Report: My First Long Weekend

On Sunday, I returned from my first ever long weekend off. Every month, each L'arche assistant is given 4 days off to do with whatever they wish. It's awesome because you can travel to places that are more than 1 day away, like Mt. Ruapehu for instance.

First, I should say that travel is expensive, especially in New Zealand, where "petrol" is $1.80 per litre and $10 in fast food gets you about half as much as it would in the States. Right off the bat, I'm poor from purchasing my necessary ski gear. A lack of funds means a couple of very important things while in a country that was built upon the economics of tourism. Namely, sleeping in a car, my friend Katie's car, to be specific. Don't worry too much, it's a station wagon, so things were reasonably comfortable...reasonably.

"LOOK WHAT I HAVE CREATED!!! I have made fire!"

The weekend began for us on Thursday. fortunately for a car-less Nathan Tramp, Katie and I have the same off time scheduled. We drove the approximately 3 hours that it takes to get to Ohakunae and then found the cheapest place to stay possible: a camp site. New Zealand is a very out-doorsy country and even the most deserted campsites are keep in descent order by the Department of Conservation. This particular campsite was not remote at all, so it had a working restroom with running water. Good deal for $4 a night.

First things first. We needed food, so we stopped at a grocery store. Basically, I survived the whole four days on a combination of bread, peanut butter, bananas, apples, pears, pasta, tomato soup, and the all-important cheddar cheese. Despite the fact that Katie has a camp stove, we thought we could save some purple gas by making a fire ourselves. But, yeah, everything is wet in NZ, so it took a while...a long while. After deciding to use the stove anyway, the fire provided us only 2 things: warmth and satisfaction for our sense of spite. I never thought that fire-making would be a skill for daily use, but here electric heating is expensive and bulky, so firewood is an industry unto itself. Katie and I put our survival skills to good use and, despite soggy kindling, concluded that Les Stroud would have been proud of us.

A car can trap alot of heat, but not enough to keep out a whole nights worth of cold, so we packed: 2 sleeping bags, an extra blanket, and 2 duvets. We were initially scared that that wouldn't be enough, but Thursday night proved to be quite comfortable. The evening's entertainment was a cheesy romance novel: Grand Finale by Janet Evanovich. From 7 pm to around 11, we burned right through that thing. In my memory, retrospectively, it was like watching a 5-hour-long movie...a really bad, semi-misogynistic, horribly written movie. All it really did was produce a few inside jokes, which came in handy, since we were about to be horribly disappointed, along with the rest of the northern New Zealand skiing community.

We awoke on Friday ready to head up the mountain, but it rained all day long, so everything was closed. Plan B was to head up North even further near Taupo. Lake Taupo was formed by rainwater that filled up this gigantic crater in the top of a mountain. It's massive and, apparently, still somewhat active. The last eruption was in...1993 I think; scary stuff. If you live in New Zealand, your odds of being evacuated at some point due to geothermal activity are very high; earthquakes, volcanoes, the occasional tsunami, it all just sort of happens every now and again. We headed East toward this road that runs through a desert. As you can kind of see in the picture above, "desert" means something very different in New Zealand. The whole country is green, so the "desert" still has vegetation, it's just brown vegetation. Moss and lichens grow on every available outcropping of stone and wood and the roads and...well everything. Apparently, the Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC, for you uninitiated) conducts exercises somewhere out in that desert, so we saw alot of military vehicles.

See that picture above? That is the Skiwi. Someone actually took the time to go out onto this road and mark skis onto a kiwi road sign. It's dumb, yeah, but it's still the best and most endearing novelty that I've ever encountered. The road trip we took on Friday just to see this thing took up perhaps 40 minutes time. After that, it was off to the hot springs. Near Taupo, there are a number of places that allow visitors to come and bathe in the naturally heated pools around the volcano. Katie and I payed $6 for this and then proceeded to get our money's worth: A 2-hour dip, plus a shower. I felt good and clean for the first time in 2 days, then it started raining again. Oh well. I also got to see a small puddle of bubbling mud. "Oooh, Ahh!" Friday evening it was back to the campsite to polish off the last bit of our cheesy novel.

Saturday morning we were finally able to get some ski rentals and a lift ticket up the mountain. That's me in all my snow gear. Surprisingly, I'm a decent skier, even after like 3 years. We got to ski alright, but everyone on the whole North Island had the same idea. We bought a pass that only let us on the lower mountain (the busiest part). That, combined with alot of melted snow, equals one really crowded ski resort. Our day wasn't spent "skiing" so much as it was "merging with traffic on the freeway." At no point was I more than 3 meters from another skier or snowboarder. And there were a ton of injuries. On woman in particular had either gone over the cliff side of a run or been nailed by another skier, because she lie in the snow for about an hour bleeding from the face; oxygen mask and the whole nine. I think I personally saw 3 or 4 people being carried off the hill by ski patrol. Still, it was lots of fun, barring injury. It's only early in the season, so I think I'll go back when I get some more money together. For a country that's all about the outdoors, I think that skiing is my favorite activity. Just the feeling of skidding along at 50 or 60 or even 70 kph on your own two feet is pretty amazing, but hold on boys and girls, because the good times rolled on long into Saturday evening.

We went back into Ohakunae after skiing and met up with a volunteer assistant at Rangimarie house named Neele. She's one cool German in my book because she actually managed to hitch-hike all the way up to Ohakunae and she did it in a single day...safely. New Zealand is really laid back like that. I don't know why, exactly, but its nice to not have to worry about having your car stolen or your house broken into or being shot in the wrong neighborhood. It's not a license to be stupid. You still have to watch yourself here, but the NZ tolerance for violent behavior is much lower than the US. Local area pet deaths actually make a column in the newspaper here, murders are a HUGE deal, and safety is a priority. The roads are covered in about a million different signs and markers and I have yet to witness any kind of accident.

