L’Arche or the United Church, Eales’s interpretation of the dance performance could also be applied to the Spirit Movers: “The complexity of the bodies on the stage during this vignette – bodies read as disabled, non-disabled, woman, man, fat, and thin – may offer unique opportunities for simultaneous critique of gendered, sized, and (dis)ableist confines of movement and embodiment. The group negotiates this

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complexity.”138 She explains that this is accomplished by “creating collaborative rather than individual responses … by highlighting collective action and interdependence.”139 This collective and interdependent quality of the dancers’ actions does not erase individual action, but allows each to reach beyond their individual abilities to enact much more than they could on their own. In the Spirit Movers’ dancing, dancers with more profound disabilities are made mobile, spinning in wheelchairs and sometimes lifted, brought into motion by their fellow dancers and the collective dynamics of their choreography. The collective agency is distributive as it vibrates through their interactive performance. Furthermore, according to Butler’s description, the Spirit Movers’ initial dance extended its distributive dynamic to include the United Church congregation, who experienced a powerful inversion, finding themselves moved by the dancers to the point that many dropped their customary church composure and shed tears. Eales explains this kind of dynamic in her C R I p s iE dance troupe: “The dancers also actively challenge the understanding of social justice as a practice enacted by one group of privileged ‘helpers’ upon another less fortunate group. Instead, the group strives to enact an always-ongoing (and imperfect) practice of mutual sharing and support among diverse people who experience some similar struggles and some widely different ones.”140 In the movements of the Spirit Movers, members of Richmond Hill United Church found mutual recognition of their shared and different yearnings and desires, in a way that was deeper than words. The second time that the Spirit Movers performed in Richmond Hill United Church, they further dissolved social boundaries by teaching gestures of the dance to the congregation and then completed the inversion by inviting the congregation into aspects of the dance. The collective agency of the dancers draws the congregation into a liminal space of ritual movement where the congregation members follow the leadership of people with disabilities. Paradoxically, it is people who are often marginalized who lead a rather mainstream congregation through dance gestures to enact symbolically an encounter with the very face of God. While obviously not a scene of carnival, this event of the Spirit Movers dancing “The Face of God” is suggestive of a carnivalesque transformation of human relations. Mikhail Bahktin notes how hierarchical rank and human relations are temporarily suspended: “People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human

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relations … The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience, unique of its kind. This temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank created during carnival time a special type of communication impossible in everyday life.”141 Again, the dynamic and energy of both inversion and distributive agency here is key to the Spirit Movers’ action and power. Barbara Babcock points out, “Symbolic inversion may broadly be defined as any act of expressive behaviour which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, social and political.”142 Discerning such patterns of symbolic inversion in the actions of people with disabilities helps to appreciate the particular character of distributive agency. In the case of the Spirit Movers, a fluid form of agency ripples through inversion to distributive agency via collective interaction. This experience of mutuality not only gathers people together, but invites them into the presence of the Divine. Shildrick muses, “I wonder whether rethinking the whole nexus of the relation between self and other need end with the notion of intercorporeality. Given the material and ambiguous experience of prosthetic limbs or donated organs, which both put into question the singularity of the embodied self, might not the idea of assemblages be more appropriate?”143 The Spirit Movers incorporate “prosthetic” aids such as wheelchairs into their dances. Curiously in light of Shildrick’s speculation, one of the Spirit Movers’ first performances in the early 1990s was choreographed to give thanks for a donated organ. The newly created troupe danced at Richmond Hill United Church in a special service to celebrate the life of Susan Zimmerman. A long-term Daybreak member who was also part of Richmond Hill United Church, Zimmerman had just received a successful heart transplant. The interconnected, distributed agency of that moment spanned years of medical teams and public health care, a tragic death leading to a donated organ, a renewed life, the physical space of a United Church and its people, members of a L’Arche community, and more: the complex networks rippled out in what Bennett might call a “cascade of becomings.” That cascade includes many connections between Richmond Hill United Church and L’Arche, dating from the founding of Daybreak in 1969. Carl MacMillan, Community Leader of L’Arche Daybreak

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points out how important it is for core members to have more than one community and to be active in several places of belonging: The thing that is obvious about L’Arche is that people with disabilities are very much at the centre. At the United Church that’s not always the case although there’s been a long history of inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities, but I see people who are elderly, people who are at the margins in all different kinds of ways who are very included. In those ways there are more similarities than differences. Core members of L’Arche Daybreak have been worshipping at the local United Church for a long time and have been very active members of the community. They’re well known. So while people at Daybreak often experience their L’Arche community as a place of belonging, it’s also nice for people to be part of another community in some way. That’s happened at the United Church.144 However, we must beware of romanticizing the distributive agency of either the United Church or other communal networks of people with disabilities. L’Arche people in the United Church sometimes bring assumptions that United Church worship will proceed like worship in the L’Arche community. One United Church minister remarks: Occasionally I go lead a service at L’Arche, but my experience of L’Arche is more of the L’Arche people who come to this congregation and are part of this service. I would say on the challenge side of things that it’s sometimes kind of a test of people’s patience or tolerance. People would like to think of themselves as welcoming of all different kinds of people but sometimes L’Arche folks are really noisy. They always come late – one group arrives half way through the service every Sunday. They come in and stand there, looking for a place to sit. I think people love to think we’re all welcoming but I’m sure that people find it annoying sometimes.145 In other words, the distributive agency of L’Arche is more complicated than leading heart-warming liturgical dances. The respect L’Arche has for the agency of core members can support behaviour and energy that is noisy or tardy in a United Church setting. Recall Jane Bennett’s

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assertion that in distributive agency, an “unstable cascade spills out” that will always also include the “wayward offspring” of any intentional action. Is the disruptive entrance of L’Arche members to the Sunday morning worship service an intriguing example of distributive agency with hints of chaos theory? Is it a renewing, carnivalesque upsetting of decorum? Or is it simply inconsiderate? Charles Taylor observed that carnival reveals something true for both itself and the accepted social order. Each is “an interlude between different kinds of codes, none of them perfect.”146 Warren McDougall remembers with amusement a time in his congregation when he struggled with a hierarchy of disability: elderly people with hearing aids found themselves unable to participate fully in the service when a L’Arche person with multiple handicaps vocalized so loudly that she prevented them from hearing. For several weeks, McDougall angsted over what to do. He wanted to treat everyone with respect. He worried about what inclusive Christian fellowship meant. Finally, he reluctantly brought his concerns to the L’Arche assistants, who immediately said, “That is completely reasonable! We’ll find other ways for this core member to worship until she is able to be more calm in public worship.” McDougall realized that he had been trying to figure it out on his own and to present a solution himself. An understanding of distributive agency might have helped him, because the problem was solved swiftly once he opened himself to think with others in community. The conversation did not diminish the dignity of the person with a disability. In fact, the process assumed her capacity for respectful connection to people with divergent needs in the congregation. With assistance, she could find alternative ways to meet her spiritual needs in other community settings until it was possible to return to her congregation.147 Thus, both she and McDougall required a networked agency beyond their individual abilities. Ironically, sometimes the vulnerable people called to renewal can be United Church ministers who have become stuck in feeling that they must do everything on their own. Doug Graves considers ambiguity between personal and community orientations to be a balance rather than a contradiction: There’s also the gift of community. We are still in the United Church largely collections of individuals. That’s a Protestant thing. Community means when you’re considering how to respond to certain things, you consider what’s important to

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you and what your needs are, but you also consider what your impact is on the others who are there, and what the collective impact is going to be. You even perhaps try to give that equal weight with your own needs. So your own needs are not necessarily subsumed with the community needs but they do have an equal tension, and you recognize that that is probably a good thing for you, that it’s good to have that involved in your discernment. Graves points out how the United Church, in seeking more recently to focus on being a diverse community, may not fully understand either the gift or the challenges of what it is taking on: “We don’t have a lot of patience for dealing with disagreements. We don’t know how to process disagreements. Well, not all L’Arche communities do either, but generally speaking L’Arche has found a way to do it unless it gets to be an intense conflict. I don’t think the United Church understands as well as it might its own impact in being such an inclusive community – our role as some kind of a model for how people of difference can live together. That is also a great gift of L’Arche – people of enormous difference living together.” Graves pushes the practical implications of this question to “the whole emphasis on intercultural ministry,” explaining, “That’s the big question – how do we live together in a way that isn’t one group swallowing the other, but actually living mutually and together, which is a huge thing for the United Church right now in trying to rethink ourselves.” responsible agency

Graves raises what he calls “the big question” of “actually living mutually and together.” We have explored five frameworks for examining different aspects of agency: the agency of prayer, causal agency, the agency of inversion, the agency of weakness, and distributive agency. There is an aspect of agency that remains unaddressed, however: something connected to singular individuals’ actions that have the cascade effects and diffused power of distributive agency, but adding a sense of responsibility, care, and justice that is larger than individual intention or desire. United Church theologian Thomas Reynolds best articulates this as “responsible agency” in community, writing: “Human beings are personal beings. That is, we are agents identified by the relationships we have with others. The context of

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these relationships informs our sense of self, but such that we become responsible agents in our own unique flourishing. In this way our capacity for self-determination and freedom is a factor of our dependence upon and vulnerability to other people. There are dramatic moral implications that follow from this picture of the human, especially as they relate to disability. Responsible agency looks entirely different; it is tied to the flourishing of others.”148 Poet Mary Hillhouse is, in Reynolds’s terms, a responsible agent in her own “unique flourishing,” as well as nurturing the “flourishing of others.” A long-term core member of the L’Arche Greater Vancouver community, Hillhouse initiated a Bible study group with United Church minister Louise Cummings. Cummings relates: I have been leading a Bible study in the community since Mary Hillhouse looked at me and said ‘Good, we have a United Church minister, now we can have our own Bible Study!’ We started with four and now have ten people with disabilities and some assistants who are part of that as well, once a week, forever! It is primarily the United Church core members who have claimed it. It’s Protestant tradition to do Bible studies and we do it. We sing the songs they know from church and it’s been a whole kind of fascinating experience of reading the scriptures with new eyes for me all the time. It just keeps opening up.149 Hillhouse grew up in Calgary with her family. They moved to Winnipeg, then briefly to Texas where her brother was born. She explains, “I heard about L’Arche through Mum, who worked with a friend, so Mum and her friend Shirley were working together at the time, that’s how I heard about L’Arche. My Mum and Dad wanted me to have a home in case something happened to them. I think I was twelve years old going on thirteen. I came to L’Arche when I was in my thirties!”150 At L’Arche, she tried out different churches, “Catholic and a couple others. Now I’m at Jubilee United Church in Burnaby.” Hillhouse is certainly what the 2015 “Theologies of Disabilities Report” would call an “active and contributing” member of her local church, which she describes in this way: “They have a lot of members, well back then they did! Lots have died too. The choir is excellent. I was a member of the Bible study there. After my church Bible study group stopped I suggested a home Bible study group to Louise. We got together to have lunch and prayer, thank

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the Lord for today, for friends, for the group, our neighbourhood – Amen! We meet on Thursdays now, and we have a Bible study dinner too.” A member of L’Arche Greater Vancouver for several decades, she has served on the L’Arche Canada Spirituality Commission whose members are selected from across Canada. In Hillhouse’s words, “We talk about prayer and getting together as a group, on the same page so to speak, and sharing [with our communities] when we get back. We are from different churches. It helps us grow as a member of the body.” Hillhouse suggests that the United Church can learn from L’Arche ways of “praying together, singing, and just being together.” She also thinks L’Arche could learn from the United Church: “Definitely! We can learn to serve in the church and in the community.” Mary Hillhouse is known for her wit and linguistic ability even though she does not read or write. In 2013, her friend Janis Harper transcribed her words, then helped her edit them into a published book of poems titled Family.151 In “The Gardening,” readers can glimpse both the United Church and L’Arche as Hillhouse expresses her commitment to serve God through her “gardening.” Her image of gardening certainly parallels the ecumenical priority quoted in chapter 2 from the United Church document “Mending the World”: “God’s work of earth healing … for the creation of a world that is just, participatory and sustainable.”152      The Gardening Pulling out weeds     Helps everything to grow It reminds me of a story from the Bible The Bad Weed and the Good Weed If you take the bad weeds out     It helps the soil       And will help the flowers grow I’ve got my hands in God’s soil153 Notice that Hillhouse doesn’t contrast a hierarchy of “wheat and tares” or good plants versus bad weeds. Rather, she notes good

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weeds and bad weeds. Everything in the garden is a weed. Nothing has to be perfect. Hillhouse’s image of weeds has theological implications. Hans S. Reinders, professor of ethics and mental disability at the Free University of Amsterdam, suggests that arguments about inclusion miss the ecological fact that in creation, inclusion is the default position and needs no defense. Reinders proposes “an ecological view on disability by looking at the notion of ‘weeds’ as a conceptual byproduct of human design.”154 Reinders connects his ecological view of disability to the crucial question of human agency: “Human beings [with profound disabilities] can flourish, but they cannot flourish as self-asserting agents … In terms of a theology of creation, there is no purpose for the human external to its being as God’s creature. When God created human being, and saw that it was good, he did not value what it potentially could become, but what it actually is.”155 Reinders’s analogy works best if you see each plant as an image of a singular person. Whether a person is perceived negatively as a weed depends on the historical project being pursued at any given moment that defines who is essential and who is extraneous. He suggests that in our historical moment of ecological awareness, all of God’s creations flourish simply by being what they are.156 Hillhouse’s imagery, by contrast, is shaped around growth. In Hillhouse’s garden, there are nothing but weeds, and her open-ended metaphor does not suggest that each weed represents an individual. Rather, taking responsibility for removing the bad weeds “helps the soil,” which in turn can help flowers grow. Responsible agency here is intentional action to improve living conditions to allow maximum growth, within the multiple contexts suggested by theories of distributive agency. The poem implies that what is “bad” is whatever limits flourishing, growth, and flowering. In this, Hillhouse’s biblical imagery echoes not only the key United Church document quoted above, but what Jean Vanier has announced for half a century. In a 1967 filmed interview, Vanier explains that people with intellectual disabilities are often locked in institutions where “they haven’t got a place where their personalities can flower out and they can be happy.”157 In 1975, he insists that all community members “are people who are growing, and that means the good is in the growth and the bad is what prevents growth.”158 In Images of Love, Words of Hope, Vanier ties gardening to responsibility: “Our role is not to manipulate people or to make people in our image. We are gardeners. We put water on the seed and

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remember that the seed has its own life. We are there to help the seed grow to be itself. We can help take away the weeds. We may perhaps fertilize but true education is to help people grow up to be themselves, walking in freedom. Our responsibility is to help people find their inner freedom.”159 In his 1998 Becoming Human, Vanier affirms, “We humans are called to become free, to free others, to nurture life, to look for the worth and beauty in each and every one of us, and to make our world a beautiful garden where each person and each society can create a harvest of flowers and fruits, and so prepare the seeds of peace for tomorrow.”160 Hillhouse’s readers can interpret for themselves what kinds of community vision, social imaginaries, spiritual practices, mental habits, government policies, theological constructs, or critical theory might block growth or enhance flourishing. In Hillhouse’s garden, there is work to be done. She concludes the poem by asserting her active participation in God’s work, her own responsible agency: “I’ve got my hands in God’s soil.”

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Go Be Broken, Go Be Whole These truly human relations were not a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced. Mikhail Bakhtin

the raising of lazarus

When L’Arche International leaders gathered in Vancouver in the spring of 2013, United Church minister Doug Graves presided at the Wednesday night worship and members of L’Arche Greater Vancouver acted out the gospel reading. First the sisters of Lazarus send word to Jesus (wearing his baseball cap), that their brother is ill. Jesus tarries. They worry. By the time Jesus comes, they object to Jesus’s request to open the tomb, because Lazarus has been dead for several days and his body will smell. Jesus convinces them to open the tomb, and invites Lazarus, now no longer dead, to come forth where he will be unbound from the grave wrappings. Except for the baseball cap, all of that is in the Bible. In the L’Arche skit, Lazarus emerged bound thoroughly with bands of toilet paper, looking like a butterfly ready to burst its cocoon. When Jesus’s cry came – “Unbind him! Let him go free!” – we all watched with eager anticipation. His community members began to unwind the complicated swaddling. The binding got all tangled up. In fact, it was getting tighter. His liberators became a bit flustered. Things were getting worse, not better, for poor Lazarus, and he was becoming quite annoyed! In the end, he burst through some of his final bindings on his own strength. Everyone rejoiced.

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Watching that, I learned something that I have not forgotten. It is a “long walk to freedom,” as Nelson Mandela wrote. This is a story of inversion, from death to life, from rotting to vibrant, from a body alone in the tomb to a community celebration. But it does not happen instantly. Unbinding and liberation is a process, and sometimes things get worse before they get better. Even the most well-intentioned community can bind us tighter before liberating us. Some liberation can come from outside, but every “singular”1 person is also an agent in his or her own life. At the United Church’s 43rd General Council in Oshawa in July 2018, an extraordinary scene erupted that reminds me of the L’Arche Lazarus skit.2 In the next United Church Observer, Trisha Elliott describes it like this: “In the last hours of the business meeting, General Council intercultural observer Douglas Walfall takes the podium to offer reflections using his own intercultural lens. He says he has yet to hear an acknowledgment of racism in the church and that at times he feels invisible[:] ‘Part of the problem may well be that you have not stopped to listen to our story.’” Elliott recounts how Walfall identifies ongoing problems of prejudice and systemic racism in Canada by telling specific stories, then adds: ‘Let us ensure that the people who sit at the table [of the church] are there not as guests but as valued members of the family,’ he concludes. His message takes root, and the room breaks open. A spontaneous motion seeks forgiveness. Then there’s talk of apology. Commissioners line up to share experiences of racism inside and outside the church. The planned meeting agenda is set aside. Stories flow for two hours, streaming testimonies of judgment, exclusion, pain and grace. The dinner hour comes and goes. The final testimony comes from moderator nominee Colin Phillips, who uses a device to give voice to his words. He speaks about how commissioners avoided him throughout the week, fearing his disability: ‘You were afraid. You were not able to get past that fear to even sit [down with me].’3 Like the death of Lazarus, there is a backstory.4 In this case, earlier on the same day Philip Peacock, a minister in the United Church of North India and executive secretary for justice and witness in the World Communion of Reformed Churches, had preached at the morning worship, commending a dynamic of inversion. In his words:

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Today I ask you, as a fellow traveller on this long road to freedom, are you ready to be discombobulated as a church? We need to be discombobulated because only then will we learn to see ourselves from outside of ourselves, to be able to learn from ­others and then truly learn our limitations and possibilities. The question is: how can we unlearn our privilege and learn to listen to others? This should not be an accumulation and an assimilation of the knowledge of others into our own systems. This means that we allow the other, and particularly the marginalized / broken other, to derange and destabilize us, to completely and fundamentally change us. That listening to the other really should twist us out of shape in a way that we are no longer the same.5 Then the day’s business begins. Perhaps like Lazarus’s sisters sending word of their brother’s illness to Jesus, several groups in the United Church sent word to the United Church commissioners that the church is not well, their seven proposals grouped under the theme “Intercultural and Dominant Privilege Lenses.” These had been discussed in subgroups on previous days. Unlike Jesus, the church does not tarry at all: on the morning of 27 July, the entire General Council passes all seven proposals so resoundingly that no discussion is required.6 That afternoon, during the Final Decision Session of General Council, just when people are expecting to be released, Intercultural Observer Douglas Walfall reiterates many of the same points as the seven Intercultural and Dominant Privilege Lenses proposals, but the points become embodied in his stories.7 He is graciously thanked, business resumes, motions are debated, but then business is interrupted with an emotional resolution. Youth delegate Daniel MacDonald and United Church minister Penny Nelson move “that the 43rd General Council seek forgiveness from our racialized siblings in Christ and furthermore commit to transforming our business practice and procedures for the remainder of the meeting, and from this point forward.” Is this a call to unbind and free the Church? United Church moderator Jordan Cantwell points out that the motion intentionally overturns business as usual, saying “We have a proposal on the floor, and I recognize in terms of process, the kind of process that we’re used to following, that this is outside of that process – and I think that is precisely the point. I think that in order for us to be the kind of church that we are called to be, that we long to be, that this proposal is inviting, that our intercultural observers have

