House and Home

Alright, so last Wednesday I began my duties as acting house leader for Arahata. The move of one core member, Peter, and three assistants, Rachel, Elias, and Noel, out of Te Waka is more-or-less complete. Peter has been moved to Rangimarie house along with Elias and Noel and Julie (from Rangimarie) has come down to live with us along with Rachel who's moved from Te Waka. Additionally, a new assistant will be with us for a period of one month. She's from the organization "Challenge 2000" and her name is Julia. It's a full house. I feel really surprised that Arahata can actually sleep seven to eight people, but hey, it works. Everybody has ample space and only two people have to share a bedroom.

There are moments when the house feels very homey to me, like during dinner. Everyone is around the table and it feels like I've finally found a full and vibrant place to live in. We have the same number of core members and assistants as before Te Waka was released, but we're all consolidated into two houses now, so everything feels more closely knit. Rangimarie is only a 10-minute walk and I can see Peter every day of the week now, if I wish. It still seems like a shame to have to release one whole house, but overall this is going pretty well. I think that the community should have made this move sooner than we did.

But, these new arrangements have their downsides as well. Tensions run higher with new people in the house and routines get upset. I don't think I could have picked a much worse time to become house leader. In addition to the added responsibility of tracking things like the house finances, I now also have to start rebuilding relationships with core members and assistants. In some cases, like with Julie and Julia, this must be done from scratch, as they're completely new to me. Assisting Julie is going to be especially challenging, but I have to keep in mind that all of this change is at least as difficult for her as it is for me and everyone else in the house. I've dedicated pretty much the past week to just getting to know Julie and Julia better and figuring out how to properly assist Julie. It's the weekend now, so things are pretty low-key, but tonight's our house meeting and tomorrow is Monday again.

As a house leader, things are looking...er...OK for me, actually (at the moment anyway). I've got things under alot more control than I thought I would. When Akiko was here, she stressed basically one thing: "making a nice house." I'm learning alot to delegate tasks to people who are either more called or more qualified than I am, which takes alot of stress off me and helps the house to feel more integrated. Everyone should have a place and a calling and, basically, it's the house leader's job to empower that idea, but it's not as hard as I thought it was. It's not so hard because, in order for a house to be a house, everyone has to have their own sense of ownership anyway. Without that, there's no house, only the enacted will of a few people, represented as a house. They say that love makes a house a home, but I have a much more technical understanding of that statement now than I ever did before.

I'm also learning to separate my own feelings from other people's feelings. If someone's upset, then there's no reason that I have to be. On the other hand, I'm not at liberty to ignore that person either. I find that, in university, I had two sorts of mental experiences: thoughts and feelings, but that I had them separately. In L'Arche, I'm gaining a whole new level of meta-cognitive awareness. I have thoughts about my feelings and feelings about my thoughts and I have these experiences quite regularly.

I think about Ethics as the day goes on and my thoughts cause me to have feelings because the once purely abstract statements and stances I hold now have actual and positive connections to my community. For instance: the intellectually disabled shouldn't be forced to work for pennies on the dollar at menial "sweat shop" jobs, but... government regulations against such things also rob alot of disabled people of their chance to feel productive and socially involved. If an employer has to pay a legally established threshold, then the disabled will either have to work very hard at "normal" jobs, or they have no work at all. Here in NZ, we can't set up a traditional L'Arche workshop precisely because of such legal "protections." It's my messy, complicated feeling about a once-clean and upright thought.

At the same time and on the other hand, I feel frustrated and angry sometimes, either about something or at someone. In community, I can't let these emotions run away by themselves because the consequences could be very drastic. In order to keep the community together we need to stay calm and act: together, decisively, committed, and intelligently. So, when I have a feeling, there's a mental check in that happens: Why do I feel this way, exactly? The answer to this question give me some very well-connected and stable thoughts about all my messy feelings. Jean Vanier says that L'Arche is built on pain, which is true, but much of that is simply the pain of self-awareness. Living in community definitely holds a mirror up to oneself.

One last thing before I head off: Last Thursday was Jean Vanier's birthday. He's now a man of 81 years. This dude's vision has come a long way since the 60s, undergoing a whole lot of change and mutation. I, for one, signed his birthday card from our community with thanks and gladness. I'm very proud to be a part of this organization and I hope that it's made the world better place, even if I can't stay here forever.