Anyway, after meeting up with Neele, we got tickets to Ohakunae's Mardi Gras block party. The whole town freaking exploded: alcohol and teenagers all over the place, filling the streets like ants to a rotten banana. People were dressed up like firemen, Smurfs, the 3 Little Pigs, Lady Gaga, Jacques Cousteau, whatever. It was nuts. Now I know why: carnival + block party + concert. Midnight Youth, probably New Zealand's most popular and current pop/rock band, was playing. They were pretty good too, sort of like a kiwi cross between Incubus and maybe Motion City Soundtrack. I think that they stand a chance of cracking the American market actually. Look them up if you've got time. Their set was heaps of fun and included songs from their first album, called The Brave Don't Run, as well as a rendition of "That's Not My Name" by The Ting Tings. Saturday night, we managed to get all 3 of us into Katie's station wagon, though I'm sure that Neele didn't get much sleep. I was missing veggie sandwiches and the ladies wanted cookies so we stopped off at a Subway on the ride home. All in all, I'd say that it was my best time by far in NZ and, probably one of the best long weekends I'll ever have.

Sunday was weird because it was the farewell party for our community leader, Michele. We just got back, not even showered yet, and we had to do this gala to say goodbye to our community leader. In addition, that long weekend is probably one of the last times that I'll ever see Neele. As an assistant, she's only here for 3 months and her time is up on the 1st of July. Making friends here is surreal. Hell, everything is surreal. I'm hitting the bricks again this week, patiently awaiting the arrival of our new leader, Alex. You'll get more later, including some theological stuff. Until then: Peace-out, girl scouts.

Abstraction, Expression, and "Ownership"

Today was the last day of a 7-week long course in Drama for our core members. Since 3 weeks before I arrived, 5 of our core members have been going once weekly to practice and perform drama. As today was their final session, the whole class put on a big show for us. The story that they performed, was a Maori folk tale. At least, I think it was. The narration was sort of all over the place, but it was enough for us, as an audience, to get the general idea.

It was a beautiful performance, but, because it was difficult to know what, exactly, was happening, the whole show came off as a kind of abstract representationalist party. From my perspective, it was beautiful. Pricelessly so, considering that no two drama performances are ever quite the same. Trish wore a top hat and had a sledge hammer for some reason. Peter waved around a pirate flag and ran in a circle. Some folks wore masks, others had on capes and boas. The characters of the drama were cold and then in a storm of some kind and the whole ordeal finished with a human volcano. In the background, a whole cadre of musicians (including Arahata's own Kim Turner) made sounds on drums, cymbals, tambourines and other instruments. In different circumstances, I think I might have paid money to see this show, but the offering was so community-oriented that I think that, in this case, a cover charge would have been offensive. An abstract art/drama show with an offensive cover charge, very avant-garde.

If people who have intellectual disabilities can put on a wildly abstract dramatic performance capable of capturing the imagination, then that either says alot about the intellectually disabled or not so much about abstract art. Personally, I think it's both. On the one hand, people with disabilities are more capable than many people realize. In our own house, we have learned how best to treat our core members like adults. If we treat them like children, then they're always going to feel like children. If core members feel like children, then they act like children. And if that happens, then they become dependent upon L'arche as patients instead of living in L'arche as equal community members. There's something about being a loving person that simply isn't dependent upon our "abilities." In one way, I think that those are the sorts of feelings which abstract artists attempt to build up. For someone like Jackson Pollock, the enemy was form. For L'arche, the enemy is ability. Even though Pollock's work is not truly "formless," it attempts to go there. Likewise, L'arche is not without a need for abilities of many kinds, but that's just not the point. Naturally, our core members are essential for bringing the Kingdom of God to its fruition in this process. They are why we are here, after all; getting beyond the usual "form" of our contemporary society.

On another level, how much ability does it require to do abstract things, really? Why is it that we always celebrate the "cutting edge" in culture, art, and (for me) theology? What's the appeal? Why is there the need to always go for the "next, big thing" or the next "movement"? How hard is it really to get a big idea by plopping a bunch of dots onto a blank canvas? In my opinion, not that difficult. It only takes a small amount of imagination, really. We've all heard the story about the 2-year-old girl who sold her "abstract"paintings for thousands of dollars. Likewise, it's not a genius idea to live in community with the disabled. It doesn't take that much more work than normal living. Plus, assistants get paid. Talk about a sweet gig. Point being this: maybe grandiose ideals aren't all that they're cracked up to be.

I've been living with the idea for my entire life that ideologies are prescriptive. That is, that ideologies tell us how to be in the world and that they attend to some vision of it, some telos. Exercising prescriptive ideals, however, is as foolhardy as attempting to name Other. You can't do it, because you just don't know. Even if the ideal in question proves to be "correct", who can see the future without doing violence to it? Indeed, the notion that we can change the world, that we own in such a way, is nothing but violent. Saying that ideology acts back upon us as people divorces our ideals from us. It causes us to name our values as outside constructs, as if we were naming the Others who shape us by their presence.

Instead of this model, I will not attempt to view my ideals as deep aspects of my self. Indeed, they are as valuable to my person as my very genes. Without them, "I" would be someone or something else, almost entirely. Without my ideals and values, I certainly would not be here and I certainly wouldn't be blogging about it to you. I am going to own my ideals. My thoughts on God, the world, and everything else are just as mutable as my physical body and probably much more so. I should regard them as such, for if my values had not been wounded by the presence of the Other, then I would not BE--HERE--NOW. As my body is a Gift, so to are the thoughts of my head. I do not own them any more than I own my genetic code. Yet, even without this sense of "ownership," my arms and legs still belong to me, and I should feel very bad if someone were to lop them off. Before I left, Dr. Dan Deffenbaugh, instructed me on the difference between a "possession" and a "belonging." A possession is something which is owned. That is, a person has rights over it. By contrast, a belonging, is something which encompasses a certain amount of a person's being. You may have possessions in your house, but your home is a place to which you belong. It's where a part of you is now and will always be. Belongings are those things which, literally, course through your synapses.