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invited us to be, we need to get used to doing things that are outside of our usual way of doing things.”8 Is this upending of established protocol another invitation to inversion? United Church minister Ha Na Park takes a microphone to say that as racialized member, she felt troubled that some of the comments about the Intercultural and Dominant Privilege Lenses motion that had passed so readily a few hours earlier were not discussed in the larger gathering, especially since some commissioners admitted that the title of the proposal made them feel defensive. “We lost the opportunity to have the deeper dialogue because of how we moved forward with the ninety percent, then no dialogue, just to go with the motion,” she declares.9 Cantwell asks that everyone take three minutes of silent, prayerful reflection before people step up to the microphones. After the first three speakers, Cantwell asks even more explicitly that White commissioners step away from the microphones and give space for Indigenous, Black, or other racialized commissioners to speak. Nearly two dozen people step up to the microphones and explain, sometimes patiently, often with exasperation and anger, that neither apologies nor forgiveness make sense until stories are heard, and that has not yet happened. Unbinding and freeing the United Church is not so easy. The testimonies of the speakers reveal that relationships in the Church and Canadian society are complicated and tangled. Their stories wrap everyone in painful realities.10 Any liberation begun at the 43rd General Council will be a slow process. “I think that [any formal motion] should be something that is said simply and then is found a way to be lived out,” insists United Church minister Maya Douglas. “Even if you apologize and make the most beautiful and wonderful proposal, it’s going to take the work of the church over many, many years.”11 “It’s a slow process of entering into the spirit of Jesus,” Jean Vanier said to the 25th General Council many years earlier as he urged the commissioners to acknowledge their position of privilege and to take responsibility “quietly, not suddenly throwing all our goods out, but letting grow in us the spirit of Jesus, and thus becoming a bridge between these two cultures of those who have too much and those who have too little. Don’t be frightened.”12 we are not alone

The 43rd General Council was co-hosted by the All Native Circle Conference and the Bay of Quinte Conference. It opened with an

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Indigenous Edge of the Woods ceremony led by Elder Grafton Antone. In a similar spirit, two months later, L’Arche Canada’s National Assembly in Halifax opened with a welcome ceremony led by Rosie Sylliboy from the We’Koqma’q First Nation and some of her friends from Mawita’mk. Sylliboy has more than three decades of L’Arche connection, and in 2007 opened Mawita’mk as a place in her Mi’kmaw community where the unique gifts and spiritual identity of each person could be celebrated. Mawita’mk activities include supports in the Mi’kmaq language, a work program, assisted living for people with disabilities, cultural workshops, drumming, and traditional medicine. The L’Arche Canada National Assembly happens every four or five years, attended by representatives with and without intellectual disabilities from all twenty-nine Canadian communities as well as two newer L’Arche projects, plus leadership and staff from all levels of L’Arche Canada including the L’Arche Canada Board and the L’Arche Canada Foundation. Like the United Church, L’Arche is also addressing new realities and changes. New government employment regulations limiting work hours have pushed L’Arche in Canada to reimagine what L’Arche communities will look like going forward. Other questions that L’Arche faces are also familiar to the United Church: financial constraints, size and structure, new outreach initiatives, leadership, accountability, and how to remain united across a large and diverse country. United Church member Paul Vogel attended the National Assembly as a member of the L’Arche Canada Board. A lawyer by training, he found it refreshing to be part of a gathering where people expressed strong viewpoints in a setting that wasn’t adversarial. People disagreed, but most felt they had an opportunity to be heard. And after the work, the delegates would get up and sing and dance together. It is tempting to romanticize long-term community experiments like L’Arche or a church. But as you read in some of the stories in this book, the reality is often frustrating or even devastating. Former moderator Gary Paterson likes to quote the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi’s invitation to “gamble everything for love.” The poem continues, affirming that seekers set out to find God but instead find themselves stopping for “long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses.”13 L’Arche is no different: human communities reach for majesty but tend to have periods of feeling like mean-spirited roadhouses. Inspiring ideals with unrealistic expectations can be exhausting and depressing to live. Good-hearted people can do a great deal of damage to each other. I

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do not want to falsely glorify either L’Arche or the United Church of Canada. As Jean Vanier recognizes, “let us not get carried away in idealistic illusions of community. Living in community is not easy. The closer we get to one another, the more dramatic small annoyances become, the more agonizing the behaviour of another, and the more our own anguish surfaces. We can become competitive or angry, protective or jealous. Community life can help us discover walls of fear and hatred that we never knew existed.”14 Vanier is speaking of life in intentional, daily community, but his points apply equally to any community. Rumi’s poem implies moving on from “mean-spirited roadhouses,” and there is a life cycle that needs to be respected. Not everyone should stay forever in a community or even a church. But L’Arche also commends fidelity. Moving on simply to escape a meanspirited community or church can evade our own responsibility for healing, for leadership, for growth. Like the Church, L’Arche is a shared journey. Some people stay for all their lives. More people stay for a time, are changed through community experiences, and then are sent forth, either voluntarily or involuntarily. In 1999, Vanier wrote a “Letter to My Brothers and Sisters in L’Arche and in Faith and Light,” insisting that to work for unity requires commitment during times of suffering: “I am not ignoring the importance of celebrations in L’Arche and Faith and Light or all the joys of communion between us, and I do not want to be pessimistic. But the experience of these thirty-four years in L’Arche have shown me that in order to be faithful on a long-term basis and to be committed to working for unity, we have to learn how to remain close to suffering, how to hold on in situations of pain.”15 What does it mean to “hold on in situations of pain”? One of the participants in the United Church’s “Theologies of Disabilities Report” shared, “More than anything, I need you not to be afraid of my story. I need people who are willing to walk with me when I am afraid, angry, exhausted, or sad.”16 United Church minister Ian Macdonald found in L’Arche “a healing model that we have not explored in our churches. We are the disabled ones who haven’t been able to talk about the way we really are, the things that we’re lonely about, the things that we fear.” 17 At the 43rd General Council, Carmen Lansdowne spoke of her experience of simultaneously being privileged by her education and position in the church and yet also being affected by intergenerational racism and trauma in ways that are not always evident. She is a member of the Heiltsuk

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First Nation, a United Church minister, and executive director of Vancouver’s First United Church. “Our stories are not visible because you don’t ask for them,” she insisted.18 Looking for a way forward, Lansdowne pointed to alliances with those moving away from dominant privilege: We have so much work to do. We passed all of the social justice proposals today with no discussion as if of course ‘that’s who we are.’ It is not who we are, because we have people in this room who are hurting and broken because of how we are treating each other … I know there are people in this room who can lead you in looking at issues of economic and White privilege … people who are already doing reconciliation from a perspective of dismantling their own White privilege – those are your leaders. And we will walk with you and we will help you find them because we know who they are because they are safe.19 In 2008, Canadian writer Ian Brown wrote to Jean Vanier about his fears and struggles on a road trip with his son Walker, who lives with multiple disabilities. Vanier replied, “Your questions come, I sense, from your loneliness. As a responsible father, you (like all such fathers) are part of a vast struggle for peace and unity and life. But you do not always realize or remember this. You are too alone. You did not travel down to New York with others who love you and Walker.”20 In this, the United Church and L’Arche share some similar challenges, because even communities such as churches and L’Arche can be “too alone.” But as the “Theologies of Disabilities Report” recommends, alliance-building could help groups and individuals in their work of transformation to hold onto their larger vision, their part in what Vanier terms “a vast struggle for peace and unity and life.” Is part of the ongoing integration of the final session of the 43rd General Council similar, that the challenge is not only individual wrestling with the issues, but how to travel together with others? love’s confusing joy

Perhaps the lines of Rumi’s poem that precede “Gamble everything for love” could be grappled to our hearts: “you’ll be forgiven for forgetting / that what you really want is / love’s confusing joy.”21

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In the gospels, what happens to Lazarus after he is raised from his death? It seems almost comical that the authorities respond with a plan to kill first Jesus and then the newly alive Lazarus. With death looming on every side, what do the family and friends of Lazarus do? What is the obvious thing to do? They throw a party. Six days before the Passover, Jesus comes back to Bethany and they give a dinner for him. Everyone is there. Lazarus is at the table, and his sister Mary anoints Jesus with perfume that Jesus identifies as perfume she had bought for the day of his burial. Apparently she decided it would be more satisfying to anoint Jesus’s feet while he is still alive. The scent that fills the house could remind everyone of the nearness of death, but instead becomes part of their feast. A big crowd comes to see the party.22 This is the wisdom and paradoxical pleasure of the gospels: when all seems lost and excruciatingly vulnerable, come together with feasting, generosity, and joy. Faith and Sharing retreats like the ones at Naramata and Cedar Glen in the 1970s continue. They are still affordable, ecumenical retreats with participants of diverse abilities, church affiliations, and income brackets. Members of L’Arche communities often come.23 In 2014, my husband Geoff and I were the “animators” for Vancouver Island’s thirty-ninth annual Faith and Sharing retreat. We spent the week exploring the gospel stories of Mary and Martha and Lazarus. The climax of the retreat was this story of the party after Lazarus is raised from the dead, and everyone at the retreat participated in acting it out. We brought armloads of wild clothing so that everyone could layer up in splendid party outfits. We read the gospel slowly, interspersed with additions such as naming the guests. The scene described in John 12 built, and then it took on a life of its own. A flexible man with Down syndrome and his friend announced that at this party for Lazarus, they would like to demonstrate the yoga pose “downward dog.” This random but earnest upside-down posture was definitely a kind of inversion, opening the festivities to yet more spontaneous contributions. The room erupted into hearty cheers and laughter; streamers in many colours were flung to and fro to represent the scent that filled the room when Mary anointed Jesus’s feet with valuable perfume. Our musicians launched into a rocking version of “Children of the Light,” and we all joined in singing, “we’re shining in the darkness of the night, hope for this world, joy through all the land, touch the hearts of everyone, take everybody’s hand.” We were shining, dancing, singing, and laughing uproariously in our absurd

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outfits and our outrageous gospel party-skit. It was festive, and it was also mysteriously prayerful and deep. This memorable scene didn’t occur because Geoff and I are somehow exceptional retreat leaders – it was a spontaneous community carnival with its own momentum. What made the moment so profound is that everyone at the retreat knew suffering. Some people there had been to decades of Faith and Sharing retreats and knew each other well, while others were newcomers. We had been sharing deeply with each other for several days about our points of anguish, the inner voices that tell us we are no good. We were people with a range of impairments, some of us precariously housed. We had shared stories of mental breaks and illness, of dread and grieving and anger, of resilience and friendship and faith in our most hopeless times. We had shared deep times of prayer in our small sharing groups and in the large group, sometimes in words and often in shared silence. Like Lazarus and Jesus and their friends, our raucous celebration hinged on a mature mutual awareness of vulnerability and erupted out of our suffering, not in spite of it.24 Rooted in this deep work of listening, our gospel enactment was tender, the kind of “hinge” moment that L’Arche psychiatrist Patrick Mathias writes about: “Tenderness brings a sense of relaxation or well being, a softening of our defenses. It is like a hinge or a pivot. It tempers the changes, tensions and lack of coherence in our lives and brings together desire and love.”25 The Final Decision Session of the 43rd General Council could likewise be a pivot, the tenderness and vulnerability of the shared experience providing the hinge that allowed what Mathias terms “the tensions and lack of coherence” to surface, expressed as anger, desire, and love. As someone who has experienced racism in the church and society at large, Carmen Lansdowne expressed a sense of alliance with Colin Philips, a candidate for moderator who uses a wheelchair for mobility and voice technology for communication. Lansdowne declared, “You ask us to come here and to participate with you in what already is, and it is your work. It is your work as the dominant church to change – to understand that somebody like Colin could have something prophetic and beautiful to say to the church, and that there’s the possibility his being moderator wouldn’t only just be about ableism and disability.”26 L’Arche and the United Church of Canada contribute diverse lived experiences, not only to each other but also to what Wade Davis calls

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“our human repertoire for dealing with the complex challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming centuries.”27 As Jean Vanier encouraged the commissioners at the 25th General Council in 1972, “Begin where you are, with tenderness and kindness, with those who are your neighbours. And as the spirit grows, it calls you forth, further and further. Let it grow so that we become people of love and compassion, tenderly, quietly, wherever we are, opening ourselves up, listening to people.”28 More than two-and-a-half hours into the final session of the 43rd General Council, commissioner Carno Tchuani Jiembou stepped up to a microphone. Speaking in French with a translator, he began, “I believe not everything is bad, but together we can construct something that is good.” Five years earlier he had come to Canada to do his PhD, but his experience of racial discrimination was so severe that he decided to leave. He stayed, however, because when people at his church heard his story, someone reached out to him by phone. “Even though she has now died, I am still in that spirit and I know there are many others here among us who have that spirit of being authentic and true. So we need to get to know each other. We need to listen to each other. And if you listen you will get to know us and you will hear the suffering that we carry every day,” he continued. “This is my first General Council and when I came here on the first day I heard the story of the Indigenous peoples and I was very touched and asked to be able to meet with them. Over two hours we shared with each other among three people, and I understood their suffering and now from today on, I have to walk with them. As our Creed says, we are not alone. Together we can move forward.”29 This is what I want to say to conclude this book: somehow we have to convince our hearts and our imaginations that communities with more tenderness, truth, diversity, and freedom are not only commendable, but are that for which we most deeply hunger. I asked United Church minister and songwriter Ian Macdonald whether any of his songs were inspired by L’Arche. He talked about blessing, explaining that “The blessing song I wrote at a time when I was thinking … you get comfortable and then you have to go through the whole process again – who is calling us to be something different? So the line of my song that I would share is ‘Go be broken, go be whole,’ because we are not whole unless we are broken.”

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p r e fa c e

  1 Davis, “Many Faces, One Humanity,” 24.   2 See chapter 1 for discussion of Flemington’s film about Vanier, the interview of Vanier in the United Church Sunday school textbook, and Vanier’s address to United Church General Council in 1972.  3 Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation, 255–6. introduction

  1 Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 23.   2 Quotation from a personal conversation with Lois Wilson, recorded in Toronto on 18 April 2011. All further quotations from Wilson are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. If I were to use Lois Wilson’s full title, I would refer to “the Very Rev. the Hon. Dr. Lois M. Wilson, CC.” Taking Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation as my model, I am not including all the appropriate designations, instead identifying people in the simplest terms – for example, “United Church minister Lois Wilson” or “former moderator Lois Wilson.”   3 United Church of Canada, “The Comprehensive Review Task Group Report: United in God’s Work,” 694.   4 Ibid., 725.  5 Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd revised edition, 118.   6 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 608.   7 Ibid., 606–7.  8 Schweitzer, The United Church of Canada, 12. Phyllis Airhart’s A Church with the Soul of a Nation also provides a detailed history of

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the process leading to the creation of the United Church of Canada. The phrase “united and uniting church” remains central in the United Church today: see for example United Church of Canada, “Welcome to the United Church of Canada.”    9 Jean Vanier also founded two global movements called “Faith and Light” and “Faith and Sharing.” Since 1969, Faith and Sharing has been offering “retreats and days of Christian spiritual renewal to everybody according to Jean Vanier’s spirituality” (Faith and Sharing Federation, home page). Faith and Light describes itself as “communities made up of persons with an intellectual disability, their families and friends, particularly young friends, who meet together on a regular basis in a Christian spirit, to share friendship, pray together, fiesta and celebrate life” (Faith and Light, home page). It began with Jean Vanier and Marie-Hélène Mathieu’s desire to help people with an intellectual disability and their families “find their place within the Church and society” (ibid., “About Us: History”). They initiated a 1971 pilgrimage to Lourdes for 12,000 pilgrims from fifteen countries, 4,000 of whom were persons with an intellectual disability. Jean Vanier offers a vivid account of this sacred and festive event in Our Life Together, 142–3. 10 Vanier joined the British then Canadian navies at age thirteen, leaving in 1951 to explore peacemaking and his spiritual life. He joined a unique postwar community of international students and teachers near Paris called L’Eau Vive for several years and remained friends with its founder, Père (Father) Thomas Philippe. In 1963, Père Thomas introduced Vanier to people with intellectual disabilities, then helped him begin L’Arche, and remained its priest until shortly before his death in 1993. A 2014–15 canonical enquiry found that during his years in L’Arche, Père Thomas sexually abused adult women without disabilities who came to him for spiritual accompaniment. L’Arche International immediately asked every community to review its p ­ olicies around sexual abuse. Several women abused by Père Thomas shared their experiences publicly at www.avref.fr, in sections about L’Arche and la Congrégation Saint-Jean. One testimony recounts trying to alert leaders about the abuse years ago, but the experiences were not taken seriously. The victims as well as many people in L’Arche have struggled with various stages of grief – denial, anger, and depression – while trying to understand. Vanier addressed it in public letters in 2015 and 2016, as well as in his 2017 book of autobiographical reflections: see L’Arche International, “Regarding Père Thomas Philippe,” and Vanier,

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A Cry Is Heard, 72–3. I consider how these revelations affect the founding story of L’Arche Trosly and explore the appeal and danger of idealizing and mythologizing founders in the introduction to Sharing Life: Stories of L’Arche Founders and in “Jean Vanier: An Icon Not an Idol.” New questions emerged after a French documentary by MariePierre Raimbault, Elizabeth Drévillon, and Eric Quentin titled Religieuses abusées, l’autre scandale de l’Église was broadcast on 5 March 2019 on the widely viewed Franco-German television channel Arte. How does a founding story integrate ongoing revelations about sexuality, sexual abuse, and power? L’Arche continues to work on the meaning of its history and evolving founding story. In June 2019, L’Arche International commissioned “an external organization to conduct a thorough and independent inquiry that will allow us to better understand our history, refine our work to prevent abuse and improve our own current policies and practices.” The results of that inquiry are expected later in 2019. Of related interest, Canadian scholar Tracy J. Trothen researches responses to pedophilia in Canadian churches, and many of her points about shame, silence, and the power imbalance between clergy and a child hold true for relationships between adults as well. See Trothen, Shattering the Illusion, 156–7n5. She sets out the development of the United Church’s approach to sexual abuse, including relevant statements, policies, and practices (ibid., 43–72). 11 Association Jean Vanier and L’Arche Canada, The Beginnings of L’Arche, 33. 12 Whitney-Brown, introduction to Sharing Life. 13 Swinton, introduction to Living Gently in a Violent World, 17. 14 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Research Report: Housing for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities, 29. 15 For United Church of Canada history, see Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation; Flatt, After Evangelicalism; Mediema, For Canada’s Sake; Schweitzer, ed., The United Church of Canada. In theology and ethics, see Trothen, Linking Sexuality and Gender; Mukasa and Kawuki, Belonging. For statistical analysis, see WilkinsLaflamme, “Normalizing Denominational Statistics with Demographic Data.” For explorations of United Church identity as intercultural, see, for example, Cho, “‘We Are Not Alone’”: however, in discussing an inclusive church, Cho does not mention people with disabilities. Best, Will Our Church Disappear? asks bluntly, “Will our church survive?” See also Milton, This United Church of Ours for a personal description of the United Church: his 2008 third edition did not mention

