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.