My ideas are not possessions. I do not own them. They cannot be bought or sold without also slicing some aspect of my Self. As parts of my Self then, they are not divorced from my Being. My values and ideals do not command me, they are expressions of me, of all the gifts that make me who I am. As my body, they are weak in places; they are mutable and fallible; they have sins and limits of all kinds bound up with them. Therefore, when I write theology or philosophy in the future, do not expect from me statements on "reform." Do not expect that I will often say what "ought" to be, for the "ought" can easily be a kind of violence and our morals (our "confidence") can become a sword.

Instead, I hope to go forward in a way of gentleness; a way of hospitality. I can do nothing except to tell you who I am, to confess my Self to you in the hope that I will encounter your Other. You may expect that this confession will be emotional, perhaps even confrontational. I hope however that, whatever I may do after L'arche, I would always attends to Gifts instead of goals.

Same one as the Other one

This is all public now, so I can finally talk about it safely without having any conflicts of interest. And, just to be completely honest, I won't say anything here that I wouldn't also confess in person. Believe you me, it is a confession if there ever was one.

Last Friday, Carly (thus far, my most troublesome fellow assistant) went on a 2-week journey to the South Island. When she comes back, she will leave the L'arche Kapiti community and return home to Canada. After only a month, it has been (apparently mutually) determined by both herself and the community that she is not really called to be here.

For those who don't know already, I felt called to be a part of L'arche here because of my studies in the fields of Religion and, particularly, Ethics. I came here under the auspices that I would find a way to be vulnerable to the presence of the Other, as Emmanuel Levinas so beautifully prescribes it. With respect to Religion, I was looking for a way to give praxis to the deep theology of post-modern theologians such as Jean-Luc Marion. I came searching for God's Gifts to the world and I still remain open to them in the practice of hospitality...At least I think.

At this point, with Carly leaving, I feel as though I may be failing miserably in my vocation. I selected L'arche for my exercises in Ethics thinking, "Surely, disabled people are my Other." As much as I liked to think that I loved the disabled just as much as I loved everyone else, there still remained for me a feeling, just at the back of my mind, which I can only describe as disgust. It takes a while, I suppose, to forget the cultural imprint of imperial dominance over others. Indeed, my life, and even my education (with as many enlightening roads as it has taken me down) have been built upon the backs of legions: prisoners, immigrants (both legal and otherwise), the disabled, the poor. I felt complicit in the sins of my Empre. I felt as though I needed a deep and powerful reconciliation. To be a faithful Christian, of course, I must always be in need of reconciliation. I stood convicted and, therefore, was driven forward in my vocation all the way to New Zealand.

Once here, however, I was shocked to discover that I got along almost perfectly well with "the disabled" in L'arche. There's a rhythm to life here that takes ordinary spaces and turns them into places. L'arche, I discovered, was almost everything I wanted in Christian community: a way to redeem Empire, to make it into the Kingdom of God. The people in this community, even the non-Christian ones, definitely speak my language. Indeed, I am quite comfortable here, even when tired and troubled. And then, there's Carly. She annoyed me. She made my skin crawl with the awkwardness of her presence. I just wanted her gone. She didn't listen well and didn't seem to learn much. Admittedly, I hated her. She was a thorn in my side and, apparently, in the side of L'arche Kapiti, though the details of those conversations are still a bit unclear, not that it matters now. I thought that I should feel relieved to see her go, but underneath that feeling is shame. I am shamed in my definition of Ethics, for it makes me into a hypocrite. My soul is troubled. In college, I always had trouble sleeping at night; too many thoughts. After 3 weeks at L'arche Kapiti, I returned to those sleep patters. When was I vulnerable to Carly? The answer, of course, is that I simply wasn't. My sense of Being remains entirely unwounded by her...At least I think.

I mentioned before that irony has taught me much in life. As life, wisdom (and God) unfold for me in their increasingly ironic ways, my Other is revealed as not the disabled at all. Instead, it was a seemingly "normal" person from Canada. Too bad that I had to come all the way to New Zealand to figure that out. In one way, this revelation only provides further support for Levinas: Self can never truly name Other, it has no breath with which to speak Other without also locking the Other into the tyranny of the Same. HA! How foolish was I to believe I could name Other, how idiotic!? For Other to be truly Other, then it must be, naturally, completely unknown to the Self. Still, I wouldn't have known, would not be the same person that I am now, if I had never come.

In another sense, however, I think that the sorts of feelings that I'm experiencing now must count as some kind of Ethical encounter. After Carly leaves, I definitely won't be the same, that's for sure. And I certainly don't feel the same now as when I first arrived. Michele told me that a calling goes two ways. Even as I feel called to be at L'arche, I can't forget that it's L'arche that must also feel called to me in order for things to work out for the whole community. I should recognize the irony here: long before Michele told me about the two-way street of vocation, I wrote about it when I did my thesis on forgiveness. According to Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas, the same is true of consciousness and Being. Once an encounter happens, this new, mutant thing emerges; it's not one thing and it's not another. A new, post-encounter Being is just new. Socially, we call them movements or trends. Personally, we call them gifts and revelations. I have been thrown into a pretty deep moral quandary here. Have I been vulnerable? If so, how? Where is the gift that has so obviously wounded my Being?

I think that I really can acknowledge a wound here. I think I can recognize the weakness, the violence, that is within me. I think that the gift of L'arche must be gentleness and I think that it is this gentleness which is causing my sense of Being such distress. As an organization, L'arche is quite obviously vulnerable to its core members. Their needs bend us, as assistants and administrators, into the way of poverty, a way that is more Christ-like than standard life. What is interesting, however, is that L'arche is not masochistic. L'arche never holds out its calling to live with the disabled as a badge of honor. L'arche is gentle enough to avoid saying, "We deserve." In this way of gentleness, L'arche is afforded the opportunity to listen, not only to core members, but also to, yes, the wider world, and even to its own assistants and administrators.