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disability or intercultural priorities. I have not read the 2017 fourth edition, but the Study Guide available online does not include the words disability or intercultural. 16 United Church Observer, “About the Observer.” 17 The lack of L’Arche archives is changing: University of St Michael’s College in Toronto now holds records of early L’Arche Daybreak years, as well as Faith and Sharing archives and the Henri Nouwen archives. Beginning in 2017, L’Arche International has begun to consolidate scattered archival material in a state-run local archive near Trosly-Breuil in Oise, France. Jean Vanier’s own papers are being ­collected separately by the Jean Vanier Association in France. Other countries may soon begin their own L’Arche archival collections. 18 This is only a very partial list of what is readily available in English, and more appears every month. In anthropology: see Angrosino, “L’Arche: The Phenomenology of Christian Counterculturalism”; Cushing,“(Story-) Telling It Like It Is.” In sociology: see Currie, “Becoming: Stories of L’Arche Children”; Cushing and Lewis, “Negotiating Mutuality and Agency in Care-Giving Relationships with Women with Intellectual Disabilities”; Kelly, “The Role of Mandates/ Philosophies in Shaping Interactions between Disabled People and Their Support Providers.” In psychology: see Bazinet, “Communal Journeys”; Coles, “‘Gentled Into Being’”; Dueck, Muchemi, and Ng, “Indigenous Psychotherapies and Religion.” In theology: see Comensoli, “Descending the Ladder”; Ford, “An Interpersonal Wisdom”; Greig, “The Slow Journey towards Beatitude”; Harshaw, God Beyond Words; Hauerwas and Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World; Hryuniuk, Theology, Disability, and Spiritual Transformation; Little, “Welcoming the Stranger”; Morris, “Transforming Able-Bodied Normativity”; Smith, “Rituals of Knowing”; Swinton, Becoming Friends of Time; Thérèse Vanier, One Bread, One Body; Young, ed., Encounter with Mystery. In philosophy: see Richard Kearney, Anatheism; Kearney and Zimmermans, eds., Reimaging the Sacred; Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream”; McCrary, “Re-Envisioning Independence and Community.” In political studies: see Hauerwas, “Seeing Peace.” In cultural studies: see Tim Kearney, A Prophetic Cry. In Ethics: see Frank, “Sheldon Wolin, Jean Vanier and the Present Age”; Greig, Reconsidering Intellectual Disability; Kornas-Biela, “Jean Vanier and L’Arche as a Witness of Merciful Love”; Reimer, Living L’Arche. In social work: see Walsh, “Jean Vanier.” In disability studies: see Burghardt, “Brokenness / Transformation”; Watson and Kumar,

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“Sport, Theology, and the Special Olympics.” In history: see Clark, Enough Room for Joy; Spink, The Miracle, the Message, the Story; Whitney-Brown, Introduction to Jean Vanier, Essential Writings; Whitney-Brown, Sharing Life. In geography: see Lemon and Lemon, “Community-based Cooperative Ventures for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities.” In biography: see Cowley, One Woman’s Journey; Higgins, Jean Vanier; Nouwen, Adam; Shearer, Thérèse Vanier; Spink, Dance with Me?; Thérèse Vanier, Nick – Man of the Heart. Interesting work in economics is close to publication: Elena Lasida, professor of Sustainable Development at the Institut Catholique has been studying L’Arche communities as economic models – see Lasida, “The Economic Impact of L’Arche.” At the Canadian Economics Association’s 51st Annual Conference in 2017, co-authors Welling, Engineer, and Janet Whitney-Brown presented “Choosing Life Together.” The abstract begins, “This paper presents a simple theoretical comparison of caring for the intellectually disabled in ‘full communities’ of diverse people versus using the increasingly standard ‘person-centred’ care offered by social services. Our model is based on L’Arche, which brings together individuals who are intellectually disabled and assistants.” In social policy: see Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Research Report: Housing for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities. For poetry: see Hillhouse, Family; O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets (Jean Vanier appears in the last canto of the fifth quintet.) For memoir: see Berken, Walking on a Rolling Deck; Buser, Flowers from the Ark; Carrère, Epilogue to The Kingdom; Clarke, L’Arche Journal; Mosteller, Body Broken, Body Blessed; Nouwen, The Road to Daybreak; Porter, Accidental Friends. For fiction: see Reinders, The Second Calling. For drama: L’Arche Daybreak celebrated twenty-five years by commissioning a play by Robert Morgan and David Craig called One Heart at a Time. It was performed in 1994 with a cast of sixty members of the L’Arche Daybreak community at the Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto and the Markham Theatre in Markham. More recently, a Globe and Mail review of the staged version of Ian Brown’s The Boy in the Moon mentions a scene where the Ian Brown character meets Jean Vanier – see Nestruck, “Review: The Boy in the Moon is a tragedy about inclusivity’s limits.” In 2019, L’Arche Daybreak commissioned a play by Stephanie Sandberg to celebrate fifty years of L’Arche Daybreak. Scholarship can also be found in French and many other languages, as well as student projects at every level – undergraduate, masters, doctoral, and post-doctoral. Vanier is often quoted in passing

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in many other contexts: for example, epigraphs from Jean Vanier’s writings begin two articles in the April 2018 issue of Canadian Family Physician. 19 L’Arche International published the magazine Letters of L’Arche from 1971 until 2014. Many interviews with Jean Vanier and others have been filmed and published, for example: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Man Alive with Jean Vanier and Mother Teresa”; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Man Alive: Jean Vanier”; Vanier, “Becoming Human,” Pamela Wallin Show; Vanier, “Interview with Jean Vanier.” A partial list of Vanier’s own voluminous writings in philosophy, theology, memoir, and anthropology can be found at Vanier, “Bibliography.” Since 1964, Vanier has written circular letters sent to L’Arche communities, friends, and supporters. A collection of these letters from 1964–94 were edited by John Sumarah and published in three volumes as Vanier, A Network of Friends. Selected letters were published in 2007 as Vanier, Our Life Together. Letters after 2007 can sometimes be found on L’Arche websites. There have been many documentary films about L’Arche. For example, in 2018, Jean Vanier, Le Sacrement de la Tendresse (shown at the United Nations on 18 October 2018); in 2017, Summer in the Forest; in 2014, Vanier, Love and Belonging; and near the beginnings of L’Arche in 1967, Flemington, narrator and director, If You’re Not There, You’re Missed. 20 The many L’Arche-inspired scholarly papers, essays, books, and artistic projects attest to the way in which peoples’ imaginations are gripped by disability, community, and life on the margins of society. Sociologist and critical theorist Margrit Shildrick describes the relatively new interdisciplinary field of Critical Disability Studies: “When conventional disability studies encounters cultural theory, it generates what is now usually referred to as critical disability studies (C DS). Unlike the social model, which focuses on the structural inequalities of Western societies that are seen to produce disability, or at least cement it, C D S  is a diverse entity that encompasses both material and discursive underpinnings, the psychocultural imaginary as much as law and social policy, and the phenomenology of the individual embodied subject as well as any identification with a sociological category.” She adds that C DS “moves away from the more familiar focus on rights, entitlements, and autonomy to encompass a complex analytic approach that goes well beyond mere description of how it is to be disabled” (Shildrick, “Border Crossings,” 137). Theologian Jill Harshaw recognizes that she needs to be in dialogue with social sciences (Harshaw,

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God beyond Words, 38–9), but it is less obvious to social scientists why they would want to be in dialogue with theologians. Many of these Vanier-inspired studies attempt to bridge this gap. I would add a caution, however. Much of the scholarship using Vanier and L’Arche focuses primarily on inspirational articulations of L’Arche. While not false, those are certainly only part of the lived reality. It is worth asking why so many people want to write about L’Arche while L’Arche communities in many countries struggle to find enough assistants who want to share life with people with intellectual disabilities in L’Arche. 21 Personal conversation with John Swinton, recorded in Toronto, 16 July 2013. All further quotations from Swinton are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. 22 Vanier interviewed in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Jean Vanier Opens First L’Arche House.” 23 Association Jean Vanier and L’Arche Canada, The Beginnings of L’Arche, 106. 24 Quotation from a personal conversation with Jean Vanier, recorded at L’Arche in Trosly-Breuil, France, March 2017. 25 Vanier, “Jean Vanier’s Speech to L’Arche in France, May 2, 2014.” 26 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 605. See also: United Church of Canada, “Intercultural Ministries: Living into Transformation,” 312–14, 524–33; United Church of Canada, “GC E 3 Intercultural Ministries,” 137–8, and United Church of Canada, “TI CI F Ecclesiology Report,” 431–47. 27 “L’Arche Identity and Mission.” The statement currently can be found on the websites of many individual communities, regions ,and countries such as the U K. Oddly, I cannot find it on either the L’Arche International or L’Arche Canada websites. 28 Vanier, Becoming Human, 163. 29 Quotation from a personal conversation with Maggie Enwright, recorded in Duncan, BC, on 5 December 2011. All further quotations from Enwright are from this conversation, unless otherwise indicated. 30 Zournazi and Vanier, “On Communion,” 120. 31 The controversial “Ashley Treatment” in the United States was a surgical and hormonal treatment designed to halt permanently Ashley’s physical maturity at the level of a child. See Greig, Reconsidering Intellectual Disability for a thoughtful discussion and critique of this. 32 It is often noted that intellectual disability does not necessarily handicap someone’s spiritual life or ability to love. See Whitney-Brown, “The Club”: “The members of our club, all born more than 60 years

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ago, labeled ‘mentally handicapped,’ have full, rich lives to integrate. These seniors are veterans of every twentieth-century theory of ‘care,’ yet somehow have emerged into their senior years with generous, gracious, attentive and hilarious spirits, no more handicapped than most others of their generation in their capacity to give and receive love, discern what is really important and be themselves. You have to honour people like that” (15). 33 Vanier, Our Life Together, 541–2. 34 Zournazi and Vanier, 119–20. 35 A small caveat is in order here. The words pleasure, inversion, and tenderness all carry sexual connotations. While that is not my particular focus, neither do I wish to pretend that sexuality is not important to any individual or community. Freud used “inversion” to refer to homosexuality, though that use is mainly archaic now. I do not use the word inversion in that way, although readers unfamiliar with the United Church of Canada might be interested that in 1988 the United Church was the first Christian denomination in Canada to pass Church policy that sexual orientation is not a barrier to ordained or diaconal ministry. As a Canadian church rather than a worldwide communion, the United Church of Canada does not have to negotiate decisions with churches in other cultural contexts around the world, and thus has had the freedom to address questions of sexuality directly, with varying success (see Trothen, Linking Sexuality and Gender). The initial 1988 commitment has expanded into a wider commitment to becoming a genuinely intercultural church, recognizing all LGB TQ2 orientations as part of an ever-expanding commitment to diversity and transformation that includes people with disabilities, racialized members of the United Church, and others whose stories have historically been overlooked. My use of the word inversion in this book is from cultural theorists, in the way that Mikhail Bakhtin uses it to discuss carnival, implying a dynamic that is more complex and interdependent than a simple reversal, analogous to the way that the United Church’s intercultural direction is more than simple inclusion. The word tender is similarly complex. Tenderness and pleasure are key to all human touch and are thus connected to sexuality. Vanier notes, “Now, tenderness frequently the way it’s looked at today can be a sort of opening to a sexual relationship. But it’s much more than that. I believe, I dare believe, that tenderness is a gift of the spirit” (Zournazi and Vanier, 119). 36 Vanier, Our Journey Home, xii–xiii. 37 Ibid.

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38 From the sermon given by Doug Graves on 22 June 2014 at the Thanksgiving service at South Burnaby United Church, celebrating the fortieth Anniversary of L’Arche Greater Vancouver and fifty years of L’Arche International: http://www.larchevancouver.org/other_docs/ doug_graves_sermon.pdf. chapter one

  1 T. [Taylor], Introduction to “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 22. This United Church Observer article begins with this brief column of adulatory remarks signed “J.T.” – presumably James A. Taylor, managing editor of the magazine. This introduction is followed by two and a half pages of excerpts from Vanier’s address to General Council. The “amiable buzzard” phrase used in introducing Vanier was so striking that Roy Bonisteel quoted it to introduce Jean Vanier in a C B C Man Alive episode in 1973. Curiously, the previous article in this issue is titled “So You’ll Never Be a Saint” by George Johnston, a professor of New Testament at McGill University. His use of saint is in contrast to ordinary people, however.   2 This account draws on a personal conversation with Sue Mosteller, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 8 February 2013. All subsequent quotations from Mosteller are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.   3 Quotation from a personal conversation with Bruce McLeod, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 12 April 2011. All further quotations from McLeod are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.   4 Phyllis Airhart in A Church with the Soul of a Nation explores the strong emphasis in the early United Church that it should become significant enough to counter the religious, cultural, and political weight of the growing Roman Catholic Church in Canada. Mark Noll in “O Canada” reviews Airhart’s book (and others) and sums up: “Phyllis Airhart’s careful documentation suggests that the United Church of Canada may have been the most significant example of liberal evangelicalism in the Protestant world from its founding in 1925 until the late 1950s. Almost all of its early leaders held firmly to traditional evangelical commitments like … an undifferentiated denunciation of Roman Catholicism” (n.p.). By 1972, that seems not to be an issue. Roman Catholic observers were also present at the 1972 25th General Council. Joan Wyatt in “The 1970s” explains, “The new rapprochement between Protestants and Roman Catholics that resulted from

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Vatican II helped provide energy and enthusiasm that supported the emergence of several bilateral dialogues. One begun then was the stillcontinuing Roman Catholic-United Church dialogue” (127).   5 Airhart, personal conversation, Toronto, Ontario, 18 April 2011.   6 Wyatt, “The 1970s,” 119, and Schweitzer, “The Changing Social Imaginary of the United Church of Canada,” 296–52.   7 For several accounts of Vanier’s life, see Vanier, Our Life Together; Vanier, A Cry is Heard; Spink, The Miracle, the Message, the Story; and Whitney-Brown, introduction to Jean Vanier, Essential Writings.   8 Quotations from a personal conversation with Beverley Milton and Ralph Milton, recorded in Victoria, BC, 19 January 2014. All further quotations from Beverley or Ralph Milton are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.   9 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 3. 10 Vanier, A Network of Friends, Vol I: 1964–1973, 161–2. This letter and other letters quoted in this chapter are not included in Vanier, Our Life Together. 11 Vanier, “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 24. 12 Ibid., 23. 13 Ibid., 24. 14 Ibid. 15 More than twenty years later, theologian Nancy Eiesland in The Disabled God comments on “patterns of social power in which ablebodied people assume an exceptional access to the bodies of people with disabilities” (93). 16 Vanier understood and believed that social research could improve policy for his community, and kept up to date in current thinking about people with disabilities. He used every possible professional connection and advice to build L’Arche, establishing close relationships with government bureaucrats, social workers, psychiatrists, academics, and policy-makers. Steve Newroth as Community Leader at L’Arche Daybreak developed early connections with the Ontario government and the National Institute of Mental Retardation, participating in their research and policy development for people with intellectual disabilities. See Wolfensberger, A Selective Overview of Jean Vanier and the Movement of L’Arche. 17 Vanier, “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 24. 18 Ibid., 48. 19 Ibid., 24. 20 Ibid., 25.

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21 This was reported by Doug Graves, who tried to find a copy of the cassettes for me by asking everyone he knew whether they still had a copy. We could not locate any. See Doug Graves’s story in chapter 3. 22 Wyatt, “The 1970s,” 129 23 Vanier, A Network of Friends, Vol I: 1964–1973, 153. 24 Ibid., 154. 25 Ibid., 156. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 158. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid.,161. 30 For example, James Hanrahan records, “In Toronto, during the fall, winter and spring of 1969–70, a number of people who had made one of the Faith and Sharing retreats organized by Jean Vanier, gathered each Friday evening at St. Augustine’s Seminary for follow-up sessions of Scripture study and sharing. The combination of this with the influence of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship provided the rather unlikely background for the emergence of two charismatic groups in 1970” (Hanrahan, “The Nature and History of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Canada,” 316). 31 Vanier, “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 24. 32 Ibid., 25. 33 Forrest, “Look of the Month, a Family Council in Saskatoon,” 13. “It seemed to me we were finally off our long self-critical binge,” added Forrest (13). Further, he observed that the whole basis of choosing a moderator shifted from hierarchical reputation to the immediate connection with commissioners, as each nominee for moderator was interviewed and all the delegates voted with that immediate lived experience in mind. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 United Church Observer, “General Council 1972,” 14. 38 Forrest, “Look of the Month, a Family Council in Saskatoon,” 13. 39 Ibid. 40 United Church Observer, “General Council 1972,” 14. 41 Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, 549. 42 For further description of the United Church’s New Curriculum, see Airhart A Church with the Soul of a Nation, 170–2, 200–2, 220; Beardsall “‘And Whether Pigs Have Wings,’” 107–9; and Flatt, After

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Evangelicalism (much of Flatt’s book is devoted to an assessment of the New Curriculum). 43 The full bibliographic information for the first printing, that does not contain Vanier, is: Morgan, Frank H. God Speaks through People. Toronto: The United Church Publishing House, 1964, first printing. The full bibliographic information for the third printing, that does include Vanier, is: Morgan, Frank H. God Speaks through People. Toronto: The United Church Publishing House, 1967, third printing. I cannot find a copy of the second printing, so I do not know if Jean Vanier is in it nor the size of that print run. The addition of Jean Vanier to the United Church New Curriculum so soon after the founding of L’Arche an ocean away might have been due to Frank Prescott Fidler. He was involved in the New Curriculum as Associate Secretary of the Board of Christian Education at General Council office from 1949 to 1969, and was also a founding member of the executive of the board of the Vanier Institute of the Family in 1965, so would have known Jean Vanier’s parents and heard about their son’s latest adventure. Alternatively, the interview with Jean Vanier may have been the initiative of the author of God Speaks through People, Frank Morgan, who arrived at Ottawa’s MacKay United Church, located near Rideau Hall, in 1956. When Morgan moved to Trinity United Church in Kitchener in 1964, shortly after completing the first edition of God Speaks through People, he reminisced happily about having tea with Madame Pauline Vanier, according to Barbara Whitney who was a member of Trinity United Church at the time. Morgan would have been attentive to Jean Vanier’s new L’Arche community in France. 44 Morgan, God Speaks through People, third printing, 225. 45 Ibid., 226. This page also indicates that church school classes could hear Vanier’s voice on a tape of the interview that was included as part of the teaching material. The tape is not held in the United Church archives. 46 Ibid., 232. 47 Ibid. 48 Throughout the interview, Vanier refers to the adult men with intellectual disabilities with whom he lives as “boys.” Through much of the 1960s, Vanier and others referred to adult men with intellectual disabilities as “boys,” perhaps because of their dependent status. 49 Ibid., 231. 50 Ibid. 51 White, Carnival, Hysteria, Writing, 134.

