Old English: wilcuma: exclamation of friendly greeting, from earlier, wilcuma, literally, one whose coming is in accordance with another’s will
‘It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, but the welcome I receive with every start.’ Mumford & Sons
My first Dublin residence this year
This week, two writers–Henri Nouwen and Paula Meehan–sparked a culmination of thoughts I have been facing since arriving back in the United States. For the past month, I have lived and worked with adults with learning disabilities in the Seattle chapter of the organization for which I also worked in Northern Ireland. After 9 months of travel, my homecoming was less than ordinary. Rather than returning to my hometown, floating on couches, searching Craigslist for entry-level jobs, I entered almost immediately into a community, a family, and I was given work and a social life.
This work in L’arche provides constant philosophical stimulation and raises endless questions for me. Each day can provoke something unexpected, making it difficult to maintain the reflective writing that sustains me.
But at a moment of discernment–when faced with the decision to stay at this L’Arche house for another 8 months or a year, something I had not intended to consider–the words of Henri Nouwen and Paula Meehan changed something in how I’d been viewing not only my decision, but the entire process, journey, that landed me to where I am at the moment.
In a poem of Meehan’s that I’ve read countless times, one line suddenly stood out. In a poem in which the speaker recalls a memory of her grandmother, she reflects on the prophecy her grandmother gave her. ‘…She tells me I am beautiful. / That I’ll never have children, but a song / for every child I might have had and none / got easy but writ in the blood of men / who’ve displeased me / She swears it’s true. No room / of my own, until the grave.’
It was part of the last 2 lines that particularly struck me: ‘No room / of my own, until the grave.’ In the past 9 months, I’ve tried to believe and live out that belief that if there is any room of my own, it’s the one from which songs come, poems come, and those are the walls I must live inside.
But the literal facts of my drifting remain. As I made my way through Northern Ireland, Ireland, Scotland, France, the Czech Republic and Germany, I lived in a house owned by someone else. I was never a single renter with friends as I was in college. Rather, this time I lived alongside people in the place they called home. In many ways, I was constantly a guest. For a moment, that thought created a slight feeling of panic, when I remembered how it felt not to feel safe, confident, comfortable–the things people feel when ‘at home-’-to wander around the rooms of a place in which I was living. This concern ostensibly seemed to impinge on my my desire to feel at home, metaphysically, without relying on anyone else. My idea of home seemed to involve a feeling of independence. I wanted to be able to live by my own will, to not be arriving at another’s will. But such a panic overlooks notice of the welcome inherent in every one of my stays.
The view from a pub in Ostrava that Jo and I frequented. Lots of big discussions there.
At the end of the month, I will have spent 5 months in a L’Arche house this year. Out of any physical place to live, L’Arche is the most likely place to find an immediate sense of being at home, a feeling of acceptance, of welcome. But knowing how to accept that welcome involves comporting oneself in a manner of openness.
When I left for Northern Ireland in September, I imagined I was, in many ways, making the journey alone. No one from my life in San Francisco or Seattle would be accompanying me. Few people I’d known had done L’Arche, and at that point, I had no idea when I would return or see friends and family. I had committed to 8 months, but intended to stay longer, perhaps to settle in Northern Ireland after L’Arche.
Things did not go as expected, and I journeyed around the rest of my time abroad. But now that I have since returned to another L’Arche house, I have begun to realize that I did not go to Northern Ireland alone. I took with me, and lived in, many close friendships.
Before L’Arche, I read the works of Jean Vanier, the founder, but I had read nothing of Henri Nouwen, despite hearing his praises. In the epilogue of a journal from his time in France, his first extended stay in L’Arche, Nouwen talks of the importance of the fact that he did not go to France alone. A close friend accompanied him, someone who he came to think of as a ‘safe place in the midst of all the transitions and changes.’ Doing do, he said, prevented him from making the community the true center of his life.
For someone like Nouwen, an ivy-league educated man who deeply valued friendships in which he could engage intellectually with others, having such a friendship was centering, balancing. But, he says, by prioritizing what sort of friendship he wanted, he failed to see the perhaps simpler and more immediate friendships around him, the community around him. It was less glamorous–it didn’t involve the existential wondering and dialogue that was so comforting in his friendship with the man who accompanied him. But there it was, existence–without the audible questioning.