From one perspective, it may seem as though Carly was systematically pushed out of L'arche, and in a way, L'arche must confess that this is so. Even as it is gentle and even as it listens, L'arche too is in need of reconciliation. L'arch is also guilty of in-grouping and out-grouping, the same as any institutional or, in this case, semi-institutional entity. As Walter Wink wrote on the subject, the Powers of our world (political or otherwise) must be redeemed, for as L'arche proves, the Powers were created in goodness. The Powers came into Being by vulnerability; they have responded to a need and the whole of Being, therefore, has been remade by a wound. Even if they are fallen and corrupt now, the Powers must be redeemed. As a Power of our world (or a "movement," if you prefer the term) L'arche has come into being by responding to the needs of the intellectually disabled. As part of that, people deemed unhelpful to L'arche can be shoved aside, as decidedly unethical as the practice is.

Yet, there is another perspective I see here. L'arche was also considering Carly's best interests. I truly think that this is the discipline of gentleness that I must learn. Even for a person who appeared to be an "enemy" to the organization, they provided, over and over again, communication, support, counseling, and forgiveness. For the sake of professionalism, I won't delve too deeply into the details here. Needless to say, however, is that, while I was stewing in my hatred for Carly, L'arche was loosing sleep over her. The power of Empire teaches us who is strong and who is weak. As I learned at Hastings College, Empire makes these categories. The Kingdom of God, however, is different. The Kingdom of God is upside down because it welcomes its enemies with open arms. Even a wound, even the concept of forgiveness or the practice of Ethics, looks different once inside the Kingdom of God. Strange thought it may sound, you may believe me when I say that the decisions made regarding Carly's assistantship, were with her continued consideration and, more that likely, in her own best interest. In the meantime, I was busy saying, "Good riddance to bad rubbish." Shameful, but, as I said, I'll confess it.

As I write this, I think that L'arche Kapiti can still teach me all that I have to learn on the practice of Ethics and ethical Religion, but not because it houses the disabled. I believe that it can teach me these things because it is a faithful community. Before I came here, I spoke to my friend Tim Moore. As many of you know, he was where I am now only one year ago. I questioned him on his experience here and whether or not he missed L'arche Kapiti. Of course, he told me that he missed this place. Tim called L'arche here, "my home." I am beginning to understand why. Having been so deeply provoked by this community so many times and in so short a time span, I think that my consciousness is becoming deeply fused with this organization and the people it loves. I think the verbal form of the word is important here. L'arche loves. A gift, made in love, must be the most provocative gift that one can give. Love cuts the deepest, hits the hardest, changes the largest, redeems the most. I don't mean to make this mystical here, I mean it actually. The gentleness and love of God as I have encountered it through L'arche is, quite literally, forging me into a new person. This process has little to do with choice or the illusion of choice and much more to do with the Gift of Other. Provocation is a saving Grace.

Jesus: The Friend of My Friends

This week, my house leader at Arahata came back from her one-month sabbatical time. In the three weeks that I have been here, I had never once even seen the offically installed leader of this house, but I finally got to meet her a couple of days ago. Her name is Akiko and she is a Japanese woman in her late thirties. Truly, she's a gem of a person if there ever was one. Akiko has been living in community at Arahata for over 3 years and she doesn't even have permanent residency in New Zealand yet, though she is currently working on that. Akiko's relationship with our core members is amazing to watch. She is truly a friend to our core members and she relates to them with an unparalleled amount of honesty and sincerity. I've done nothing in the past several days except try to soak up her approaches and attitudes. Of course, they don't actually work for me. This is partly because I have only begun for forge my own relationships here and partly because no two relationships are ever the same. Still, my relational experimentation is beginning.

It's been said that, during the first month at L'arche, an assistant only sees a core member's disease. It is for this reason that we are not told our core member's diagnoses until we have been here for at least 2 months. The whole process is very transparent. Until that time, I have been told to simply "be a friend." Akiko embodies this mentality, though after a certain amount of time in community, I suppose that even the toughest person would. If you're angry at your friend, you tell them. You wouldn't pretend to be fine, because it would be a betrayal. You might not want to shout or use harsh language, but it's important to your relationship with your friend that your feelings are communicated. Likewise, L'arche often feels like an episode of The Real World if the show had also included care for the disabled as a part of its paradigm. Although, L'arche communities are not like "normal" ones, the goal is still to, as Akiko would say, "make a nice house." In L'arche, our core members are not shielded from our personalities. Living in community as closely as we do, I don't think we can really afford to shield them anyway. It's just too demanding. Much like the core members themselves, we discover that the price of introversion is simply too high and we are forced to realize that, truly, no man is an island.

Following Edmund Husserl, I think that consciousness is all a part of encounter. Once you meet someone, both parties are changed, they being to share their consciousness of one another. Although the contact may be fleeting, it is always very real. And yes, even as something as mundane as a smile on the bus, touches and changes even the most emotionally inaccessible of us. Akiko is very conscious of her friends. She truly shares herself with them. Though this is not widely known, our house used to be a very different place for her. For starters, Victor was living here less than 4 months ago. He is very disabled and requires full-needs care. Then, alongside those needs, there were other core members, some of whom had alot of issues with an inner and abiding anger. Apparently, there existed at that time, much conflict between core members and especially between core members and assistants. In the midst of all this activity, there was Akiko, training new assitants, cleaning, cooking, and generally being a saint. For a while, she actually slept on the floor. In the midst of things, L'arche simply didn't have an adequate bed. I thought that my room was small, but Akiko's is truly monastic, as it is divided in half. The other 50% of her room that's not personal space is our house's office space, complete with a desk, shelf, and filing cabinet. When I heard this (though, not from Akiko herself) my immediate thoughts were of Mother Theresa. She just takes it all in stride, trying to make new friends.