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52 Ibid. 53 Morgan, God Speaks through People, third printing, 231–2. 54 It seems like a very United Church kind of question, in keeping with stereotypes of the United Church as a well-heeled social club. Airhart notes, “What critics denounced as a social club, suburban parishioners saw as putting down new roots,” and quotes a 1964 United Church Observer editorial by Al Forrest: “They want to find or create a community and rear their children in the fear of God and the knowledge of Christ among believers – nice, decent believers” (Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation, 249). 55 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 4–5. Critical disability theorist Margrit Shildrick identifies the same dynamic, linking a repulsed fascination with both disability and monsters: By openly engaging with such representations, we may, at the very least, hope to counter the negativity associated with differential embodiment, but that is not enough. Whether the images we research are historical or current, overtly fantastic or ostensibly accurate representations of reality, the twin pull of repulsion and fascination is not just an abstract consideration, but is realised in us all. None of us is innocent. Nonetheless, while we may teeter on the brink of a voyeurism that in its lack of (self)-recognition would reduce the focus of our gaze to merely an object of desire for the absent or forbidden, a more reflexive engagement will provoke just those questions that I want to ask of the ambivalent nature of the encounter with the monstrous. Again: what exactly is it that we are looking for? (Shildrick, “Visual Rhetorics and the Seductions of the Monstrous,” 169) 56 Morgan, God Speaks through People, third printing, 227. 57 Ibid., 233. 58 Ibid., 229. 59 Ibid., 233. 60 Morgan, God Speaks through People, third printing, 229. 61 Ibid., 230. 62 Vanier, Eruption to Hope, 1. 63 Flemington, “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed.” 64 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 5. 65 Ibid., 5–6. 66 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 33. 67 Ibid., 34.

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68 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Man Alive with Jean Vanier and Mother Teresa.” 69 Morgan, God Speaks through People, third printing, 239–41. 70 Quotation from a personal conversation with Gordon How, recorded in Vancouver, BC, 9 May 2011. All further quotations from How are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. Inviting a Roman Catholic speaker to address the World Council of Churches in Vancouver in 1983 was an intentional ecumenical gesture, since the Roman Catholic Church has never been a member of the World Council of Churches, and was not part of the Canadian Council of Churches. See the Canadian Council of Churches website: “An application for membership by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops was approved in May 1997. The Conference had held associate membership since 1985. In 1993 the Vatican issued a directory encouraging participation in ecumenism” (“History,” The Canadian Council of Churches). 71 For How’s more detailed account of the United Church’s involvement in the founding of the L’Arche community in Vancouver, see chapter 2. 72 Quotation from a personal conversation with Lois Wilson, recorded in Toronto on 18 April 2011. All further quotations from Wilson are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. Wilson’s respect for how Vanier spoke ‘for those who had no voice’ raises interesting questions about why people with intellectual disabilities so often “have no voice.” The interviewer in God Speaks through People responds to Vanier’s assertion that people like his “boys” are so rejected that they “have no voice. They cannot speak” with a bewildered, “Are they all mute?” (229). The question of who can speak for another and under what circumstances is explored further in chapters 3 and 4. See also theologian Kawuki Mukasa’s discussion of critical theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous question, “Can the subaltern speak?” Mukasa, Belonging, 187–93. 73 Vanier, A Network of Friends, vol. 2, 1974 –1983, 304. 74 T. [Taylor], Introduction to “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 22. 75 Quotation from a personal conversation with Gary Paterson, recorded in Victoria, BC, 19 January 2014. All further quotations from Paterson are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. 76 Personal conversation with Harold Coward in Victoria B C , 27 November 2013. Theologian John Swinton used the same phrase, “thin place,” to describe Vanier in a personal conversation, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 16 July 2013. All further quotations from Swinton

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are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. See also Vancouver Sun columnist Douglas Todd writing about Vanier on 5 March 2001 under the title “Jean Vanier, who some call a living saint, comes with a message of hope: Young people can find spiritual liberation.” Todd reprinted the same column in 2015 with a short introduction, titling it “New Templeton Prize winner Jean Vanier: ‘Don’t call me a saint.’” See also U K magazine Premier Christianity, June 2015 where Justin Brierley declares that “Jean Vanier is probably the closest person to a ‘living saint’ that I’ve ever met” (Brierly, “Profile: Jean Vanier”). 77 Quotation from personal conversations with Jean Vanier, recorded in Trosly-Breuil, France, 24 February – 4 March 2017. All further quotations from Vanier are from these conversations, unless otherwise noted. 78 Calling all of God’s people to be saints is not just a Protestant interpretation of saints. In 1966, Pope Paul VI welcomed Jean Vanier and his fellow L’Arche pilgrims to the Vatican and said to them, “God calls all of you, in spite of your difficulties, to be saints, and He reserves a special role for you in His Church” (Vanier, Our Life Together, 29). 79 See United Church of Canada, “Twenty Articles of Doctrine (1925).” 80 Personal email from Lois Wilson. In contrast, “saint” is used to refer to someone so holy as to be beyond ordinary believers in George Johnston’s December 1972 United Church Observer article immediately preceding Vanier’s: “So You’ll Never Be a Saint … but Here’s How to Be a Christian, 24 Hours a Day.” Similarly, see Schweitzer ­contrasting saints and sinners in “The Changing Social Imaginary of The United Church of Canada.” Wolfensburger, in “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” notes: “Among the ten or so historically prominent perceptions and interpretations of the retarded, one of the more benign ones has been that of the retarded as ‘holy innocents’ who are incapable of the judgment necessary to commit a sin, and who are therefore living saints assured of heaven … I found no such idealized distortion among the workers of L’Arche” (Wolfensburger, “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” 10). He also notes, however, with some amazement, that through L’Arche he has gained “an entirely new and different insight into the potential spirituality of the retarded person … who can live a spiritual life of much greater intensity and directness than I had thought.” Even in deeply troubled individuals, “this spirituality provides a remarkable depth, serenity and internal joy – such as one encounters occasionally in saintly individuals, but that I cannot recall having encountered before in the retarded. I admit with considerable pain that this may be my fault” (11).

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81 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 611. 82 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 229. 83 Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 23. 84 Ibid. 85 Vanier, Made for Happiness, 43–4. 86 Ibid., 42. Vanier cautions though that “we should not make the mistake, however of thinking that pleasure is the end, for the end is the act itself. Rather pleasure is given when the end is fully attained, as a bonus or consequential end” (Made for Happiness, 44–5). As Vanier asserts, “pleasure completes or crowns the act” (ibid., 44). 87 Flemington, “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed.” 88 Vanier, Made for Happiness, 65. 89 Ibid., 70. 90 Vanier, Be Not Afraid, 80. 91 Vanier, Community and Growth: Our Pilgrimage Together, 202–3. 92 The original French is as follows: “Alors, quel est le secret qui permet à L’Arche d’exister encoure? Je vais te le dire: c’est le plaisir … Aucun assistant ne reste ici par devoir, parce qu’ «il le faut». Aucun n’y reste pour faire une «bonne action». Nous sommes confrontés à une probléme, dans notre société: nul ne croit que le plaisir à l’Arche est possible. Les gens pensent que, pour rester à l’Arche, il faut être une sorte de héros, un saint. Mais ce n’est pas vrais: on reste à l’Arche parce ce que cela nous plais” (Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 23). The French “parce que cela nous plait” conveys a strong connotation of “plaisir” or “pleasure.” The phrase could also be variously translated as “because we like it,” or “because we enjoy it,” or even as a longtime L’Arche translator suggested, “because it’s fun.” chapter two

  1 T. [Taylor], “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 22.   2 Thousands of United Church members have been part of L’Arche as core members and their families, assistants and employees, board members, pastors and retreat leaders, in Canada and around the world. With seemingly endless possibilities, this chapter includes only a few strands of the many stories generated through decades of relationships in L’Arche Canada’s nearly 200 homes, workshops, and day programs in twenty-nine communities. Readers will find less focus on core members in this chapter, and more on the relationships between United Church and L’Arche leadership and structures.

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 3 Vanier, A Network of Friends, vol. 1, 1964–1973, 162.   4 Vanier often acknowledges the crucial support of those who pray for L’Arche. For example, see Vanier, An Ark for the Poor, 26; and Whitney-Brown, Introduction to Jean Vanier: Essential Writings, 31.  5 Bock, In Search of a Responsible World Society, 233.  6 Vanier, A Network of Friends, vol. 1, 1964–1973, 162.  7 Vanier, Our Life Together, 125.   8 Faith and Sharing Retreats began in 1968 with a retreat preached by Jean Vanier at an Augustinian retreat house near Toronto called Marylake. The Bishop’s choice of Vanier was controversial: it was the first time a layperson had been invited to lead a Roman Catholic retreat in Canada. By a curious coincidence, this took place in the same summer that Dr Robert McClure was elected the first lay moderator of the United Church, so in the summer of 1968, both McClure and Vanier offered unprecedented lay leadership in their respective denominations. At that first Faith and Sharing Retreat, Vanier invited the diverse range of people to spend eight days meeting God in scripture, in the eucharist, in silence, and in small groups where they shared and prayed together. Faith and Sharing became a movement of annual retreats focused on living the Beatitudes: “There is a two-fold movement in Faith and Sharing: an inward movement towards God hidden in each person’s vulnerability and an outward movement towards our brothers and sisters especially those who are more poor and in need” (Clarke, “The Grace of Faith and Sharing”). The cornerstone is twicedaily faith-sharing, when retreatants meet in small groups to share ­personally about their lives and faith, listening to each other without judgment, with open ears and hearts (Faith and Sharing website). If this were the structure of the Cedar Glen retreat as well, then McLeod’s and Smith’s discomfort with Vanier’s Jesus language would have been exacerbated by the expectation that they would frequently speak about their faith in their small groups. Lists of participants for some retreats can be found in the Faith and Sharing archives at St Michael’s College, Toronto. Faith and Sharing retreats still continue across North America: see the Afterword in this book.   9 Quotations from a conversation with Louise Cummings, Doug Graves, and Dan Kirkegaard recorded in Tsawwassen, B C , 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Cummings are from this conversation. 10 Massey, For Space, 130–1. 11 Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd revised edition, 200. 12 A related aspect in the complex simultaneity of stories of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada involves complicated relationships

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between Christian denominations as well as formal ecumenical initiatives. The Roman Catholic Church was full of change, hope, and fresh initiatives following Vatican II, while the United Church and Anglicans were finding common ground while moving towards church union. A fascinating and telling example of the ecumenical spirit of the age can be seen in how the United Church participated together with other churches in Expo 67, negotiating various contradictions and compromises as they tried to create an interdenominational Christian Pavilion (see Miedema, For Canada’s Sake, 137–60). Miedema asserts of this period that “the broad interpretation of Christianity in public life may have masked Canada’s religious divisions as much as it overcame them” (21), quoting Governor General Georges Vanier claiming that he intentionally spoke of non-specific shared “spiritual values” because “those could mean different things to different people” and he wanted “to speak to all Canadians” (216n45). Jean Vanier’s father Georges Vanier was Canada’s first Roman Catholic governor general. Other less organized spiritual signs of the times were the Jesus people and the charismatic movement in Canada. These were ecumenical in the sense of crossing denominational lines, and there are documented connections between Jean Vanier’s Faith and Sharing retreats and the Canadian charismatic movement. L’Arche has always emphasized that it is not a church, and its members are encouraged to join their local worshipping communities. For a broader discussion of ecumenism and L’Arche see Thérèse Vanier, One Bread, One Body. 13 For example, see Goodhand, Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists. In 1973, the first five women’s shelters were opened by five separate groups of women in five different Canadian cities. In the same year, four new L’Arche communities also opened. Communal intentional ­living experiments could also be found across Canada: see for example Liz Marshall’s documentary film Midian Farm, exploring a “back-tothe-land social experiment created by a community of urban babyboomers from Toronto” from 1971–77 that was “part of the youth counter-culture movement during a period of social and political reimagining” (Marshall, Midian Farm). 14 Wyatt, “The 1970s,” 126. 15 World Council of Churches, “The Unity of the Church and the Handicapped in Society,” 191. 16 See World Council of Churches, “W CC Work on Persons with Disabilities History” 17 Quoted in United Church of Canada, “Open and Accessible,” 174. The 1977 United Church resolution on “The Handicapped and the

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Wholeness of the Family of God” is cited by this 2012 report as an important early precedent in the growth of awareness about people with disabilities in the United Church. 18 Vanier, Signs of the Times, 1. 19 Ibid., 1–2. 20 Ibid., 3. In Our Life Together, Vanier also credits other “community movements that, like L’Arche, were both countercultural … and yet very much of their time, of a time when people were searching, willing to see where the Spirit of God could lead and concerned with the pain of others” (61). He specifically names the Little Sisters of Jesus in Montreal based on the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers Movement, Catherine Doherty’s Friendship House, and Marthe Robin’s Foyer de Charité (62–3), as well as the influence on L’Arche prayer of Brother Roger and the Taizé community (190). 21 Brown and Vanier, “‘Your Questions Come, I Sense, from Your Loneliness.’” 22 Ibid. 23 Steve Newroth tells the story of founding L’Arche in Canada in Whitney-Brown, Sharing Life. For clarity, Newroth used as a singular last name will always refer in this chapter to Steve Newroth. Ann Newroth will be refered to by both her first and last names. 24 The Orange Society in Ontario has held strongly pro-Protestant annual marches for more than a century. “Orange Societies, in one form or another, have been in existence in various parts of the world since 1688, when Prince William of Orange came to England, at the request of a coalition of parties, to defend “the liberties of Englishmen and the Protestant Religion. These societies were organized so that people of like mind might join together to support and maintain those principles” (Grand Orange Lodge of Canada, “Our Historical Beginnings”). 25 Personal email with Steve Newroth. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotations from Newroth, and the account of L’Arche Daybreak’s founding and early days, are from personal emails.. 26 Steve Newroth recounts, “On one occasion a high-level Catholic priest volunteered to concelebrate with an Anglican priest. It was a great mass and we all felt very good about it. There were no repercussions. But it happened only once.” 27 This paragraph and all further quotations are based on a personal ­conversation with Bob (Robert) Smith, Vancouver, b c , 9 May 2011. 28 Quotation and the account of Shorten’s connection with L’Arche Daybreak come from a personal conversation with Robert Shorten by telephone, Victoria, BC, 27 September 2015.

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29 Did being part of L’Arche mean “ecumenical” inclusion into the dominant Roman Catholic ethos? Part of what is interesting about the painful exclusion of Protestants is the way in which those moments are similar to experiences of people with intellectual disabilities who were excluded from wider Canadian culture, often not out of malice but insensitivity. Decades later, debate around the meaning of “inclusion” continues in many contexts, not just in terms of Christian denominations. L’Arche posted a booklet titled “Beyond Inclusion” on its website around a decade ago. From the 1930s on, the United Church was officially committed to “inclusive Christian community.” I don’t know who was in mind for that inclusion. It might have been a radical gesture at the time, even though now the whole idea of inclusion is problematic if it leaves what Massey would call the power-geometries of the space unaddressed. Of course, as many have wryly observed, inclusion is better than exclusion. Kristeva recommends replacing “inclusion” with “interaction” (Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 224). 30 Psychoanalyst Ann Shearer recalls an international conference in 1972 where speakers praised the revolutionary possibilities of normalization, until Vanier “questioned the very concept of ‘normality’ for its inbuilt emphasis on achievement, and the inevitable consequent devaluing of people who failed to meet its demands. I don’t think I was the only one to be shocked into wondering whether somehow we’d missed an essential.” See Shearer, “Jean Vanier: A Personal Tribute.” See also the critique of normalization in Moore, “Making No Apologies for Our Differences,” 6–7. 31 Wolfensberger, ed., A Selective Overview of Jean Vanier and the Movement of L’Arche. 32 Roeher, “Preface.” A Selective Overview of Jean Vanier and the Movement of L’Arche, i. 33 Newroth, “Daybreak, Jean Vanier and L’Arche,” 3. 34 Ibid, 7. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid, 9. 37 Ibid. 38 Wolfensberger, “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” 11–12. 39 Ibid, 11. 40 Ibid, 12. It seems Wolfensberger was referring to others, however. Looking back, Steve Newroth comments, “I certainly don’t remember

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Wolf ever dancing. He was so much in his head it is hard to think of him having such emotion as King David.” 41 Ibid, 12. 42 Ibid. 43 In “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” Wolfensburger does flag two potential problems. First, “once a person has realized that he can learn and gain by the presence of the retarded … then one will be tempted to keep the retarded in their state of retardation” (16). Second, will L’Arche be able to maintain its “initial exuberance and identity” when “the overpowering charismatic influence of the person of Jean Vanier … is no longer on the scene?” (16). He notes that “later leaders might blindly perpetuate the forms of the system, but not the dynamism of its founder” (17). These cautions remain relevant, though he perhaps underestimates the crucial leadership of the core members in establishing and maintaining the exuberance, identity, and dynamism of L’Arche. 44 Quotation from a personal conversation with Sue Mosteller, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 8 February 2013. All further quotations from Mosteller are from this conversation. 45 Quotation from a personal conversation with Bruce McLeod, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 12 April 2011. All further quotations from McLeod are from this conversation. 46 Vanier, Our Life Together, 151. Consider also Sue Mosteller’s further reflections on the relationship between L’Arche and the United Church, and the importance of retreats: “that had people from different backgrounds and traditions than just Catholics. Through those things we grew close to the United Church because of our connection at Avoca and with George Morrison … Out of that grew this real connection with the United Church in Richmond Hill which has had a lot of ups and downs over the years but which has been an incredibly rich gift.” 47 A section title in Shepherd, “Church of the Margins,” insists: “Resist the urge to unify” (142). Shepherd uses the work of postcolonial theologian Kwok Pui-lan who warns that an overemphasis on unity can move towards uniformity. Pui-lan affirms the Church image of one body with many members. Fortunately then, most members of L’Arche are stubbornly themselves, experts in resisting any kind of unity that reduces diversity (as Lois Wilson observes). The unity that Vanier prays for is to be united in love for God and in commitment to each other as God’s people, not some kind of impossible uniformity.