When Nouwen chose to say ‘yes’ to making L’Arche the center of his life, to move away from his friendship, he said no to many things assistants also turn down when they enter L’Arche: to choosing the people you want to live with, to spending time with people you feel very close to, to self-defined views of solitude and independence, to centering your life on a wonderful friendships with promise of commitment beyond the day before you.
In the past 9 months, I took many friendships with me along the way, and I maintained them sometimes through visits, but mostly through the oft-time letter, countless emails, skype–all the ways Henri Nouwen could not connect with his life at home while in a tiny French village. Much of the journey was painful, in part, because, like Nouwen, I could not choose the friendships that sustained me and my own defined terms of solitude or independence.
One such friend, around the corner from one of her former roofs.
So long as I viewed myself as a guest, under someone else’s roof, I could not fully enter into community. I often let others determine how close we could become, rather than standing, open, to what came.
One might ask, What risk is there in not making the community the center of life, rather than relying instead on chosen friendships?
The choice, Nouwen says, to center life in community, brought on a ‘second loneliness,’ for him. It was not the loneliness of physical or emotional or mental isolation, but one bred from finding oneself purely existing, perhaps connection-less, perhaps not, depending on how one can eventually view the situation. It was a loneliness that turned into a truer independence.
There were times in Northern Ireland when emotional crises or the simple requirements of my job forced me to center my life around L’Arche, around a community that did not include hand-selected, favorite people (something we all sort of want our family to be).
And when I focused on L’Arche, I found myself existing in a more pure way. I faced the day before me, the minute before me. There was much uncertainty in which relationships would last, but I learned to see value in relationships not for their longevity or potential for future commitment, but rather for what they brought out on a daily basis. Viewing relationships this way allowed me to apply things I’d read from Gadamer and Nancy, about accepting the new person that is constantly created in relationship, about what it tangibly means to stand alongside one another.
Perhaps one of the most moving and profound things I have learned from L’Arche, but constantly forget and must be reminded, is how to redefine dependence and independence. For the past 9 months, I have depended, in many ways on the generosity of others, on the company of others I did not always choose. But I have appreciated that company, even if it was only for a few days, hours, one night. I think of a woman from my fiddle class in Belfast, my instructor for that class, the woman who made coffee in my local haunt, a homeless artist I met in Belfast, Fulbright scholars in Ostrava, fellow students in Berlin. And I am amazed how many people welcomed me into their life.
Common American culture and my own stubbornness makes me view dependence as an inherently negative thing. The true adult, we believe, must be independent, self-made. But when are we not in relationship to one another? When are we not relying on someone else for communication, eye contact, for them to ring up our bill or answer our calls? As Vanier and Nouwen have said, there is something about living with, along-side, people with disabilities, who show their dependence so evidently, that reminds us how dependent we are.
When I must chop up someone’s food just so that someone can eat, when I must assist someone to use the toilet, when I help someone to shower, I am reminded that though these adults are dependent on me, in some small way, for simple things that I take for granted, their dependency is not a weakness, with the negative connotation we give that word.
Their weaknesses show me all of my own. When I try to help someone in the shower and mess up the temperature of the water or forget soap, I am reminded how careless I can be in the simple acts of daily living. My concern for intellectual questions and my love of reading, which are gifts, can also make me vulnerable to missing out on what is before me. Sometimes I cannot initiate a friendship the way some of the core members I have lived with can. When a woman with Down Syndrome shows affection so easily and readily to me, I am reminded how difficult that once was for me.
Part of what allows for relationships to exist as they do in L’Arche is the acceptance that we are not entirely whole. One aspect of the role of an assistant involves helping core members show their best selves. That could involve gently talking to them when their misunderstanding of social situations leads to behavior that does not reflect well on who they truly are. It could also involve finding jobs and activities that bring out their gifts so that the greater community sees beyond labels of ‘disabled.’
As Nouwen says, this love for each other ‘is a love that grows by forgiving each other constantly for not yet being who we want to be for each other.’
One could say that L’Arche takes in guests, accepting that they too are in the midst of a process, a journey, toward becoming. But whether or not such people remain guests, or integrate into the community, is open to the traveller.
In the end of this discernment process, I decided that now is not the right time to say ‘yes’ to living in L’Arche. I value saying yes in a time of uncertainty, and I think L’Arche allows for that, but I have decided I would like to re-commit to life in L’Arche for an extended period when I am more confident in my decision.
For the time being, I am freelancing and exploring ways to stay connected to L’Arche, to keep these friendships I quickly made simply from living alongside other people, from sharing their roof.