But, I wouldn't say that her service is masochistic in its nature. I think that Akiko is merely embodying what Vanier calls "the descent into littleness." It is a way of humility, of poverty, that is conscious of those close to us; of those in our presence, even if they are Other. Perhaps the greatest example of this that I have seen is Akiko's approach to faith. It is worth note that, although she lives here in a faith-based, Christian community at L'arche, Akiko is not herself a professing Christian. This is fine as L'arche has many assistants who hail from faiths and traditions different from those of the core members. As an organization, L'arche politely asks that, while we may bring our own uniqueness into our homes, we must respect the faiths of our core members as they are. For an Episcopalian like myself, it's not difficult to respect our Roman Catholic community. I cannot imagine, however, the difficulty experienced by someone like Akiko. First of all, Akiko is not a native English speaker, so she has had to crawl her way up a slow and arduous ladder of communication. As house leader, she is-of course-under appreciated, as all house leaders are, despite L'arche's best efforts. To a certain extent, under appreciation comes with the position. On top of that, she does not share the faith of the community. Yet she is here and remains here. When we pray, she prays with us. When we bless a meal, she blesses it with us. When we thank God, she thanks God with us. Further, she does so (to the best of my knowledge) with complete honesty. My inquisitive mind wondered why, so I asked her about faith and her experience of faith in L'arche. She stood for a moment, perhaps a meager 5'6", and then said in her own broken English, "Jesus is the friend of my friends."

How powerful! How profound! How wonderful! The words of Christ came to me in this, from the Gospel of John: "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends [...]. I do not call you servants any longer." What service? For me, in this moment, Akiko's life is a proof positive that L'arche is not about service. It is about community, real and true and simple community. As we make friends here, as we practice the foolishness of worship, we make friends. And for friends, we lay down our lives, our selves, even our faith. We lay it down because we have become friends. This is not a year of service, for in the Kingdom of God such lines of power disappear altogether. This is a year of community. This is a Kingdom year.

Prayer as Physical Hospitality

Today, I met my accompanyer. L'arche provides for assistants "accompaniment" with another person, either inside or, in some cases, outside of the community. As a L'arche assistant, my accompanyer is someone with whom I can speak it utter security. I can vent and ask for advice (if need be) and generally use this person as a resource for discernment and decision making. It still shocks me to see the amount of time and energy the L'arche spends on its assistants, as well as the organization's core members. I dare say it more favors the assistants in some instances. L'arche tends to make a point of the idea that no one ought to be alone, neither in pain nor celebration. As it turns out, my accompanyer is Father Roderick Milne. "Father Rod" founded L'arche in New Zealand and actually spent time with Henri Nouwen at the community of Daybreak. He has also, of course, personally met with Jean Vanier, which is also rather cool. With Nouwen now passed, Father Rod is about as close as I'll ever get to one of those people who have directly inspired my current pilgrimage into L'arche. Pretty freakin sweet.

It was never really Nouwen's theology that called me to L'arche, thought that is very good stuff. Instead, I felt more attracted by his personal story. Nouwen delved into his own sense of vulnerability more than once and it definitely shaped the way that he thought, wrote, and lived. When I mentioned that I had a copy of Gracias!, Father Rod suggested that I look up the entry for "Friday, December 11." I've been doing more theological thinking lately. I'd like to wrap up my thoughts and feelings on the topic of hospitality with this passage:

Every morning at 6:45 I got to the small convent of the Carmelite Sisters for an hour of prayer and meditation. I say "every morning," but there are exceptions. Fatigue, busyness, and preoccupations often serve as arguments for not going. Yet without this one-hour-a-day for God, my life loses its coherency and I start experiencing my days as a series of random incidents and accidents. My hour in the Carmelite chapel is more important than I can fully know myself. It is not an hour of deep prayer, nor a time in which I experience a special closeness to God; it is not a period of serious attentiveness to the divine mysteries. I wish it were! On the contrary, it is full of distractions, inner restlessness, sleepiness, confusion, and boredom. It seldom, if ever, pleases by senses. But the simple fact of being for one hour in the presence of the Lord and of showing him all that I feel, think, sense, and experience, without trying to hide anything, must please him. Somehow, somewhere, I know that he loves me, even though I do not feel that love as I can feel a human embrace, even though I do not hear a voice as I hear human words of consolation, even though I do not see a smile as I can see a human face. Still the Lord speaks to me [...]. I notice, maybe only retrospectively, that my days and weeks are different days and weeks when they are held together by these regular "useless" times. God is greater than my senses, greater than my thoughts, greater than my heart.

I take lots of pride in the fact that, for the most part, I'm a committed physicalist. There is some background to this: If Martin Heidegger and, particularly, A. N. Whitehead are correct, then we dwell in the realm of the actual, which is distinctively different from than of the real, in which God dwells. Although the two interact, we must seek the expression of God in the actual world as it happens around us and have little business making grand, metaphysical inferences about the "nature" of the Divine reality.

As a physicalist then, as one who needs to find God here in actuality, I have a hard time reconciling my inclinations toward religion and theology. I know that the one road which I do not want to travel is that of the epistemological realist: Noah's Ark was an actual boat, the whole world actually flooded, and the world as we know it is actually only 6,000 years old. This position is ridiculous, even at face value, because the truth of our religious practices are quite obviously non-factual. Yet if this is so, then why religion at all? If religious practice implies that we must transcend the physical, then why would those of us who must live in the realm of actuality practice our religion?

As it stands now, I have come to L'arche in an attempt at encountering the absolute Other. I believe that, in terms of physical value, this is purpose of prayer and, indeed, of most all religious practice. It is a physical expression of our deepest non-self interest. It may be all well and good to speak of God in large theological terms and the same deep need is present within the various works of theology, but, honestly, nothing beats a genuflection. The word "genuflect" comes to us from Latin and it means "bent knee." The knee, breaking at it's primary point of weakness, has in its physical nature, the capacity to change a person. The one who physically walks becomes the one who physically worships. So it is with worship and prayer.

To follow the Ethics of Emmanual Levinas for a moment, we must recognize that there is an Other who's presence wounds our sense of Being. This much is true, but please don't make it a "mystical" experience. What good does pure mysticism do? It reminds me of Paul's preaching to the charismatics of his day who "spoke in tongues." In Acts, the apostles where given the gift of tongues, but they weren't keeping these gifts to themselves because the tongues given to them where actual languages spoken by actual people. They were not tongues of mysticism. Pardon me for being so harsh toward mystics, even those mystics whom I love, such as Martin Buber. This is simply what I see in people whom I think can truly be called faithful, such as Henri Nouwen. In the passage above, Nouwen doesn't cover up the bare, physical realities of his prayer life; it is an impoverished experience. But it is, somehow, this physical poverty which makes it so important: the act of prayer is "useless" to Being, it is an act of hospitality toward Other, toward God.

