Alternative Source of Energy. Remember your Radicalism!

My Praise & My Concerns with what you’re up to in L’Arche …

People who are familiar with my research and ongoing collaboration with L’Arche know that I have great respect for your mission and even feel myself to be part of it now. But Hollee has recently encouraged a ‘shock’ approach for assistant formation, (see L’Arche commons) so I’m going to be a bit provocative here.

What I want to say is that you are doing some fantastic things, but I also have some concerns …

It is impressive that you are living out your commitments to solidarity with the marginalized in such a radical, everyday life kind of way. I teach university students who study social justice but many of them are very uncertain about how to actualize or enact their interests. You provide just such a forum for young people.

But I have a concern … and that is that you forget that what you are living is radical. You naturalize life-sharing with the core members (people with developmental impairments) within your communities such that people can forget the radical rationale behind the prosaic, everyday tasks that comprise the bulk of life as an assistant.

There is a reason for that naturalizing – you want life to feel natural of course – you want these relationships across difference to unfold in natural ways and it is towards that admirable aim that you do in a sense ‘forget’ that in fact these relations across disability and difference are not normal in the broader society.

The very fact that places like L’Arche or Faith and Light are needed is proof of the challenges of such integration. For newer assistants, you may not even be aware of the details of the horrible historical treatment and discrimination of people with developmental disabilities; not only in large-scale institutions but also by their own families and by systems of education and medicine.

Beyond a general sense that things were not, and even today are not great, it is hard for many of us to imagine just how badly some of our people have been treated.

Why is this important? What would a better sense of the radical nature of the L’Arche project do for you as a community? I would argue that it is a powerful potential source of energy for you – a spring. People who founded L’Arche in Canada in the 1960’s and 1970’s were driven by this kind of revolutionary energy – the desire to contribute one’s capacities to social change, in this case via radical solidarity with the poor.

One can throw around the term radical casually but here I use it to refer to a serious effort to get at the ‘roots’ of an issue.

For Jean and L’Arche this meant a belief that the only way to invert social norms that devalued people with disability, was to make a visible, strong commitment to share life with them, and to bear witness to their intrinsic and relational value.

As Ian Brown, Toronto journalist and father of Walker (The Boy in the Moon) expressed so well recently – he wants people to realize that Walker’s ‘broken presence’ is a gift to the world.

At the ‘Anthropology of L’Arche’ gathering this summer in Toronto, Jean was intent on conveying a message about passion to the group. He urged the group of assistants to realize how important their work and lives in L’Arche are. But he lifted their sights further by saying that L’Arche is not about disability per se, L’Arche is about giving life to people; it is about having a mission that is life-giving and that you are passionate about.

In this way, assistants in L’Arche are part of a much larger movement of people world-wide who seek to use their creative energy and talents to support others, especially marginalized others, to have a more full life. There was a hesitance around this however; Jean expressed concern about what he sensed was a lack of passion for mission in many young assistants he met in his community visits – he sensed that many seemed ‘heavy with the burden’ instead of alive with a mission.

And this is precisely what I think is the problem with forgetting what is radical about what you do – you lose that life-giving energy of feeling that what you do matters – that what you do will make a difference in the world.

In my interviews with 100 assistants across Canada, ‘making a difference’ was one of their top motives for spending time in L’Arche. Jean implored each person to take the time to discern for themselves and with the new assistants – What are they passionate about? Where would they like to give life? And I think that this addresses very well my concern with your practice of naturalizing.

While naturalizing the value of relationships across difference has a clear strategic point, it is important not to lose track of the reality of how rare they are in our world.

Stay tuned ...

Next week : Countering Pity : Why the public needs your Stories now

To write to Pam Cushing : pcushin@uwo.ca