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48 See Newroth’s chapter on the founding of L’Arche Daybreak in Whitney-Brown, Sharing Life. 49 Quotations from a conversation with Doug Graves, Louise Cummings, and Dan Kirkegaard recorded in Tsawwassen, B C , 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Graves are from this conversation. 50 In keeping with the stance of quiet, often anonymous support of worthwhile projects, the United Church does not have a central authority structure like the churches with bishops. Graves added with amusement, “We had a meeting with Jean Vanier at the International Church Leaders group, and he was talking about his vision for the role of the international church. He said, ‘I want you to encourage your folk’ – he doesn’t know Protestants, and what am I supposed to do, put out an announcement? There was a Church of Scotland minister who looked at me the same way when he made that comment.” 51 Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation, 295. 52 Taylor, A Secular Age, 171–2. Taylor expands his explanation in a way that could sound like something tendered, offered, and received, something requested and provided: The relation between practices and the background understanding behind them is therefore not one-sided. If the understanding makes the practice possible, it is also true that it is the practice which largely carries the understanding. At any time, we can speak of the ‘repertory’ of collective actions at the disposal of a given group of society. These are the common actions which we know how to undertake … The discriminations we have to make to carry these off, knowing whom to speak to and when and how, carry an implicit ‘map’ of social space, of what kinds of people we can associate with in what ways in what circumstances (Taylor, A Secular Age, 173). This raises the question: to what degree are people on the margins of society, particularly people with intellectual disabilities, excluded from this kind of social imaginary? Again, as Newroth says about the Roman Catholic exclusion of Protestants, this may not necessarily be out of malice but thoughtlessness, insensitivity, and obliviousness. Taylor continues: This implicit grasp of social space is unlike a theoretical description of this space, distinguishing different kinds of people and the norms connected to them. The understanding implicit in practice stands to social theory the way that my ability to get around a familiar environment stands to a (literal) map of this area. I am very well able to orient myself without ever having adopted the standpoint of

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overview which the map offers me. And similarly, for most of human history, and for most of social life, we function through the grasp we have on the common repertory, without benefit of a theoretical overview (Ibid.). 53 Schweitzer, “The Changing Social Imaginary of the United Church of Canada,” 282. 54 A list of L’Arche communities around the world up to 2011, each with their date of foundation, can be found in Vanier, An Ark for the Poor, 154–60. Another tale of Newroth recounts that, as the person responsible for following up with all of the new communities in Canada and the US, he became increasingly frustrated with Jean Vanier’s relaxed way of encouraging the launch of new communities wherever he went, because it left Newroth with the hard work of helping the goodhearted but often naive founders figure out logistics such as establishing a board of directors, conforming to government regulations, registering with appropriate authorities, and so on. Finally in frustration he blurted out, “Jean, you have to stop going around having babies and not taking responsibility for them!” L’Arche soon added more leadership to support “baby” communities and a process for becoming a L’Arche community. But many still hold nostalgia for the wild optimism and energy of the early 1970s. 55 Vanier, A Network of Friends, vol. 2, 1974–1983, 90–1. 56 Quotations from a personal conversation with Gordon How, recorded in Vancouver, BC, 9 May 2011. All further quotations from How are from this conversation. 57 L’Arche Shiloah was the original name for the Vancouver community. Later it was changed to L’Arche Greater Vancouver. 58 Personal email from Judith Leckie. All further quotations from Leckie are from personal emails. 59 Ibid. 60 Vanier, Our Life Together, 158–9. 61 Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” 154–5. 62 Ibid. 63 Quotation from a conversation with Eileen Glass recorded in Cowichan Bay, BC, 30 May 2013. 64 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Trangression, 27. 65 Jeff and Debra Moore’s account, and all quotations from them, come from personal emails, unless otherwise noted. 66 The phrase “cuckoo’s nest” at that time referred to the 1975 movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The movie, a fictional story of

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the power imbalances between patients and nursing staff in a mental hospital, won five major academy awards. 67 Moore, “Making No Apologies for Our Differences,” 6. Jeff Moore continues: I had to get out of a deeply ingrained mind-set that had me constantly correcting and directing Keith, sometimes only in thought, but too often in deed. It became clear to me that normalization as it was commonly interpreted, was not doing justice to Keith, other people in his position, or me. The approach suggests that we cannot accept him the way he is and that he will only be accepted to the degree that he becomes ‘normal,’ which of course by our definitions he will never be … Normalization ends up rationalizing and excusing the exclusion and segregation of people rather than challenging it (ibid). 68 Ibid., 7. 69 Personal conversations with Gordon and Edith Haliburton, by telephone in June 2015. All further quotations from the Haliburtons are from these conversations. 70 The United Church’s 1997 document “Mending the World: An Ecumenical Vision for Healing and Reconciliation” resulted from this ten-year process. Earlier, at the United Church’s 34th General Council in 1992, the Interchurch Interfaith Committee presented a study document titled Toward a Renewed Understanding of Ecumenism. One of its key concepts was that “the world is in serious trouble; the churches should join with peoples of good will to work together for the cause of peace, justice and the healing of God’s creation” (quoted in United Church of Canada, “Mending the World,” 2). 71 A biography of the Moores by Acadia University professor Dr John Sumarah was published in 1989, titled On Becoming Community. See page 57 about support from their United Church. 72 I am thinking further about Massey’s theory concerning spaces “where a larger proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local” (Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” 154–5). Does her description raise the possibility of less positive relations? For example, the Moores’ experience suggested that the choices of L’Arche members in the

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meeting were undermined because the process was mysteriously tied to instructions from other levels of leadership. As a literary scholar, I could note the obvious literary genre of secret Roman Catholic machinations, perhaps tangled in both directions with the combination of revulsion and fascination suggested in chapter 1. Does a related theme emerge of frustration with outside agency/control – whether from the Roman Catholic church (Wolfville), or from L’Arche itself (see Enwright’s account at the end of this chapter about difficulties with L’Arche Comox Valley over core members coming to her United Church)? Those are frustrations with decisions made outside of the local context, of “extroverted” outside relations and layered agency impinging on autonomy. It is a frustration L’Arche core members know well, as Peter Rotterman at Daybreak once commiserated with me, “It’s hard when other people make decisions about your life.” These stories are again in keeping with the early L’Arche retreat experience of Cummings at Naramata, where in a United Church space, the dominant culture remained Roman Catholic, with the United Church members marginalized. In that way, experiences of inclusion/exclusion, agency/marginalization for people with intellectual disabilities have a curious echo at points in United Church experience with L’Arche. But there is an interesting reversal in the early 2000s in Winnipeg when Dennis Butcher is chosen as director, and the exclusive and explicit Roman Catholic identity of the community consciously changes and gradually expands to accept his leadership and an ecumenical vision (see further in this chapter). 73 United Church of Canada, “Mending the World,” 6. In 2018, Mary Jo Leddy could not recall ever speaking of an “ecumenical eclipse.” 74 Ibid., 7. 75 Legge, “Building Inclusive Communities of Life,” 296. 76 Porter, personal email. See stories of baptisms in chapter 4. 77 The Nouwen archive at the University of St Michael’s College in Toronto holds records of many invitations and connections. 78 Mosteller admits that for her personally, as a vowed sister of St Joseph, Nouwen’s way of reimagining traditional Roman Catholic practices was unsettling, even though Mosteller had lived for more than fifteen years in the ecumenical L’Arche Daybreak community. She recalls, “For me, as a Catholic in such a box of ‘I know what is right and I know that we’re right and I know that nobody else is right and that everybody should do it my way,’ this just cracked the walls. The walls just started to tumble and I didn’t know what to do. I loved what

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Henri was doing, but I just said, ‘Is it right? I mean, can you do this? Is this possible?’” 79 Lloyd Kerman’s story is told in chapter 3. 80 Quotation from a personal conversation with Keith Reynolds, recorded in Victoria, BC, 22 January 2012. All further quotations from Keith Reynolds are from this conversation. 81 Nouwen and Turner were acquainted already: in 1987, Nouwen had written the foreword to Turner’s book, Outside Looking In. 82 Excerpts from Nouwen’s letter to Turner, dated 1 April 1991, and his letter to Daybreak Council are quoted with the permission of the Henri Nouwen Legacy Trust. The letters are held in the Henri J. M. Nouwen Archives and Research Collection, University of St Michael’s College, Toronto, Ontario. 83 Shepherd, “Church of the Margins” 148. 84 Ibid. 85 Story from a personal conversation with Dennis Butcher, recorded in Winnipeg, Manitoba on 29 October 2015. All quotations from Butcher are from this conversation. 86 The Gimli retreat was in 1973, and offered about 10 per cent of spaces for United Church members. The Gimli retreat led directly to the founding of L’Arche in Winnipeg. 87 Rollason, “Café Paves the Way,” A29. 88 Story from a conversation with Dan Kirkegaard, Doug Graves, and Louise Cummings, recorded in Tsawwassen, B C , 9 May 2011. All quotations from Kirkegaard are from this conversation. 89 World Council of Churches, “A Church of All and for All,” 11, section 57. 90 Ibid., 16–17, section 87. 91 Story and quotations from a personal conversation with Lynn Godfrey, recorded in Hamilton, Ontario, 10 April 2010. All quotations from Godfrey are from this conversation. 92 Godfrey also says this about assistants: The assistants are wonderful, and they bring life and keep us young, and they are also young! And there are all kinds of challenges with young people. This newer generation has special challenges engrained into our individualistic, self-righteous society that makes it hard to really ‘get’ community. We have quite a mixture of assistants: Roman Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, we’ve had two Jewish assistants. It’s a very mixed group. We have a good connection with Redeemer College, which was founded by the Dutch Reform church.

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Notes to pages 87–97 215

They send people on placements. We also get co-op placements from Waterloo and Guelph. German and Israelis have come on their alternative to military service. That’s been good for us.   93 United Church Observer, “The United Church Has a Special Role in 1973,” 10.   94 Ibid., 12.   95 Quotation from a personal conversation with Maggie Enwright, recorded in Duncan, BC, 5 December 2011. All further quotations from Enwright are from this conversation.  96 Nouwen, Adam, God’s Beloved, 30 and 126. See also Little, “Welcoming the Stranger,” 104.   97 Quoted in Shepherd, “Church of the Margins,” 145.  98 Vanier, A Cry is Heard, 119.   99 This account comes from a telephone conversation with Donna Tourneur on 27 September 2018. 100 This account comes from a telephone conversation with Jenn Power on 4 October 2018. 101 Effective 1 January 2019, the United Church of Canada reorganized itself: presbyteries and conferences had their final meetings in 2018 before being replaced by regional councils. chapter three

  1 Kearney, On Stories, 6–7.    2 Swinton, Mowat, and Baines, “Whose Story Am I?,” 6.    3 Morris, “Transforming Able-Bodied Normativity,” 242.    4 White, introduction to Voices and Visions, vii.    5 Hutchinson quoted in Trothen, Linking Sexuality and Gender, 41.    6 Quotation from a personal conversation with Beverley Milton and Ralph Milton, recorded in Victoria, B C , 19 January 2014. All further quotations from Beverley or Ralph Milton are from this conversation.    7 Quotation from a personal conversation with Keith Reynolds, recorded in Victoria, BC, 22 January 2012. All further quotations from Reynolds are from this conversation.    8 Cushing, “(Story-)Telling It Like It Is: How Narratives Teach at L’Arche,” 165.    9 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream: Disability Revisited,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 225. Kristeva also thanks Vanier for helping her son find a home in Paris with the L’Arche partner Association Simon de Cyrene (229).

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Notes to pages 97–105

10 Ibid., 225. 11 Ibid., 227. See chapter 4 for further discussion of how Kristeva analyzes the way in which non-disabled people and society react to the disabled person not only as a sign of mortality but as the fearful figure of a wound that agitates their own primal psychic wound. 12 The United Church website states: “A New Creed is a brief and well-loved affirmation of faith used widely in our worship (1968; rev. 1980, 1995). The 20 Articles of Doctrine; A Statement of Faith, 1940; A New Creed; and A Song of Faith are recognized as standards subordinate to the primacy of scripture in the doctrine section of the Basis of Union. (See The Manual, pages 11–28)” (United Church of Canada, “A New Creed”). 13 Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 154. Ricoeur is especially writing about the duty to remember the millions of people who died in the Holocaust. Among those millions were hundreds of thousands of ­people with intellectual and physical disabilities who were deemed “unworthy of living.” Ricoeur’s central point also applies to wider questions of remembrance and whose stories are, as Cushing puts it, “narrative-worthy.” 14 Burghardt, Broken, 172. 15 Peter Rotterman told this story each time he and I spoke to school groups together in 1997. 16 Arbuckle, Laughing with God, 136. 17 Ibid. 18 Cushing, “(Story-)Telling It Like It Is: How Narratives Teach at L’Arche,” 166. 19 Todd, “A Eulogy for Thelus – 15 October, 2014, by her friend Anne Todd.” 20 Quotation from a personal conversation with Linda Butler and Warren McDougall, recorded in Richmond Hill, Ontario, 14 April 2011. All further quotations from Butler or McDougall are from this conversation. 21 Eulogy for Thelus George provided by Alan Cook in a personal email. 22 Madeline Burghardt, “Brokenness/Transformation,” n.p. 23 Ibid. 24 Wolfensberger, “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” 16. United Church minister Doug Graves makes a similar point in chapter 4. 25 Vanier, “The Vision of Jesus: Living Peaceably in a Wounded World,” 63–4. 26 For example, writer Anne Lamott read on a radio show the story of the infant son of friends, “a baby born so damaged that he died at

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five months old” (Bird by Bird, 189). His parents appreciated it, and Lamott explains that “even though their son will always be alive in their hearts … – and maybe this is the only way we really have anyone – there is still something to be said for painting portraits of the people we have loved, for trying to express those moments that seem so inexpressibly beautiful, the ones that change and deepen us” (192). 27 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 607. 28 All quotations in this paragraph from Cushing, “(Story-)Telling It Like It Is,” 161–3. 29 Cummings holds decades of memories and reflection on L’Arche. She brought Lynn Godfrey into L’Arche. She helped orient Ian Macdonald into his L’Arche ministry. Doug Graves speaks highly of her. She has led retreats across Canada for L’Arche. She has been hugely influential in connecting L’Arche and the United Church since 1973. 30 Quotations from a conversation with Louise Cummings, Doug Graves, and Dan Kirkegaard recorded in Vancouver, B C , 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Cummings are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. 31 Cummings, “A Lively Parable,” 17. 32 Quotation from a personal conversation with Mary Bastedo, recorded in Richmond Hill, Ontario, 6 February 2013. All further quotations from Bastedo are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. 33 Burrows, Hope Lives Here names Mary Bastedo on page 121. 34 Arbuckle, Laughing with God, 137. 35 Mosteller, Body Broken, Body Blessed, 24. See also pages 19–28 for a more complete story of Lloyd Kerman’s life in L’Arche, as well as a photo of Kerman and Michael Arnett. 36 Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 123. 37 Cushing is quoted in Scrivener, “50 Years On,” n.p. 38 Arbuckle, Laughing with God, 137. 39 Quotations from a conversation with Doug Graves, Louise Cummings, and Dan Kirkegaard recorded in Vancouver, B C , 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Graves are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. 40 “Creating God, We Give You Thanks,” Hymn 292, in United Church of Canada, Voices United, 292. 41 Community pastors had been part of L’Arche from the beginning. Vanier details the specific role of spiritual guides, the “priest or ordained minister” in Community and Growth, 2nd revised ed., 240– 8. In Canada, Henri Nouwen was pastor of L’Arche Daybreak for a

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decade, creating a pastoral team for ministry to the community. After Nouwen’s death, Daybreak’s pastor was a layperson. 42 Quotations from a conversation with Dan Kirkegaard, Louise Cummings, and Doug Graves recorded in Vancouver, B C , 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Kirkegaard are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. 43 Swinton, Mowat, and Baines, “Whose Story Am I?,” 6. 44 Harshaw, God Beyond Words, 18. 45 Quotation from a personal conversation with Ian Macdonald, recorded in Victoria, BC, 23 January 2012. All further quotations from Macdonald are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. 46 In an interview, Jean Vanier uses a similar image to suggest a path to renewed life: “And then the prophetic cry of the deviant group becomes a cause of change, and a cause of salvation. Because resistance to change is a form of death. People will eventually suffocate themselves inside of their culture, inside of their riches. Whereas the deviant, or those who appear rather as deviant and marginal, are crying for openness, crying for change. In a way what they are saying is: break down your barriers, come out from behind your walls, because behind your walls you are going to die” (Vanier, “The Prophetic Cry,” 80). Perhaps this is a good image for a church that has been contemplating its imminent death for many decades now, because it is encouraging: the work on reconciliation and the intercultural efforts of the United Church are precisely trying to listen and respond to the kind of prophetic cry that Vanier identifies. If his intuition is correct, these United Church initiatives are life-giving as well as community-building. 47 United Church of Canada, “Leadership from the Margins.” 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Vanier, “The Vision of Jesus,” 75. 51 Swinton, Mowat, and Baines, “Whose Story Am I?,” 7. 52 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 88. 53 Ibid., 94. Bakhtin continues that laughter “liberates from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years; fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power. It unveils the material bodily principle in its true meaning. Laughter opened men’s eyes on that which is new, on the future” (ibid.). 54 Ibid. Bakhtin continues with this interesting observation about the relationship between carnival laughter, seriousness, and fear:

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It was understood that fear never lurks behind laughter (which does not build stakes) and that hypocrisy and lies never laugh but wear a serious mask. Laughter created no dogmas and could not become authoritarian; it did not convey fear but a feeling of strength. It was linked with the procreating act, with birth, renewal, fertility, abundance. Laughter was also related to food and drink and people’s earthly immortality, and finally it was related to the future of things to come and was to clear the way for them. Seriousness was therefore elementally distrusted and trust was placed in festive laughter. (95) 55 See the discussion of Vanier and Aristotle’s understanding of pleasure in chapter 1. 56 Vanier, Community and Growth: Our Pilgrimage Together, 207–8. 57 Quotation from a personal conversation with Gary Patterson, recorded in Victoria, BC, 19 January 2014. All further quotations from Patterson are from this conversation. 58 Quotation from a personal conversation with Lynn Godfrey, recorded at L’Arche Hamilton, 10 April 2010. All further quotations from Godfrey are from this conversation. 59 Vanier, “The Fragility of L’Arche and the Friendship of God,” 37. 60 Excerpts from Whitney-Brown, “The Club,” 13–14. 61 Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd revised ed., 317. 62 Ibid., 172. 63 Bill’s turkey joke is told in the preface to this book. 64 Vanier, Made for Happiness, 184–7. 65 Vanier quoted in Whitney-Brown, introduction to Jean Vanier, Essential Writings, 50. 66 Vanier, Becoming Human, 99. 67 Swinton, Mowat, and Baines, “Whose Story Am I?,” 16. 68 Both Swinton and Greig discuss ways that people with intellectual disabilities can help others slow down: see chapter 4. 69 Macdonald, “My Journey.” 70 Kenneth Ian Macdonald, 28 March 1945 – 6 March 2016. Douglas B. Graves, 13 Dec 1944 – 23 March 2016. 71 Macdonald family, “K. Ian Macdonald Official Obituary.” chapter four

  1 Vanier, “Remarks of Jean Vanier upon Receiving the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award,” 2.

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  2 Quotation from a personal conversation with John Swinton, recorded in Toronto, Ontario, 16 July 2013. All further quotations from Swinton are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted.   3 Richard Kearney, On Stories, 3.   4 Erevelles, “Signs of Reason,” 58.   5 For example, see Fineman, The Autonomy Myth, and Scully, “Disability and Vulnerability,” 212–21.   6 The stories of Doug Graves, Ian MacDonald, Lloyd Kerman, and Thelus George were told in chapter 3.   7 Vanier, personal email to me on 5 December 2011.   8 Tataryn and Truchan-Tataryn, Discovering Trinity in Disability, 114.   9 Ibid, 115. 10 Quotation from a personal conversation with Linda Butler and Warren McDougall, recorded in Richmond Hill, Ontario, 14 April 2011. All further quotations from Butler or McDougall are from this conversation. 11 This story and these quotations are from a telephone conversation with Joan Vogel on 18 November 2018. 12 United Church of Canada, “Prayers.” 13 United Church of Canada, “Leadership from the Margins.” 14 Shogren, et al., “Causal Agency Theory,” 61. 15 Ibid., 62. 16 Ibid., 55. 17 Scully, “Disability and Vulnerability” argues that every person depends on shared social supports, infrastructure, and resources (214–17). 18 Moore, “Making No Apologies for Our Differences,” 5. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 7. 21 Ibid., 7–8. 22 Ibid., 8. Keith and Jeff Moore’s strong relationship as fellow members of their L’Arche community provides a conducive milieu for Keith’s abilities to flourish. However, even when the milieu is less nurturing, people with intellectual disabilities can prove to be much more resilient agents than their caregivers may suspect. Professor of psychology Mark Rapley in The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability analyzes data of interactions in group homes between staff and people with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities. He discerns in these interactions an unexpectedly proficient capacity of people with intellectual disabilities to manage these interactions: “What is immediately visible in the interactions examined here, then, is the sophisticated

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management, in interaction, by people defined by their ‘incompetence,’ of issues of power, membership and its entitlements, and their status as competent human beings. The negotiation of this co-membership with staff – who can frequently be seen to work to withhold it – is managed in a variety of ways and … these ways are often subtle, sophisticated and, ironically invisible to ‘normal’ interlocutors” (143). Rapley’s research and analysis testify to the capacities of people with intellectual disabilities to engage interactions for their own best interests. That such capacities are not always recognized can make them secret agents in a society that tends to occlude them. 23 Vanier, “The Prophetic Cry,” 80. 24 This person chose to be identified as LY in this text. 25 Cushing and Lewis, “Negotiating Mutuality and Agency in CareGiving Relationships with Women with Intellectual Disabilities,” 187. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 United Church of Canada. “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 607–8. 31 Eiesland, The Disabled God, 26. 32 Ibid., 98–105. 33 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 228. 34 Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement, 7. For Betcher’s thinking on disability see especially “Introduction: Telling It Slant,” in Spirit and the Politics of Disablement, 1–24. 35 Greig, Reconsidering Intellectual Disability, 106. For Greig’s discussion of being a legitimate “voice for the voiceless” see 104–6. See also Reinders, “Understanding Humanity and Disability,” 42 and 45–7. 36 Newroth, “Daybreak, Jean Vanier, and L’Arche,” 8. 37 Ibid. 38 Vanier, A Network of Friends, vol. 1, 1964–1973, 151. 39 Ibid., 152. 40 Quotation from a personal conversation with Lois Wilson, recorded at Emmanuel College, Toronto, Ontario, 18 April 2011. All further quotations from Wilson are from this conversation. 41 Erevelles, “Signs of Reason,” 58. 42 Quotation from a personal conversation with Lynn Godfrey, recorded in Hamilton, Ontario, 10 April 2010. All further quotations from Godfrey are from this conversation.