I believe that this will be, for me, a serious point of argument with other theologians. As the economy suffers, the message that we received from Jean Vanier in his latest letter to L'arche basically ran like this: "Get hard and give more." The reasons to support this conclusion were, of course, vague and highly "mystical" in their nature and usage. Mysticism is not the answer to our problems because its obscurity cannot wound us. Even Nouwen himself wrote that his experience among the poor of South America was "God receiving God" and the like. Don't get all mystical on me like that. We need an actual answer to our distress. We need an actual Other to wound us. We need an actual Gift.

So it is also with my experience of prayer at L'arche. Tonight we had a visitor: Tamzin. Tamzin is considering joining L'arche as a core member and is spending a couple of nights with us to try it out. Last night, her first night here, she did not really participate at prayer time and she gave us the impression that she wasn't used to prayer. I understand the feeling. Tonight, however, it was my night to run prayer and Tamzin was asked to aid me. I chose a reading and she decided that it would be good if we did prayers with stones. As we sat in our circle, Tamzin, feeling the need to physically participate, went round and made everyone pick a stone from a basket, so that each of us would have to physically walk up to the prayer table in order to place it. The experience worked well and I think that it encouraged more free thinking about prayer time, which is a very deeply entrenched ritual, particularly with Kim. It was then that I understood my physicalism: a deep and physical need for participation, for encounter, brought forth some "useless" accident of physical action, which, in turn, created a better sense of consciousness about goodness and mercy and love.

In its physical practice, prayer is a kind of hospitality, we are looking for the Transcendence of God to break our Being. We genuflect in order to seek the change. We kiss the icon, light the candle, sing the hymns, and take the bread. Where the hell is God in all this silly ritual? Who can say, since it actually is useless. It actually is stupid and uncomfortable and boring. Yet is is precisely this actuality of uselessness which opens the space for God to inhabit. It is an invitation for the reality of God to inhabit the actuality of our world. Who wouldn't make space for that? A wedding is the same way: say some words, give a ring, smash a glass, whatever. As dumb or archaic as these rituals are, we believe them important because it is these physical practices of foolishness which invite a lifetime of shared life and love. "And the two shall become one flesh." These are not mystical things. I am a physical creature, I will die a physical death, and I will love a physical love, even toward God.

Mustard Seeds

In my last post, I talked a lot about my sense of woeful underqualification for my job at L’arche. I basically said that I was grateful for this, since it causes me to be more teachable. Dr. Dan Deffenbaugh told me before I left that a year of service was a good method for doing some unlearning after college. Indeed, things are as he said; I have some unlearning to do. I had originally thought that my unlearning and relearning would be areas such as good thinking and theological praxis. While I won’t deny that there is some unlearning taking place in those areas, the real action is happening in areas that I, of course, didn’t expect. These include human communication and, most notably, prayer.

First, communication. This is a good one. Kim, as I’ve said, is an elective mute. Judging by the reports that I’ve heard from other assistants, months can go by without Kim having said so much as one or two whole words. Even so, she will often hold out her hand in an attempt to communicate non-verbally. When she does this, the appropriate response is to simply grasp her hand for a moment; extension, reception. Kim will do this to say a variety of things, but it usually means, “Hello,” “Thank you,” “Good on you,” or “I like you.” Kim is a silent mover as well, and she goes everywhere at about a snail’s pace. Her hand gesture, therefore, will often simply materialize in front of my face, as if a specter had suddenly been incarnated before me. Likewise, she fancies forcing people to smell the Marmite (concentrated yeast extract, usually spread over toast) at breakfast. This morning, Brenda got a surprise when she turned her head only to be accosted by the Marmite jar, which suddenly blinked into the existence of her right visual field. The shock was good for a laugh. Kim thought it was hilarious, anyway. (Actually, so did I.) Point being this: The fact that we can’t ever really hear Kim makes it vitally important that we understand her own methods of communication. We have to be visually vulnerable to the presence of Kim where, otherwise, such would only be possible aurally. Even so, we encourage Kim to use words whenever possible and we try to create an atmosphere in which she will feel comfortable enough to speak. In my own way, I’m a lot like Kim. I realized last year that, since beginning my foray into academic religion and philosophy, my personal lexicon has grown rather substantially. This is true to such an extent that I actually now have difficulty communicating with people on an ‘everyday’ sort of level, especially with my father. It’s as if we speak two entirely different languages. In the past, I had always assumed that it was my responsibility to “dumb it down” for everyone, so that I could be understood. But that’s, well… dumb. Instead, I ought to be vulnerable to the depth of other people’s communication. I’ve been throwing my academically primed vocabulary out there in the same way that Kim extends her hand: though I know that it’s inadequate, I expect everyone else to get the gist. I force others to kowtow to me. Of course, I’m also deeply appreciative of anyone who actually understands me, but those encounters function more as litmus tests for my peers than real attempts and building relationships. More often than not, other people are forced to treat me the same way that we assistants have to treat Kim: “What do you want? Use your words please. I don’t understand. Show me.” Far from being superior and powerful, both Kim and I usually just end up frustrated. Still, it’s always nice when someone helps me along by creating the kind of environment that’s conducive to more simple forms of correspondence.

