To know what love is one must be about loving; to know what good is, one must do goodness. I learned about that again this morning. I just served as a panelist along with several L’Arche core and team members in a conversation with some Birmingham Southern students who have chosen for their January term project observing and learning about intentional communities; what they have termed neo-monastic communities. They first visited a Benedictine community in north Alabama; then the Koinonia community in Americus Georgia, and now L’Arche Mobile their last stop. L’Arche, for those of you who don’t yet know about it, is a residential community that serves people with mental disabilities. People, if it weren’t for L’Arche, who would be institutionalized. They reside together, take their meals together, share household chores,worship together, share sorrow and joy and the stuff of life, just like the rest of us.
Each team member (the paid staff) of L’arche without exception said that they stay at L’Arche for far different reasons from those for which they came. One woman said she came because she simply needed a job, but that now she stays because through her caring for these “least” souls, these who are considered marginal in our world, she is learning not only how to love unconditionally her friends and family through an acquired new perspective; but she is learning also how to love herself. She said that once she almost left because of the deaths of two core residents whom she’d grown to adore, but that she stayed because she had learned that love was in truth stronger than death. Another team member informed the students that living in this community is not all sweetness and pious hymn singing, but that there are flashing moments of anger and resentment, just like with the rest of us. But she said that those moments don’t last long because they work hard at communicating their differences with the goal of reconciliation. A student asked, “and you pull that off consistently?” “We have to”, she said, “or else we wouldn’t last as a community.” She said that she came to L’Arche because of a vague calling that she wanted to serve something larger than herself. Now she says that she stays because she is learning that love is real; that God is not invisible but alive in all of us created in God’s image. These weren’t canned phrases…but words learned and spoken from experience.
Over my years here, I’ve been learning from L’Arche too. I’ve learned that seeing to the good of our neighbor is the highest form of love, love that brings joy and love that transforms. The L’Arche community is a model, with all its flaws and messiness, for all to see, that we can’t live with integrity and dignity except in community, a community that cares first for the other, that the needs of each matter equally…. a community that forgives as vital necessity; a community that, in spite of its fragility, becomes invincible through love…That is who God is…and that is who we all are…creatures both human and divine, made to give only…to love only for the world’s transformation and renewal….and to live such a life is to know joy that is visible…to do love is to know love….to know God alive among us, …Let us get about the work of enlightened loving, for there we will surely see the God of Love…. see and know in our own time and own place….We have to, else we won’t last.