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43 In my research, many United Church people told stories about their pleasure in being welcomed in L’Arche, specifically by people with disabilities. Lois Wilson emphasized the remarkable gift of welcome that she enjoyed whenever she visited L’Arche. The point is also made by Maggie Enwright (introduction), Gary Paterson (chapter 3), Linda Butler (chapter 4, below) and others. Stories of this kind of welcome are intriguingly counter-cultural. Maria Garvey, the founder of L’Arche in Belfast, now leads workshops for people in leadership in a range of fields including politics and business, and she attests to the transformative power and value of feeling unconditionally welcomed just for being, not because of accomplishments or usefulness. Obviously, I do not wish to perpetuate a reductive stereotype that every person with intellectual disabilities is always welcoming, but I also don’t want to devalue or underestimate the significance of these many profound stories of welcome. 44 For extensive discussions of carnival in general see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 1–26, 171–90, and Bahktin, Rabelais and His World, 1–58, 254–6. 45 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10. 46 Ibid. 47 Quotation from a personal conversation with Ian Macdonald, recorded in Victoria, BC, on 23 January 2012. All further quotations from Macdonald are from this conversation unless otherwise identified. 48 Charles Taylor, “Transcendent Humanist in a Secular Age,” 85–6. 49 Babcock, The Reversible World, 29. Babcock provides a thorough literary, anthropological, and cultural analysis of how symbolic inversion functions and how it upturns and destabilizes the ostensible permanence of social ordering (13–36 and 95–116). 50 Ibid., 29. 51 Macdonald, Living Waters, 18. 52 See Doug Graves’s account in chapter 3 of how his experience in L’Arche influences his process for decision-making with his United Church congregation. John Swinton explores what he calls “the gift of slowness” in Becoming Friends of Time (72–5). See also Jason ReimerGreig, “The Slow Journey towards Beatitude.” Jean Vanier has noted that “retard” is a beautiful term in music, changing the pacing by slowing the tempo. I live in Cowichan Bay, North America’s first “cittaslow” or “slow city”: social movements such as cittaslow or the slow food movement reveal the desire of many for the pleasures of slower, simpler lives. Perhaps it is time for a slow people movement.

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Notes to pages 152–6 223

53 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10. 54 Quotation from a personal conversation with Gary Paterson, recorded at Victoria, BC, on 19 June 2014. All further quotations from Paterson are from this conversation, unless otherwise noted. 55 Hall, “For Allon White,” 291. 56 Ibid. 57 Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses, 170–71. 58 Quoted in the introduction. Quotation from a personal conversation with Jean Vanier, recorded at L’Arche in Trosly-Breuil, France, March 2017. 59 Vanier, Befriending the Stanger, 41. 60 Vanier, Becoming Human, 39. 61 Vanier, “The Vision of Jesus,” 74. 62 See Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Jean Vanier Opens First L’Arche House.” This interview of Vanier in 1964 was broadcast in early 1965. See also, for example: in 1967, Flemington, narrator and director, “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed”; in 1969, Vanier, In Weakness, Strength, 18–26; in 1971, Vanier, Eruption to Hope, 39–50; in 1988, Vanier, The Broken Body, 1–113; in 1997, Vanier, Our Journey Home, vii–xvi and 3–79; in 2008, Vanier, Jean Vanier: Essential Writings, 121–51; in 2013, Vanier, Sign of the Times, 52–72 and 94–124. 63 World Council of Churches, “A Church of All and for All,” 6 (section 28). This is also quoted in United Church of Canada, “Open and Accessible,” 179. 64 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 609. For a complex and nuanced exploration of the concept of vulnerability, see Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, eds., Vulnerability. The word “vulnerable” is important to Jean Vanier as well: see, for example, Images of Love, Words of Hope, 12–18. Its Latin root “vulnus” means “wound” and Vanier often reflects on how each person lives with being wounded. For example, see Community and Growth, 2nd revised ed., 35–7. 65 Vanier, Jean Vanier: Essential Writings, 100–1. 66 Vanier, Our Journey Home, xii–xiii. 67 Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd revised ed.,125. 68 Ibid. Vanier continues by naming the unique agency of someone who can intervene to provoke laughter and lighten the heavy mood. Vanier himself has often taken this role in community: “So another person, either consciously, or unconsciously under the inspiration of the Spirit must absorb the aggression. They may do it by playing the fool. Then the aggression is gradually transformed and the crackle of tension is

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Notes to pages 156–9

dissipated in the light of laughter” (Vanier, Community and Growth, 2nd revised ed., 125). 69 Vanier, Our Journey Home, xii–xiii. 70 Brooks, “Now Is the Time to Talk about the Power of Touch,” A27. 71 Morris, “Transforming Able-Bodied Normativity,” 241–2. 72 Vanier, Befriending the Stranger, 64. 73 Vanier, Our Journey Home, 76. 74 Ibid. 75 Julia Kristeva was introduced in chapters 1 and 3. She engaged Vanier in an exchange of letters in 2009–10. In subsequent articles, Kristeva delves into the nature of disability based not only upon philosophical inquiry and psychological insights, but also upon her direct experience as the mother of an adult son with intellectual disabilities, and her work as a disability rights activist and president of the French government’s National Council on Disability. See Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, and Kristeva, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and … Vulnerability.” For analysis and critique of Kristeva’s thinking on disability see: Bunch, “Julia Kristeva, Disability, and the Singularity of Vulnerability”; Dohmen, “Disability as Abject”; and Grue, “Rhetorics of difference.” 76 Kristeva, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and … Vulnerability,” 251. 77 Ibid. 78 See Kristeva’s 1982 book, Powers of Horror. For discussion of Kristeva on abjection, see: Burghardt, “Common Frailty, Constructed Oppression,” 561–2, and Dohmen, “Disability as Abject.” 79 Kristeva, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and … Vulnerability,” 251. 80 Vanier, Our Life Together, 343. 81 Ibid. 82 Vanier, “The Vision of Jesus,” 67. 83 Quotation from a personal conversation with Maggie Enwright, recorded in Duncan, BC, on 5 December 2011. All further quotations from Enwright are from this conversation. 84 Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 187. Reynolds provides further theological explanation: “Living with impairments is a way, like other ways, of being human that it is fully capable in most instances of giving and receiving love, and thus capable of living life’s creative possibilities under the image of a God who loves, draws near, and suffers with” (187). Later in his book, Reynolds considers weakness in relation to God, taking up Paul’s scriptural affirmation that “God’s power is made complete and perfected in weakness” (210) from which it

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follows that “as God embraces human weakness and inability in Christ, we are empowered to welcome weakness in others as God’s beloved” (210). Finally he adds, “And conversely it is by encountering weakness in another that we come to discover it in ourselves as God’s beloved” (210). Reynolds’s thinking here is close to Vanier’s understanding. 85 Vanier, Becoming Human, 45. 86 Vanier is clear about identifying the social sufferings inflicted on people with intellectual disabilities. See, for example, Vanier, Becoming Human, 45–6 and 76–8 and Vanier, Our Journey Home, xii–xiii, and 5–6. 87 United Church of Canada, “Open and Accessible,” 176. In addition, United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” elaborates further: “The social model of disability, an alternative to the medical model, defines disability not as what a person can or cannot do, but how people with disabilities are treated by society. To have a disability is to experience prejudice and exclusion, called ableism. If disability is understood as socially constructed, then the barriers ­society sets up become an issue of justice” (605). 88 Vanier, “Jean Vanier in Conversation with Pamela Wallin.” This is a transcript of Vanier, “Becoming Human,” Pamela Wallin Show. 89 Vanier, “Transforming our Hearts.” This text is Vanier’s remarks for the Templeton Prize News Conference. See also Vanier, “Jean Vanier Templeton Talk,” which is the text of his address for the Templeton Prize ceremony. His actual address included further spontaneous reflections, which you can view in the filmed ceremony: Vanier, “2015 Templeton Prize Ceremony for Jean Vanier at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Full Version.” 90 Cushing is quoted in Scrivener, “50 Years on L’Arche Harnessing the Power of ‘With.’” See also Vanier, “2015 Templeton Prize Ceremony for Jean Vanier at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Full Version.” In this video, people with disabilities literally “bring something to the table,” as Cushing puts it. The formal and staid Templeton Prize 2015 ceremony at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, erupts with a dynamic tableau around a table at the front of the church, where ­people with disabilities, Jean Vanier, and other friends join in symbolic feasting, lively music, and dancing. 91 Cushing quoted in Scrivener, “50 Years on L’Arche Harnessing the Power of ‘With.’” 92 Vanier, Community and Growth. 2nd revised ed., 263.

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  93 Quotation from a personal conversation with Doug Graves, Louise Cummings, and Dan Kirkegaard, recorded at Tsawaasen, b c , on 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Graves are from this conversation.   94 Vanier, “Interview with Jean Vanier,” 12.   95 Jones, “Church is for Everybody,” 25.  96 Ibid.   97 Scully identifies a similar problem in discussing vulnerability: “One of the difficulties of theorizing vulnerability, then, is that some people are thinking in terms of vulnerability as ontological, an unavoidable part of the fabric of all human life, while others are using it in a more limited sense to describe a state that relates to only some people, or in only some contexts, and that, in principle at least, can be avoided. Each of these understandings pushes some features of vulnerability to the fore while necessarily obscuring others” (Scully, “Disability and Vulnerability,” 206).   98 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 227.   99 Ibid. The World Council of Churches 2003, “A Church of All and for All – An Interim Statement” also critiques the notion of defining disability in terms of weakness. It asks: “Is disability really something that shows the weaknesses in human life? Is that in itself a limiting and oppressive interpretation? Do we not have to take another, more radical step? Is disability really something that is limiting? Is the language of disability as a ‘loss’ an adequate one at all, despite it being a stage of the journey undertaken by persons with disabilities themselves? Is a language of plurality not more adequate? To live with a disability is to live with other abilities and limitations that others do not have?” (5). 100 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 227. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 224, 228, 223. 105 Ibid., 228. Kristeva’s orientation as both a philosopher and a disability activist is seen in her beginning from a human rights principle that “the respect of rights requires firstly and before anything else the recognition and the respect for the singular person” (223). 106 Vanier, “Interview with Jean Vanier.” 107 Burghardt, “Brokenness / Transformation,” np.

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108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. Burghardt draws upon both disability studies critiques and her own experience as a L’Arche assistant. While she commends L’Arche for its counter-cultural values and focus on relationships, she also points to “criticisms directed at L’Arche which suggest that its discourse concerning people with disabilities has potentially oppressive connotations, and that its primarily insular nature has resulted in a lack of noticeable engagement with broader political concerns.” See my chapter 3 for Burghardt’s analysis of how telling stories about people with disabilities can end up objectifying them in a way that undercuts their own personhood and singularity. 110 Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 23–6. 111 Vanier, Signs of the Times, 57. 112 Vanier, Becoming Human, 98. 113 Vanier, Jean Vanier: Essential Writings, 109. In addition, see Vanier, The Poor at the Heart of L’Arche, 17. See also Whitney-Brown, introduction to Sharing Life. 114 Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 35. 115 Vanier, Made for Happiness, 44. Vanier goes on to state that “we should not make the mistake, however of thinking that pleasure is the end, for the end is the act itself. Rather, pleasure is given when the end is fully attained, as a bonus or consequential end” (ibid., 44–5). For discussion of Aristotle and Vanier’s understanding of pleasure see ibid., 37–75. See also Vanier, Signs of the Times, 57–9, which includes some critique of Aristotle as defining the human person as a rational being rather than a being centred in the heart. In addition, see my chapter 1 for more discussion of Vanier’s thinking on pleasure. 116 Kristeva and Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres, 35. 117 Ibid., 36–7. Kristeva seems to be less focused on sexual abuse, and more on the way in which unconscious desires on the part of caregivers can eclipse the singularity and agency of the vulnerable person. But her straightforward challenges about boundaries and contradictory desires resonate in our present historical moment when churches and L’Arche communities are all living with a heightened awareness of the potential for abuse and its debilitating effect on trust and agency. The United Church’s 2015 “Theologies of Disabilities Report” recommends “the movement from feeling threatened to feeling trust needs to occur within communities of faith” (United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 609). Both the United Church of Canada and all L’Arche communities around

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the world have recently strengthened education, safeguards, and policies around sexual abuse. 118 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 609. 119 Quotation from a personal conversation with Dennis Butcher, recorded in Winnipeg, 29 October 2015. All further quotations from Butcher are from this conversation. 120 United Church of Canada, “Open and Accessible,” 181. 121 Finding ways to welcome the diverse gifts of people of many abilities not only fosters community, but also fulfills the Church at large. Defining the Church as “the mutual exchange of gifts given by the power of the Spirit,” theologian Thomas Reynolds points out that “such gifts reside in all people, precisely amidst various disabilities and alleged limitations” (Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 245–6). 122 In “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and … Vulnerability,” Kristeva goes on to champion vulnerability, another value in which she and Vanier and the churches all have contiguous interest. An important ongoing project for Kristeva is the articulation of a new humanism. She declares, “By adding a fourth term (vulnerability) to the humanism inherited from the Enlightenment (liberty, equality, and fraternity), analytical listening inflects these three toward a concern for sharing, in which and thanks to which desire and its twin, suffering, make their way toward a constant renewal of the self, the other, and connection” (Kristeva, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and … Vulnerability,” 264). She is suggesting that vulnerability completes the classic Enlightenment societal values of liberty, equality, and fraternity and collectively orients them towards sharing and renewal. This suggests a political dimension of vulnerability as a communal value like fraternity, liberty, and equality. See this whole article for Kristeva’s discussion of vulnerability as integral to human identity. Kristeva poses the fundamental question: “Coming from different horizons, a question is emerging: how do we inscribe in the concept of the human itself – and therefore in philosophy and political practice – the constitutive part of the destructivity, vulnerability, and imbalance that are integral parts of the identity of the human race and, singularly, of the speaking subject?” (264). 123 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 227. 124 Ibid., 228. 125 Ibid., 229.

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Notes to pages 166–8 229

126 Vanier, “Remarks of Jean Vanier upon Receiving the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award,” 2. 127 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 209. 128 Vanier, Signs of the Times, 57. 129 Ibid., 58. Kristeva and Vanier’s different perspectives on pleasure result in her focusing on the complexities and contradictions of initial interior drives, while Vanier discovers pleasure in the fulfillment of activity that is going well. They both begin with affirming the crucial importance of self-knowledge, but then Kristeva looks to pleasure as rooted in interior desires that draw you into yourself, while Vanier sees pleasure as essentially an enticement to get over yourself. 130 Kristeva, “A Tragedy and a Dream,” 229. 131 Ibid. Kristeva connects the film Untouchables and Vanier not only because of a shared vision, but also because the film was produced with the support of the Association Simon de Cyrene, which since 2005 has been in partnership with L’Arche in France. See Association Simon de Cyrene, “Des liens étroits avec l’Arche.” Association Simon de Cyrene is primarily directed towards making homes in which “able-bodied people live alongside others who have been severely disabled by an accident” with the intention that the shared “houses cultivate fraternal, open, realistic and sympathetic relationships” (Association Simon de Cyrene Foundation, “Places to Live Together”). 132 Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” 457. 133 Shildrick, “Border Crossings,” 143. 134 Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” 457. 135 Ibid., 463. 136 The power of the Spirit Movers to touch hearts and erase social distinction was also seen at World Youth Day celebrations in 2002 in Toronto when they danced for Pope John Paul II and thousands of young people. Zenit: The World Seen from Rome, a daily Catholic online news source, remarked on the dancers’ capacity to touch the frail Pope, noting how “John Paul II was moved by the sight of L’Arche’s young men [sic] on Thursday, when the ‘Spirit Movers,’ an artistic group of the mentally handicapped [sic], performed a choreography” (“L’Arche Founder Tells Youths to “Learn from the Weak”).

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Notes to pages 168–77

137 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 97. 138 Eales, “(Dis)quiet in the Peanut Gallery,” 152. 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid. 141 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10. 142 Babcock, The Reversible World, 14. 143 Shildrick “Border Crossings,” 142. 144 Quotation from a personal conversation with Carl MacMillan, recorded in Richmond Hill, Ontario, on 14 April 2011. All further quotations from MacMillan are from this conversation. 145 This account is deliberately left anonymous. 146 Charles Taylor, “Transcendent Humanist in a Secular Age,” 86. 147 The core member in this account is deliberately left anonymous. 148 Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 103. 149 Quotation from a personal conversation with Louise Cummings, Doug Graves, and Dan Kirkegaard, recorded in Tsawwassen, B C , on 9 May 2011. All further quotations from Cummings are from this conversation. 150 Quotation from an interview with Mary Hillhouse by Alex Richmond in Vancouver, bc, on 23 November 2017. All further ­quotations from Hillhouse are from this interview. 151 Hillhouse, Family. 152 United Church of Canada, “Mending the World,” 7. 153 “The Gardening” was written in April 2012 and included in Hillhouse’s book, Family. The transcript of Hillhouse’s 2017 interview by Alex Richmond for this book included the text of “The Gardening.” 154 Reinders, “Understanding Humanity and Disability,” 37. 155 Ibid., 48. 156 From a related perspective, professors Myroslaw Tataryn and Maria Truchan-Tataryn also claim the full value of people with profound intellectual disabilities in God’s creation (Tataryn and TruchanTataryn, Discovering Trinity in Disability, 114). To Reinders’s assertion that there is no purpose for the human external to its being as God’s creature, they would add the mystery of full spiritual belonging. 157 Flemington, “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed.” 158 Vanier, Be Not Afraid, 80. 159 Vanier, Images of Love, Words of Hope, 57. 160 Vanier, Becoming Human, 135.