Beside communication, next comes prayer. Thank God I know nothing about prayer. I have to confess that this has long been a point of serious consternation for me. I really don’t know how to pray, though I always thought I did. Here at L’arche, we do prayers daily (or nightly, to be more specific) and each house has a prayer table; a designated space for our sacred time. Nothing else beside worshipful things are allowed to go on the prayer table: no TV remotes, no drinks, nothing. When I read Christine Pohl’s book, Making Room, last semester, I recall reading her statement that ignoring limits and boundaries can be a form of arrogance. I think she was right. Having limits is the first step toward hospitality, which, if you read my undergraduate thesis, is the first step toward Ethics, and maybe even the first toward God. With our prayer times in L’arche, this sense of limit is true in a double sense. We keep the sacred space sacred, but we also keep things simple. Folks with intellectual disabilities are generally confused or bored by anything that goes longer than a half-hour or involves more than a few sentences. Ignoring those limitations would indicate a serious sense of arrogance on our part as assistants. In this way, I’m learning how to pray by going back to basics. To pray in L’arche is to do so as honestly as possible while kicking out all the stuff that’s too big or that has too many widgets to fit. Kim, for instance, doesn’t say anything really, but she usually manages to mutter “Amen,” so we all just say, “Amen,” and that’s the prayer; the whole thing as one word. Considering her difficulty with speech, however, I can’t think of a more honest prayer in Kim’s world. If you pray fake in L’arche, everybody knows that it’s fake and there are usually at least a few people who won’t put up with your bullcrap.

For me, then, I’ve been greatly wounded in this area of prayer. One thing I hate is the “daddy” language of so many Evangelical and “low-church” prayers. It sounds completely idiotic. “God, we just…Lord, we just…Father, we just…Oh, Daddy, we just…” blah blah blah. Get it out already! If you “just” desire one thing or another, then why not just say that one thing instead of going on and on? There’s insecurity in there that makes my skin crawl. There’s also insecurity, however, in a lot of “high theology” prayers. These prayers generally hit critical mass for boredom. “Merciful, heavenly, almighty Father, who is omnipotent in all ways and cares for each *insert Scripture passage here*…With your graces, please allow…” yadda yadda yadda. Lord, save me from thy ministers! My frontal lobes simply cannot withstand that kind of theological onslaught. As the saying goes, a rich man doesn’t need to tell you that he’s rich and the same thing is true for a faithful man. A certain amount of spiritual insecurity just can’t be tolerated in a faithful community. The prayer is simply too obvious for God to really be in there. Unlike in other areas of life, however, we normally don’t get corrected during prayer and, therefore, don’t learn very much. During college, I came up with a formula to circumvent these problems: something reverent, something appropriate, something powerful, something inclusive. As long as a prayer, regardless of its length, hit all four of those things, then I was happy with it.

Learning to pray is like building an airplane, but I was starting from scratch by bolting together a Leer jet. What I should have been doing was sketching lines on scraps of balsa wood. The truth is that I don’t know how to pray powerfully, not yet anyway. But, for the time being, L’arche is forcing me to come at prayer with only what I’ve got and nothing more. It’s basic and maybe a little awkward, but at least it’s stable and comes with a measure of spiritual security. Before I left home, I was convicted that God’s calling was one into deep poverty. I’m still convicted of that. A friend of mine, Anna, who is currently in Taize, France, spoke to me about a kind of poverty that I had never heard before: spiritual poverty. That is, like material poverty, but involving the deeper bits of the Self. We come to God with what we can muster. And, no, it’s not enough. The fact is, it’s never enough, especially for God, but it is what we have nonetheless. I’ve thought about material poverty before and, as the years go by, I’m becoming more used to it (little by little). I feel my need to compulsively purchase new things growing progressively fainter. In this, I think that I am gaining a measure of material security. Spiritual poverty, however, opens up new wounds and hits me in new ways. Perhaps in time, the training wheels will come off, but that’s not how God’s provoking me right now. I have to start small. I guess that I’m just planting the mustard seed.

Time of Trial

The night before last (as of this writing) our sweet Arahata exploded. These past two weeks have been a trial by fire for me, as there’s been nothing but tragedy and turmoil. In Arahata specifically, the conflict has centered squarely on relations between assistants, particularly Carly. Apparently, Carly has worked in mental health before, more than likely in a care-giving role. Here at L’arche, however, we’re assistants, not care-givers. I think she’s having trouble making the transition, probably due to her prior experience with the disabled. Although this is highly ironic, my inexperience is the quality that’s actually helping me most to cope with life at L’arche. Never underestimate the power of being woefully underqualified for something, because it can completely save you. And there’s another bit to remember: Look for the irony. Irony is a clue that something is amiss, often within oneself. Listen for irony and you’ll find wisdom. As a matter of fact, I think sheer and simple irony has revealed more wisdom to me than any philosopher or theologian ever could, but that’s a lesson for another time. For now, let’s get back to underqualification. It’s becoming clear that, coming simply with my Self and my deepest vulnerabilities and wounds, I have a very large margin of teachability. I’ve been unexpectedly complimented on my work here several times and every time the word ‘teachable’ comes into use. Yet, the only reason for the existence of this beneficial quality is that I’m still a greenhorn. Fresh off the plane, “Your wish is my command,” became my general outlook. If Michele or Brenda had asked me to move a mountain, then I would have at least attempted it. (Incidentally, they did exactly that when I was given sole charge of the house for a day.) There is the darker side, the unknown parts, of being new. Despite the good that newness brings, make no mistake, living in community as a greenie is uber-scarry. What if there’s a fire? What if someone chokes on their food? How is medication distributed? Are core members OK to leave the house by themselves? What do I need to cook for dinner? How does laundry work around here? From the extremely bogus to the extremely banal, being underqualified is no picnic and is a serious cause of sleepless nights, soreness, stiffness, awkwardness, and the occasional catastrophic misjudgment (and subsequent guilt trip).

But all of that stuff; for all the problems that being underqualified causes, is nowhere near as problematic as being unteachable. Among assistants here, being unteachable creates an aura of tension, both psychological and muscular. If core members need help with something, then we help them. Helping out core members is what we get paid for as assistants. At the same time, however, there is a season for every kind of help. If core members can do something on their own (like making lunch in Kim and Leighanne’s case) then it actually becomes very unhelpful to intervene and provide assistance. In terms of the mental health and disability sectors, L’arche works under the “Empowerment Model.” A big part of that in Arahata is the enforcement of boundaries. Carly, however, won’t do it, not yet anyway. Instead, her care-giving nature takes over and she ends up coddling the core members as if they were babies. Alot of assistants, myself included, make this mistake. Culturally, it's a natural bad habit. It’s worth note here that both of our core members are middle-aged women. We don’t call them “sweetie” or “darling” because that would be like calling my mom by those names, which is just plain creepy, disability or no.