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Notes to page 180 231 afterword

  1 I am using “singular” in the way Kristeva commends, affirming every person as unique and irreplaceable. See chapter 4.   2 See Dorrell, “Experiences of Racism Break into the Open.” This description of the Final Decision Session concludes, “The Moderator, the Right Rev. Jordan Cantwell, thanked all those who offered their stories, saying, … ‘You have given us a gift; we as a church need to understand how to open up that gift fully. We’re not going to get there tonight or tomorrow.’ Before returning to business, the Moderator suggested that commissioners take the time to let this rare gift soak in rather than rushing to finish up with the closing proposals and moving on to closing worship and the installation of the new Moderator. This small step on the road to transformation may have been a true kairos moment for the church.”   3 Elliott, “General Council Special Report,” 35.   4 There are many backstories of intentional times of sharing and storytelling at G C43. The workshop “Disability and the Church: Re-Imagining Being Together,” held on Saturday 21 July 2018, was described as “addressing efforts to widen the scope of participation in the church, particularly to more fully include people with disabilities (including visible and invisible disabilities).” Colin Phillips, a lecturer in the school of social work at Ryerson University in Toronto with a doctorate in policy studies, made history as the first person who uses a wheelchair and communicates via a word board to be nominated for moderator of the United Church. “While my disability is integral to who I am, it does not define me or my call. I know this will challenge, maybe even anger, some in the church, but I’m hoping it will deepen our understanding of inclusion,” he said (United Church Observer, July–August 2018). The opening ceremony culminated in a procession from the “woods” into our “village” (the plenary space) where worship was led by thirty-year old United Church minister Miriam Spies of Hamilton Conference, the U CC representative to the World Council of Churches, who preached from her wheelchair: “I worry that we are quick to say, ‘Oh yes, Jesus, we’ll feed them,’ but then don’t accept the gifts the ‘hungry,’ those on the margins, bring to the feast. I worry that we say we seek right relations with Indigenous peoples yet try to water down our responsibilities. I worry that we use people to show how diverse we are but then ignore their struggles of daily service.” She added, “we forget that we are not alone. We forget that we have gifts

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to offer, but we don’t have everything and we need companions on this pilgrimage” (Spies, “You Feed Them!” Sermon for 43rd General Council Opening Worship). Instructions to commissioners urged “Watch for AS L interpreters making this worship accessible, enriching us with a language new to many of us.” United Church minister and intercultural observer Sharon Ballantyne spoke about using intercultural lenses to “aim for equity, live out commitments, question biases, challenge assumptions, notice who is missing and value all voices” (Monday 23 July 8:30 a.m. Livestream, beginning at 1:45:50. In her role as intercultural observer, Ballantyne later offers further comments on Tuesday 24 July, 8:30 a.m. session, 2:02 ff.) During the same morning session on Monday 23 July, Tracy Odell of Knob Hill United Church in Scarborough, Ontario, one of the presenters of the “Disability and the Church: Re-Imagining Being Together” workshop, posted an observation that “Currently GC E12 includes only sexual orientation and gender identities, racial and gender justice, and right relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Missing: people with disabilities.” Concerns about unthinking assumptions, privilege, and marginalization were also expressed by people from rural congregations, who found the proposals for restructuring the Church often were made with urban rather than rural communities in mind.   5 Peacock, Philip, “Are You Ready to Be Discombobulated.”   6 United Church of Canada, “G C43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Decision Session 5 – 11:00 am,” 46:00–51:00 of livestream.   7 All of the Final Decision Session can be viewed online at United Church of Canada, “G C43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm.” Douglas Walfall’s remarks are from 37:30–55:00 of the livestream.   8 United Church of Canada, “G C43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm,” beginning at 1:20:30 of livestream.   9 Ibid., beginning at 1:21:37 of livestream. 10 All testimonies of people who chose to speak to the motion of asking for forgiveness can be viewed at United Church of Canada, “GC 43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm,” from 118:28–3:24:40 of livestream. 11 While this session explicitly asked White people to step away from the microphones and give the floor to their “racialized relations,” the final contributor was a White man, Colin Phillips, who spoke about marginalization and exclusion from the perspective of his physical

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disability. By the end of the session, it was clear that dismantling structures of exclusion and injustice will be long journeys that require a radical openness to unknown future possibilities. As Margit Shildrick asserts: I am committed to the view that broadly postmodernist alternatives both more effectively analyse and deconstruct the structures that maintain those amazing normativities, and mobilise new and more creatively positive ways of thinking and feeling about difference. What many critics find intolerable is that the question of what comes next is deliberately left open … There is, in short, no programme or plan of action, no right or wrong way of proceeding, but rather so compelling a critique of the exclusionary structures of modernism that have suppressed the subjectivity and sexuality of disabled people that a call for radical transformation is the only adequate response (Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality, 170–1). For Shildrick, as for those who intervened at GC43 to share their experience of racialization and disability, “the first stage is to think differently. What follows on from that cannot be determined in advance” (176). 12 Vanier quoted in T., “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 25. 13 Rumi, The Essential Rumi, 193–4. 14 Vanier, Life’s Great Questions, 137. 15 Vanier, Our Life Together, 459. 16 United Church of Canada, “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 607. 17 Quotation from a personal conversation with Ian Macdonald, recorded in Victoria, 23 January 2012. All further quotations from Macdonald are from this conversation. 18 United Church of Canada, “G C43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm,” beginning at 2:16:00 of livestream. All of Lansdowne’s contribution is in 2:10:40–2:19:44 of the livestream. 19 Ibid., 2:16:58–2:18:16. 20 Brown and Vanier, “‘Your Questions Come, I Sense, from Your Loneliness.’” 21 Rumi, The Essential Rumi, 193. 22 John 12:1–11. 23 Faith and Sharing retreats are described in chapter 2, note 7. 24 This could not have happened without people embodying diverse life experiences. As Linda Butler notes in chapter 4, she couldn’t tell her Richmond Hill United Church congregation to dance, but the members of L’Arche could.

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25 Mathias is quoted in Vanier, Our Life Together, 541–2. Many writers explore the relationship between brokenness and blessing: three books that use Vanier and L’Arche are Nouwen, Life of the Beloved; Mosteller, Body Broken, Body Blessed; and Young, Brokenness and Blessing: Towards a Biblical Spirituality. 26 United Church of Canada, “G C43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm,” 2:16:04–33 of livestream. 27 Davis, “Many Faces, One Humanity,” 24, quoted in prologue. 28 Vanier quoted in T., “A Gentle Hallelujah,” 25. For a thoughtful reflection on current similarities between Vanier’s vision and the United Church’s Mission and Service, see McGonegal, “Stories of Sacred Community.” See also McGonegal, “On Vanier, Voice, and Disability.” 29 United Church of Canada, “G C43 Livestream: Friday July 27 – Final Decision Session – 4:25 pm,” 2:39:46–2:45:00 of livestream.

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– Made for Happiness: Discovering the Meaning of Life with Aristotle. Translated by Kathryn Spink. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2001. – A Network of Friends: The Letters of Jean Vanier to the Friends and Communities of L’Arche. Vol. 1, 1974–1983, edited by John Sumarah. Hantsport, N S : Lancelot Press, 1994. – A Network of Friends: The Letters of Jean Vanier to the Friends and Communities of L’Arche. Vol. 2, 1974–1983, edited by John Sumarah. Hantsport, N S : Lancelot Press, 1994. – Our Journey Home: Rediscovering a Common Humanity beyond Our Differences. Ottawa: Novalis, 1997. – Our Life Together: A Memoir in Letters. Toronto: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007. – The Poor at the Heart of L’Arche. Trosly-Breuil: Les Chemins de L’Arche – La Ferme, 1991. – “The Prophetic Cry: Interview with Jean Vanier.” Interviewed by Timothy Kearney. The Crane Bag 5, no. 1 (1981): 79–85. – “Remarks of Jean Vanier upon Receiving the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award of the Pacem in Terris Coalition of Davenport, Iowa.” L’Arche U S A, 7 July 2013. Accessed 21 November 2018. http://www. larcheusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Jean-Vanier-Remarks-forPacem-in-Terris-Final.pdf. – Signs of the Times: Seven Paths of Hope for a Troubled World. Translated by Ann Shearer. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2013. – “Transforming our Hearts.” Templeton Prize News Conference, British Academy, London, 11 March 2015. Accessed 23 September 2018. http://jean-vanier.org/sites/default/files/pdf/vanier__news_conference_­ statement.pdf. – “2015 Templeton Prize Ceremony for Jean Vanier at St. Martin-in-theFields (Full Version).” Templeton Prize, 19 May 2015. Accessed 21 November 2018. http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue= 1andv=6zXq5zso0oo. – “The Vision of Jesus: Living Peaceably in a Wounded World.” In Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness, by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, 59–75. Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 2008. Vanier, Jean, with François-Xavier Maigre. A Cry Is Heard: My Path to Peace. Translated by Anne Louise Mahoney. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2018. – Un cri se fait entendre: Mon chemin vers la paix. Montrouge: Bayard, 2017.

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Vanier, Thérèse. One Bread, One Body: The Ecumenical Experience of L’Arche. Ottawa: Novalis, 1997. – Nick: Man of the Heart. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1992. Wall, Benjamin S. Welcome as a Way of Life: A Practical Theology of Jean Vanier. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016. Walsh, Anne Marie. “Jean Vanier: An Alternative Voice for the Social Work Profession.” Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought 30, no. 4 (2011): 340–57. doi:10.1080/15426432.2011. 619898. Watson, Nick J., and Simon Kumar. “Sport, Theology, and the Special Olympics: A Christian Theological Reflection.” Journal of Disability and Religion 21, no. 2 (2017): 245–56. doi:10.1080/23312521.2017.12 98492. Welling, Linda A., Merwan Engineer, and Janet Whitney-Brown. “Choosing Life Together: Modelling Community among Persons with Intellectual Disabilities.” 51st Annual Conference, Canadian Economics Association, CW EN Session: Disabilities and Public Policy, St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, N S , 3 June, 2017. Session paper. Accessed 3 February 2018. http://economics.ca/2017/en/program.php. White, Allon. Carnival, Hysteria, Writing: Collected Essays and Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. White, Peter Gordon. Introduction to Voices and Visions: 65 Years of the United Church of Canada, edited by Peter Gordon White. Etobicoke: United Church Publishing House, 1990. Whitney-Brown, Carolyn. “The Club.” Letters of L’Arche, March 1996, 13–15. – “Henri at Daybreak: Celebration and Hard Work.” In Remembering Henri: The Life and Legacy of Henri Nouwen, edited by Gerald S. Twomey and Claude Pomerleau, 119–37. Ottawa: Novalis, 2006. – Introduction to Jean Vanier: Essential Writings. Selected with an introduction by Carolyn Whitney-Brown, 13–56. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2008. – “Jean Vanier: Remembering an Icon, Not an Idol.” Sojourners, 20 May, 2019. Accessed 7 June 2019. https://sojo.net/articles/jean-vanierremembering-icon-not-idol. – Sharing Life: Stories of L’Arche Founders. New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2019. Wilkins-Laflamme, Sarah. “Normalizing Denominational Statistics with Demographic Data: The Case of the United Church of Canada.” Canadian Review of Sociology 49, no. 2 (May 2012): 173–87.

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Wilson, Hilary. My Life Together: L’Arche Communities and the Challenge of Unity. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2004. Wilson, Lois M. I Want to Be in That Number: Cool Saints I Have Known. Toronto: Printed by the author, 2014. Wolfensberger, Wolf. “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche.” In A Selective Overview of Jean Vanier and the Movement of L’Arche, edited by Wolf Wolfensberger, 10–17. Toronto: National Institute on Mental Retardation, 1973. Wolfensberger, Wolf, ed. A Selective Overview of Jean Vanier and the Movement of L’Arche. Toronto: National Institute on Mental Retardation, 1973. World Council of Churches, “A Church of All and for All: An Interim Statement.” Ecumenical Disabilities Advocates Network, September 2003, 1–17. Accessed 23 September 2018. http://www.oikoumene.org/ en/resources/documents/commissions/faith-and-order/ix-other-studyprocesses/a-church-of-all-and-for-all-an-interim-statement. – “The Unity of the Church and the Handicapped in Society.” Section 4 of “A Report on the Discussions by John Deschner.” Faith and Order, Louvain 1971. Study Reports and Documents. Faith and Order Paper No. 59: 191–2. Accessed 23 September 2018. http://archive.org/stream/ wccfops2.065#page/n1/mode/2up. – “WC C Work on Persons with Disabilities: History.” World Council of Churches. Accessed 23 September 2018. http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/ what/jpc/hist.html. Wyatt, Joan. “The 1970s: Voices from the Margins.” In The United Church of Canada: A History, edited by Don Schweitzer, 119–38. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. Young, Frances. Brokenness and Blessing: Towards a Biblical Spirituality. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2007. – ed. Encounter with Mystery: Reflections on L’Arche and Living with Disability. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1997. Zournazi, Mary, and Jean Vanier. “On Communion: Reflections on Dementia, Tenderness, and Belonging.” Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health 18, no. 2 (2016): 108–23. doi:10.1080/19349637.2015.104.

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abjection: Kristeva on, 42, 158, 166, 224n78 agency, xii, 15, 104, 136–8; causal, 140–7; distributive, 166–73; of inversion, 147–54; of prayer, 138–40; responsible, 173–7; and story-telling, 93, 137; in weakness, 154–66 Airhart, Phyllis, 18, 61, 197n4, 201n54 alliance-building, 4­–5, 185 anger: United Church on, 145, 157, 182, 184, 187; Vanier on, 28–9, 156–8 anguish, 146, 187; Vanier on, 7, 13–14, 157–8, 184 Arbuckle, Gerald, 94, 98–9, 113, 116 Aristotle, 12, 132; Poetics, 15, 115, 130, 137, 163; Vanier on, 4, 40–1. See also pleasure assemblage, 167–8, 170 Babcock, Barbara, 150, 170 Baines, Susannah, 93, 124, 127, 133–4

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Bakhtin, Mikhail, 148–9, 152, 169– 70, 179. See also carnival baptism, 77, 141–2, 150–1 Bastedo, Mary, 110–13 being: L’Arche as a way of being, 8, 25, 137, 144, 149, 222n43 belonging, 97, 118, 144, 170–1, 230n156. See also community; welcome Bennett, Jane, 167–8, 170–2 Betcher, Sharon, 145–6 Bible study, 81, 174–5 body, 20, 138, 145, 168, 198n15; and L’Arche, 95–6, 112, 163 brokenness, 56, 118, 155, 188; Vanier on, 155, 157–8, 162. See also pain; suffering; vulnerability; weakness Brooks, David, 156 Brown, Ian, 49, 185 Burghardt, Madeline, 98, 103–4, 162 Butcher, Dennis, 80­–3, 131–2, 164, 213n72 Butler, Linda, 101–2, 128, 167–9, 222n43, 233n24

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Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, 8 Canadian Council of Churches, 48, 74, 92, 202n70 Cantwell, Jordan, 181–2 carnival, 148–50, 153–4, 163, 172; Bakhtin on, 127, 152–3, 169–70. See also inversion Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic Church Catholic spirituality, 63–4, 89­–91, 106–7, 110–13, 141–2 C B C (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 9, 11, 17, 32–4, 36–7 Cedar Glen Retreat, 56–60, 112, 205n8 celebration, 67, 97, 105, 187; and L’Arche, 11, 42, 105, 136; Vanier on, 10, 42, 126–9, 184. See also dancing; laughter change, 127, 152; and L’Arche, 11, 104, 130­–1, 154; and the United Church, 4, 10, 26, 181; Vanier on, 11, 45, 126, 144, 158. See also transformation Cleveland Retreat, 21, 23­–4 Collins, Bill, 125, 150–1 comedy, 115, 130 communion, 12, 41, 133, 155–6, 161, 184; sacrament, 25, 46, 50–1, 89–90, 106. community, 105, 137; and conflict, 119–26; and L’Arche, 54, 109, 148–9, 151–2; and the United Church, 4, 94, 140, 164, 172–3, 188; Vanier on, 10, 41–2, 129– 31, 155–9, 162–3, 184. See also United Church of Canada: communities of faith

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conflict, 29, 31, 45, 71–3, 119–26 Cook, Alan, 102–4 core members. See L’Arche: core members critical disability studies, 154, 162, 194n20 Cummings, Louise, 45–7, 80, 106– 10, 120–1, 174 Cushing, Pamela, 96, 99–100, 105, 116, 144–5, 159 dancing, 23, 55, 136, 146, 153; in worship, 167–70 Davis, Wade, xi, 3, 187–8 death, 97, 134–5, 158; in L’Arche, xi–xii, 95–7, 100–1 decision-making, 122–3, 141–2, 145, 151–2 dementia, 132–4 desire, 29, 31, 163, 167, 169 difference, 97, 154; and L’Arche, 105, 114, 143, 151, 173; and the United Church, 4–5, 10, 155 disability: and cultural construction, 145, 147, 154, 158–9, 225n87; Kristeva on, 97, 161; and L’Arche, 8, 49, 118, 128; stories, 98, 103, 105, 116, 124; and the United Church, 4, 40, 48, 163–4, 187, 231n4. See also diversity; United Church of Canada documents: “Theologies of Disabilities Report” diversity: and L’Arche, 11, 70, 143, 165; and the United Church, 4–5, 10, 61, 145, 171. See also difference dominant culture, 5, 31–2, 78, 126 dominant privilege, 131, 181–2, 185 Douglas, Maya, 182

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Eales, Lindsay, 168–9 ecumenism: and L’Arche, 7, 47–53, 83­, 118; struggles, 46, 53, 70–4, 78, 82, 89; and the United Church, 48, 70–1, 74, 91–2, 205n12; and Vanier, 23–4, 57­–60, 62, 65, 90. See also Cedar Glen Retreat; Cleveland Retreat; Naramata Retreat Eiesland, Nancy, 145–6, 198n15 Elliot, Trisha, 180 Enwright, Maggie, 11–12, 87–9, 158–9 Erevelles, Nirmala, 137, 147–8 eucharist. See Catholic spirituality; communion; ecumenism; Roman Catholic Church Faith and Light, 184, 190n9 Faith and Sharing, 45, 186–7, 190n9, 205n8, 206n12 First Nations, 56, 80, 152, 184–5, 188; welcome ceremony, 182–3 Flemington, Peter, “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed,” xv, 30–1, 139 forgiveness, 73, 145, 148, 180, 182 freedom, 127, 148–9, 162, 168, 181–2; Vanier on, 29, 42, 49, 144, 177 friendship, 7, 41, 128, 133–4, 165 Frye, Northrop, 8, 32 fun, 7, 42, 54, 128; Vanier on, 28, 126–9, 136, 154, 165. See also celebration; dancing; laughter General Council. See United Church of Canada, General Councils George, Thelus, 99­–106, 130

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gifts: in churches, 85, 118, 128, 164, 228n121; in L’Arche, 11, 13, 25, 86, 152, 173; Vanier on, 58, 62, 159 Glass, Eileen, 66 Godfrey, Lynn, 80, 85–7, 128, 147– 9, 151–2 gospel, 20, 39, 133, 179–80, 186–7 Graves, Doug, 14, 61, 79, 116–21, 179; on community, 122–4, 172– 3; on ecumenism, 89, 210n50; and the United Church, xiv, 61, 65, 76; on weakness, 134, 159– 60, 161–2 Greig, Jason Reimer, 146 Haliburton, Gordon and Edith, 69–70, 72 Hall, Stuart, 153–4 Harshaw, Jill, 124 healing, 21, 118, 156, 184; and L’Arche, 73, 75, 109, 128, 131; and the United Church, 74, 161, 175 heart: L’Arche and, 8, 68, 121–2, 138–9, 146; Vanier on, 11, 21, 36–7, 45, 225n89 Henry, Gord, 138–9, 141–2 hierarchy, 5, 10, 46, 141, 169 Hillhouse, Mary, 129, 174–7 history, xv, 5–6, 12, 103, 137 home, 7, 17, 23, 54, 98, 128; group homes, 68–9. See also belonging; welcome hospitality, 54, 67, 99–100. See also home; welcome How, Gordon, xiv, 34–6, 62–5 human, 142, 156, 164, 169, 228n122; L’Arche on, 11, 160; Vanier on, 10, 130, 159, 173–4,