To invoke my undergraduate thesis for a moment, I think that our cultural desire for charity, especially as a manifestation of power, needs to be seriously wounded. L’arche communities are the places for such transformation. I understand the desire for emotional security, but, for God’s sake (literally) people, give it a rest. All that disempowering, co-dependent behavior only creates creates heaps of tension and anxiety. This is true in a social sense, a communal sense, and a personal one. Try as we might have to keep things under wraps, the situation in Arahata was like a powder keg and a few nights ago it went off. We hit a wall. The camel’s back was broken.

I was making pizza for dinner (which, much to my surprise, was quite good) and I was almost finished baking it when Brenda decided that she wanted to put a little music on. She put on a CD and selected a song. One of our core members (who likes to be in control of the stereo) didn’t want to hear it, so she tried to change the CD to a different track. Brenda compromised with her: “We’ll listen to this one first and then, after that, you can pick what you’d like.” This particular core member agreed with her, which stopped her from trying to steal the stereo, but didn’t stop her from sulking. I’ve learned in the past week that sulking is, in many cases, actually a clever emotional smoke screen which people just use as a bid for power. Brenda knows this and has therefore been working to establish some boundaries in this area for our house. If the assistants don’t give in, then core members realize that they can’t push everyone around emotionally. Eventually, the sulking person just kind of gets over whatever was bothering them. The curtain comes down; the show ends. A half-hour later, we're usually finished sulking and ready for jokes and laughter again; obviously, nothing too traumatic.

I learned this lesson (yet again) yesterday, when trying to get Kim to put on her boots. Brenda simply knows our core member better than most, especially Carly and I. But Carly wasn’t going to have any of that. She began to comfort and hug Kim, reinforcing her little sulk. Brenda tried to correct Carly. Carly ignored her. Brenda tried again. Carly still ignored her. Then the shouting match started. This quickly evolved into a barrage of harsh language. Brenda went off and Carly left. Michele was called and we spend the rest of the night doing a few things: calming down our core members, talking with Michele, and praying. Fortunately for us, it was also Open Night of Prayer, a community event of worship which is open to the public and supports L’arche. So directly after that emotional explosion, we left for worship with friends. Certainly strange, but just what the doctor ordered.

We try hard to hide assistant conflicts from our core members. People with disabilities tend to live deeply into community. They need the help of others so often that most of them simply can’t afford the costs of being introverted. The practical upshot is that, because our core members know people on such an intuitive level, they can pick up on and identify with the emotional states of their assistants very quickly. What do you do when your assistants, your friends and caretakers, seem hate each other? You get extremely frightened. You question your security. You cry-a lot; which is exactly what our core members did. Assistants were rattled, but mostly just silent. I...prepared pizza (which was quite good). At present, I’m on my days off, sitting in a sketchy little hostel on the hospital grounds of New Town, Wellington. Carly has gone to be at a convent until our normal house leader, Akiko returns tomorrow. Brenda is at a funeral for her friend who just died in a surfing accident. The next time we see each other, Akiko will be there as well and we’ll have a absolutely chaotic mess to sift through. A lot has happened in the past month. “Surprise, Kiko, the house is in bloody shambles.” We've all literally gone our separate ways and I look forward to a reconvening.

Oh well. For now, it’s good that we all have some time away. As I stated in an earlier post, Sabbath is important, especially in L’arche. And, even though my first two weeks here have been a non-stop roller coaster ride of travesty, it’s been a travesty that I’m proud to own. Worrying about a faithful community of people who really care is still ten times better than worrying about something like required credit hours for graduation, my financial debt load, or the number of hours that I get/have at work. I mean, that stuff is just soul-crushing. Thank God that my pizza turned out OK. I still have much to learn about cooking. Thankfully, Leighanne’s been helping me with that.

Photo Jam 2

Some photos of my fellow assistants and the core members of L'arche that we live with are long overdue on this blog, so: PHOTO JAM 2!

First up is a shot of Peter. Though he may not look it, Peter was a gold medal swimmer in the Special Olympics back in his prime. He still likes to swim alot and is probably one of the most graceful people I've ever seen in the water. Peter doesn't live at Arahata anymore, but he still comes around once in a while to have a go in the spa pool.

This is Kim, one of the core members that lives in Arahata with me. Kim is a died-in-the-wool trickster. She's always good for a laugh and, if you get her going, she'll even tell some jokes. In this photo, she's playing the ukulele. Normally, Kim is an elective mute, but that night she actually sang us a song. I'd tell you what the song was, except that it was in Maori and, unfortunately, I don't speak Maori.

Here's one final shot of everyone in the spa pool. In the left background: That's Leighanne, she's the other core member who currently lives here in the Arahata house. Leighanne currently holds a job at a local hair salon, which is very exciting. She super good in the kitchen and very neat and tidy; a real help for us assistants, especially in the preceding weeks of turmoil.

That's all for now, but pretty soon I should have some landscape photos. Until then, just imagine what it would be like if the Rocky Mountains were right next to the Pacific Ocean. Add some rain (or alot of it) and you've got Paraparaumu, New Zealand.

Photo Jam 1

I've got a deep theological development brewing somewhere, but it's not here now. So, for the time being: PHOTO JAM 1!

For this first one, we have the latest craze among hip indie Kiwi subversives: Knit-Tagging. The local crew here in Paraparaumu is called the "Tit-Knaggers." Note that most of these pictures were taken at night; very ninja styles. This movement's so subversive that it's not even really subversive anymore! "Nice digs with the crochet, grandma, but look out; here comes the five-oh!"

There are, of course, a few masterworks including the rainbow bike stand, clothing for bronze statuary children, and a knitted police line in New Town, Wellington.