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177. See also Vanier books: Becoming Human humour. See fun; laughter Humphries, Helen, xi–xii, xv, 91 hurt, 23, 80, 144–5, 157, 185. See also brokenness; conflict; pain; woundedness identity, 11, 67, 98–99, 103, 158. See also L’Arche: L’Arche Identity and Mission statement; singularity; stories: about identity image of God, 40, 164 imagination, 20, 31–2, 105, 120, 145–6. See also social imaginary impairment, 138, 146, 159, 224–5n84 inclusion, 148, 171, 176, 196n35 inclusivity, 43, 105, 130, 165; as United Church value, 10, 48, 75, 173 Indigenous Peoples. See First Nations intellectual disabilities, 98, 103–4, 124, 141–8, 156; and L’Arche, 7–8, 11, 32, 85 intercultural, 4, 49, 140–1, 173, 180–2. See also alliance-building interfaith, 8, 11, 49, 51, 74 inversion, 3, 12, 100, 159; dynamics of, 20, 127, 130, 147–8; as more than reversal, 149, 150, 153; as renewal, 166, 180; of social order, 14, 20, 25, 35, 153– 4. See also carnival Jesus: and L’Arche, xiii, 79, 87–8, 179; Jesus-language and the United Church, 57–9, 74, 110; Vanier on Jesus, 22–3, 38, 112,

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138, 160; Vanier on following Jesus, 23–4, 45, 62, 65 Jiembou, Carno Tchuani, 188 Jones, Chelsea Temple, 160 justice, 94, 169; and L’Arche, 10, 49; and the United Church, 48, 135, 145, 181–5, 188. See also peacemaking Kearney, Richard, 93, 137 Kerman, Lloyd, 79, 113–16, 130, 138, 217n35 Kirkegaard, Dan, 80, 83–5, 121–2, 140 Kristeva, Julia: commended by Vanier, 158; commends Vanier, 165–6; critique of Vanier, 161­–5; 226n105; Leur regard perce nos ombres, 40, 42, 162–3, 204n92, 224n75. See also abjection; death; desire; disability; identity; singularity; vulnerability Lansdowne, Carmen, 184–5, 187 L’Arche: core members, 8, 15, 76–7; early history, 6–8, 49–56, 60–5; L’Arche International, 9, 71, 118–21, 179, 190n10; L’Arche International Church Leaders Group, xiv, 61, 91–2, 118, 210n50; “L’Arche Identity and Mission” statement, 11, 14, 195n27; L’Arche Ivory Coast, 106–8, 12; L’Arche Trosly, 7, 35, 50, 106, 139; scholarship about, 9, 192n18, 194n20; and the United Church, 5–8, 26–34, 49–56, 60–92, 164–77. See also being; body; celebration; change; community; death; difference;

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disability; diversity; ecumenism; gifts; healing; heart; human; intellectual disabilities; Jesus; justice; leadership; life; listening; mission; mutuality; prayer; relationships; stories; togetherness; unity; vulnerability L’Arche Canada: L’Arche Canada Spirituality Commission, 175; National Assembly, 183 L’Arche Comox Valley, 12, 87–9, 212–13n72; L’Arche Daybreak, Richmond Hill, xi–xiv, 91, 95–6, 98–104, 113– 16; beginning, 7­, 49–56, 62; Retirement Program, 129–30; and the United Church, 60–1, 77­–80, 141–2, 167–72 L’Arche Edmonton, 62, 81, 111 L’Arche Hamilton, 80, 85–7, 128, 147–8, 151–2 L’Arche Homefires, Wolfville, 66–76, 83, 143 L’Arche New Dawn, Saint John, 83–5 L’Arche Shiloah Greater Vancouver, 14, 34–5, 89, 174–7; beginning, 62–5, involvement of United Church ministers, 84–5, 117–18, 120–1, 125–6, 149–51 L’Arche Sudbury, 86, 108 L’Arche Toronto, 62, 144 L’Arche Winnipeg, 62, 66, 80–3, 164 laughter, 28, 54–5, 126–32, 218n53, 218–19n54; Vanier and, 27, 127, 129, 131, 223–4n68 leadership: in L’Arche, 71–2, 80, 103, 146–152, 168–9; in the United Church, 17, 26, 80, 121–6, 152–3. See also United

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Church of Canada documents: “Leadership From the Margins” Leckie, Judith, 63–5, 90 legislation. See policy life: and L’Arche, 8, 11, 88, 95–7, 165; Vanier on, 10, 13, 129, 133, 184. See also community; sharing; togetherness life together. See togetherness listening, 94, 133–4; in L’Arche, 124, 126, 144–5, 146, 152; in the United Church, 108, 180–2, 188; Vanier on, 12, 22, 29, 158, 188 love, 75, 97, 119, 144, 147; Vanier on, 22–3, 27, 100, 114, 161 LY (Loretta), 144–5, 160, 162 MacDonald, Daniel, 181 Macdonald, Ian, 124–6, 129, 134–5 MacMillan, Carl, 170–1 “Man Alive: Jean Vanier,” 194n19, 197n1 “Man Alive with Mother Teresa and Jean Vanier,” 32–3, 194n19 Massey, Doreen, 47, 55, 65, 84, 212n72 Mathias, Patrick, 13, 187 Mawita’mk Society, 183 McDougall, Warren, 101, 138–9, 141–2, 167–8, 172 McLeod, Bruce, 17–18, 24–6, 37–8, 42–3, 58–9 McNeil, John, 68–70, 83 Milton, Beverley, 19–20 Milton, Ralph, 15, 19–20, 24­–5, 94, 133

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mission: of Jesus 57; L’Arche and, 11, 14, 100, 109, 146; United Church and, 62–3, 151–2 Moore, Jeff and Debra, 67­–76, 78, 83, 143, 148 Morris, Wayne, 94, 156–7 Morgan, Frank H., 26–30, 33–4, 200n43 Morrison, George, 17, 56, 60–1, 63, 209n46 Mosteller, Sue, 17, 64, 86, 111; and the United Church, 53, 57, 59, 76–9 Mowat, Harriet, 93, 124, 127, 133–4 mutuality: in dance, 168–70; in L’Arche, 11, 86, 97, 114, 151–2; in the United Church, 10, 75, 114, 151–2, 173; Vanier on, 12, 22, 155, 158, 165. See also community; friendship; relationships; sharing mystery, 29, 59, 138, 157, 160 Naramata Retreat, 45–7, 106–7, 112, 212–13n72 narrative: counternarratives, 93, 127; narrative co-opting, 103–4; narrative discrepancies, 98, 119, 137; narrative theory, 93, 96, 99–100, 105, 124. See also story Nelson, Penny, 181 network, 65, 166–7, 170, 172 Newroth, Ann, 7, 50–6 Newroth, Steve: and Daybreak, 7, 50–6, 60, 198n16, 208n40; and ecumenism, 51–3, 207n26, 210n52; and L’Arche Shiloah Greater Vancouver, 63–4; on mission of assistants, 146; and

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new L’Arche communities, 211n54 normalization, 53–5, 67–9, 159, 208n30 Nouwen, Henri, 69, 76–81, 88, 101, 213n78 Other, 29, 31, 145–6, 154, 181 Pacem in Terris Award, 136, 140, 165–6 pain, 114, 119–21, 145, 156–7, 180; Vanier on, 157, 158, 160, 184. See also brokenness; hurt; suffering; woundedness Park, Ha Na, 182 Paterson, Gary, 37, 127–8, 133, 152–3, 183 peace: as an experience, 21, 108, 111, 114, 166; as a message, 22, 45, 135, 177, 212n70; movements, 48–9, 136, 185, 190n10 Peacock, Philip, 180–1 Phillips, Colin, 180, 231n4, 232–3n11 place, 9–10, 37, 155, 202n76; sense of place, 65­–7, 84–5, 212– 13n72; specificity of place, 3, 29, 44, 47, 55 pleasure, 12, 55, 144, 196n35, 222n43; Aristotle on, 4, 40–1, 127, 163; Kristeva on, 161, 163, 229n129; Vanier on, 3, 40–3, 162–3, 166, 229n129 policy, 22, 53, 196n35, 198n16, 231n4 poor, 10, 23, 56, 130, 159 Porter, Beth, 77 power, 137, 147–8, 155, 161, 175; of stories, 99, 103, 105; power

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dynamics, 22, 47, 98, 137, 220–1n22 prayer: agency of prayer, 138–40; and L’Arche, 86, 108, 117–18, 128, 139; and the United Church, 21, 25, 52, 175, 182; and Vanier, 45, 59–60, 65, 129, 136 protagonist, 32, 115, 140 Protestant, 6, 118, 149–50, 172–3, 174; Protestant understanding of saints, 37, 39 Protestant-Catholic divide, 46–7, 50–2, 71­–2, 77–8, 107 Pui-lan, Kwok, 88, 209n47 racialized persons, 181–2, 196n35, 232–3n11 Reinders, Hans S., 176, 230n56 relationships, 153, 161, 163, 165– 6, 173–4; in L’Arche, 11, 103, 114–15, 161, 165–6; Vanier on, 23, 28, 38, 155–6, 160; in the United Church, 145, 152–5, 182 reversal, 22, 32, 46, 148, 154; in Aristotle, 12, 115–16, 130; in carnival, 148–9, 150, 153, 196n35 revitalization, 43, 94, 99, 113–19, 124 Reynolds, Keith, 78–9, 95–8, 114–5 Reynolds, Thomas E., 114, 156–7, 173­–4, 224–5n84, 228n121 Ricoeur, Paul, 97–8, 216n13 Roman Catholic Church, 38–9, 50–3, 61, 71–4, 76–8, 81–3; eucharist, 45–7, 57–8, 110–13. See also Cedar Glen Retreat; ­ecumenism; Naramata Retreat

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Rotterman, Peter, xiv, 98, 212–3n72 Rumi, 183–4, 185 saint, 203n78, 203n80; and the United Church, 37–40, 197n1; and Vanier, xvi, 16, 31–3, 37–9, 202–3n76 Schweitzer, Don, 62, 203n80 serious, 27–9, 42, 127, 128–9, 218–19n54 sexuality, 22, 196n35; sexual abuse, 156, 190–1n10, 227–8n117 sharing, 38, 65–6, 166, 228n122; faith sharing, 128, 140, 169, 175, 187; sharing life, 11, 45, 137, 163, 166. See also Faith and Sharing Shearer, Ann, 208n30 Shepherd, Loraine MacKenzie, 80, 209n47 Shildrick, Margrit, 154, 167, 170, 194n20, 201n55, 232–3n11 Shorten, Robert, 52–3 silence, 79, 131, 140, 187, 191 singularity: Kristeva on, 145, 157–8, 161–5, 226n105, 227–8n117 slow, 133, 151–2, 182, 219n68, 222n52. See also time Smith, Bob (Robert), 52, 56, 58–9, 74, 87 social imaginary, 61–2, 76, 82, 140, 210n52 social justice. See justice social transformation, 5, 136–7, 163 solidarity, 42, 80, 85, 93, 165 Spirit Movers, 167–70 Stallybrass, Peter, 20, 29, 31, 66–7 stories, 80, 94; of conflict, 71–3, 119–26; Aristotle on, 115, 130,

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137; and death, 95–8; dynamics of transformation, 3–4, 12; of exclusion, 180–2; gospel stories, xiii, 88, 186–7; about identity, 98–113; of intellectual desires and fears, 132–5; and L’Arche, 95–106, 113–16, 119–20, 129– 32; and memory, 6, 97–8, 216n13; and narrative theory, 93, 96; and places, 47; problems with, 103–4, 119, 124; of revitalization, 113–19; United Church stories, xiv, 61–3, 180–2, 196n35, 231­–2n4; Vanier stories, 19–24, 32, 34, 38, 65. See also narrative Strong, Keith, 68–70, 143–4, 148, 220–1n22 subjectivity, 31, 147–8, 232–3n11 success, 37, 85, 155 suffering, 115, 156–7, 184, 187–8, 224–5n84; and laughter, 15, 130–1; Vanier on, 27–8, 42, 60, 184, 225n86. See also brokenness; pain; vulnerability; weakness Swinton, John, 8, 9, 13, 93, 137; with Mowat and Baines, 93, 124, 127, 133–4 Sylliboy, Rosie, 183 Taylor, Charles, 61–2, 150, 172, 210–11n52 Taylor, James (J.T.), 16, 197n1 Templeton Prize, 7, 159, 225n89, 225n90 tender: as fuel source, 136–7; as gentle, xi, 13, 133; as offer, xi, 4, 44, 80; as small boat, 16, 24; as tender ship, 93–4, 104, 130–1. See also tenderness

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tenderness, 11–14, 187, 196n35; Vanier on, 12–13, 157, 163, 165, 188. See also weakness; woundedness; vulnerability theology, 26, 118, 138, 155, 160. See also United Church of Canada documents time, 122­–3, 133, 150, 152, 231n2 Todd, Anne, 100–1 togetherness: faith together, 57–8, 77, 190n9, 205n8; L’Arche on being together, 96–7, 121–2, 128, 148, 154–5; the United Church on being together, 173, 175, 185, 188, 231n4; Vanier on living together, 9, 41, 49, 126–7 Tourneur, Donna, 91–2 tragedy, 28, 42, 115, 130 transformation, 92, 120, 153–4, 185 trust, 11, 134, 136, 155, 161 Turner, Gordon, 79–80 United Church of Canada: Cedar Glen Retreat, 56–60, 112, 205n8; communities of faith, 4, 48, 155, 227–8n117; as dying, xv–xvi, 74, 153, 218n46; history, 6, 17–18, 25–6, 189–90n8, 197– 8n4; Intercultural and Dominant Privilege Lenses, 181–2, 185; intercultural church, 126, 140, 173, 196n35; intercultural observers, 181–2; and L’Arche, 5–8, 26–34, 49–56, 60–92, 164– 77; Naramata Retreat, 45–7, 106–7, 112, 212–13n72; A New Creed, 13, 97, 216n12; New Curriculum, xv, 26–30, 200n43; and Vanier, xv–xvi, 16–49, 56–60, 65, 72, 90. See also

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Index

anger; change; community; difference; disability; diversity; ecumenism; healing; inclusive; Jesus; justice; leadership; listening; mission; mutuality; prayer; relationships; saint; stories; togetherness; unity; vulnerability United Church of Canada congregations: Comox, 11–12, 87–9, 212–13n72; Deer Lake, 107; East Burnaby, 84; First Metropolitan, 132; First United, Port Credit, 139; First United, Vancouver, 111, 117, 184–5; Jubilee, 174; Richmond Hill, 51–3, 77–9, 99–101, 114–15, 141–2, 167–70; Sherwood Park, 81, 164; South Burnaby, 120, 125–6, 149–51, 153–4, 164; Stewart, 91; Sylvan, 132; Tsawwassen, 85 United Church of Canada documents: “The Handicapped and the Wholeness of the Family of God,” 48, 206–7n17; “Intercultural Ministries: Living into Transformation,” 195n26; “Leadership from the Margins,” 126, 140; “Mending the World,” 6, 74, 175, 212n70; “Open and Accessible: Ministries with Persons with Disabilities,” 159, 164, 206–7n17; “Theologies of Disabilities Report,” 4–5, 10, 40, 145, 155, 184–5 United Church of Canada General Councils: 25th General Council, xv, 16–26, 37, 57, 87; 27th General Council, 48; 34th General Council, 212n70; 42nd General Council, 4–5, 10, 40;

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43rd General Council, 180–5, 187–8, 231n2, 231–2n4, 232–3n11 United Church Observer, 16, 21–6, 58, 87, 160–1, 180 unity: in L’Arche, 10–11, 109, 136, 138; in the United Church, 6, 8, 10, 48; struggle for, 89, 184, 209n47; Vanier on unity among churches, 21, 60, 62, 65, 90 Van Buren, Bill, xiii, 7, 77, 98, 132 Vanier, Jean: beginning L’Arche, 7–10, 190–1n10; Cedar Glen Retreat, 56–60, 112, 205n8; Cleveland Retreat, 21, 23­–4; critiques of, 156–8, 160–6, 190n10; Daybreak visit, 99–100; 25th General Council address, 16–25, 37, 57, 87; Homefires visit, 75; and Kristeva, 40, 42, 157–66, 204n92, 224n75; Naramata Retreat, 45–7, 106–7, 112, 212– 13n72; and the United Church, xv–xvi, 16–49, 56–60, 65, 72, 90; and Vatican II, 49; World Council of Churches 6th Assembly address, 14, 34–7, 202n70. See also anger; anguish; Aristotle; brokenness; celebration; change; community; ecumenism; freedom; fun; gifts; heart; human; Jesus; laughter; life; listening; love; mutuality; pain; pleasure; prayer; relationships; saint; stories; suffering; tenderness; togetherness; unity; vulnerability; weakness; woundedness Vanier, awards: Pacem in Terris Award, 136, 140, 165–6;

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Templeton Prize, 7, 159, 225n89, 225n90 Vanier, books: A Cry is Heard, 90, 190–1n10; A Network of Friends, Vol I, 21, 23, 45, 146, 194n19; A Network of Friends, Vol II, 36–7, 62; Becoming Human, 11, 60, 133, 159, 177, 225n86; Befriending the Stranger, 157; Be Not Afraid, 41–2, 176; Community and Growth: Our Pilgrimage Together, 42, 127; Community and Growth, 2nd revised edition, 4, 130, 156, 159, 223–4n68; Eruption to Hope, 16, 18, 30; Images of Love, Words of Hope, 176–7, 223n64; Jean Vanier: Essential Writings, 155; Leur regard perce nos ombres, 40, 42, 162–3, 204n92, 224n75; Made for Happiness, 41–2, 163, 204n86, 227n115; Our Journey Home, xiv, 13, 156–7, 225n86; Our Life Together, 13, 45, 65, 158, 182, 207n20; Signs of the Times, 49, 162–3, 166 Vanier, interviews: 1965 on CBC, 9, 17; in Flemington, “If You’re Not There, You’re Missed,” xv, 30–1, 41; in Morgan, “The Ark,” 26–30; in United Church Observer, 160–1; with Wallin, 159; with Zournazi, 12–13 Vogel, Joan, 139 Vogel, Paul, 183 vulnerability, 94, 142, 156–7, 162, 223n64, 226n97; Kristeva on, 228n122; and L’Arche, 88, 92, 122; Thomas Reynolds on, 114;

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and the United Church, 40, 126, 155, 157; Vanier on, 155–6, 158. See also brokenness; suffering; tenderness; weakness Walfall, Douglas, 180–1 weakness: Graves on, 116, 134, 162; Kristeva on, 161–2, 165; Thomas Reynolds on, 114, 224– 5n84; Vanier on, 10, 21–2, 138, 154–7, 159–66; World Council of Churches on, 226n99. See also brokenness; vulnerability; woundedness welcome, 10, 12, 54, 98, 222n43 White, Allon, 20, 28–9, 31, 66–7 Whitney-Brown, Carolyn, 129–30, 190–1n10, 195–6n32 Wilson, Lois, 4, 36, 39, 147, 165 Winnington-Ingram, Amanda, 128, 141–2 Wolfensberger, Wolf, 53–5, 68, 103–4, 198n16, 208n40 World Council of Churches, 8, 34–5, 45, 48; World Council of Churches 6th Assembly, 14, 34–7, 202n70, 202n72 World Council of Churches documents: “A Church of All and for All: An Interim Statement,” 85, 155; “The Handicapped and the Wholeness of the Family of God,” 48, 206n16; “The Unity of the Church and the Handicapped in Society,” 48 worship service, 132, 149–50; 152– 3, 160, 168–72 woundedness, 118–19, 145, 156–8, 160; Vanier on 21–4, 26, 36, 43, 158

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