The mystery of our fundamental human dignity is a reality that we intuitively sense by virtue of our being human, and yet it eludes every strictly rational attempt to understand it. It is difficult if not impossible- by reason alone- to grasp the profound value of simply being human; so difficult, in fact, that in trying to locate the source of our sense of sense of worth, we ignore the silent and mysterious core of our personhood and focus instead on its periphery: our actions and achievements, the choices that define us, and our unique gifts and talents. These, and not the often elusive mystery of our humanity itself, become the means by which we seek to justify our fundamental intuition that we are valuable. Perhaps no ministry that I have ever been involved with has more deeply challenged my own tendencies to think this way than the eleven weeks I spent working at Jean Vanier's L'Arche in Montreal.
L'Arche, so named after the biblical story of Noah's Ark, is a world-wide network of residential communities for people with mental disabilities. Founded in the 1960's by the French-Canadian Jean Vanier, L'Arche is rooted in Vanier's intuition of the dignity of people with cognitive disabilities, and his sense that they have profound gifts to offer the rest of us, if only we will allow ourselves to encounter them in mutual relationship. The L'Arche community where I ministered, located in Verdun, a municipality near Montreal, houses five residents, one responsable (a sort of house administrator), and one or two assistants who cover for the responsable on his days off. There is no hierarchy separating residents from assistants and responsables: All are members of the community and eat the same food; all pray together at mealtime and live in the same house. Residents may remain in the community for life, and they are cared for in a way that respects and encourages whatever degree of autonomy and decision-making is possible for each. The L'Arche model is purposely non-clinical; it is not conceived of in terms of "caregivers" and "clients", but rather in communitarian terms grounded in relationship and reciprocity.
Ministering at L'Arche has deepened my awareness of the dignity of the human person as a mystery to be silently contemplated in awe. My work with the mentally disabled helped me uncover within myself traces of an insidious and all too common tendency in our culture to make intelligence, talent, and achievement the measure of our humanity, rather than the mysterious and indescribable core at the heart of our personhood. The awesome truth is that before we act, excel, or out-shine one another, we simply are; and there is a dazzling brilliance to simply being that is unveiled to us only when we truly engage and attentively look at another person in her helplessness and vulnerability, without any of the usual fireworks of intellectual deftness, talent or achievement to distract us. It took brushing a woman's teeth who could not do it herself, being placed squarely in the presence of her loving and trusting gaze, for me to see Christ gazing at me from within her. This experience and others like it have blessed me with a deeper sense of the priority of being over doing, of love over reason.
Paradoxically, my ministry to my new friends at L'Arche also filled me with a deeper sense of the importance of actions, moral responsibility, and the application of our unique gifts and talents as the vehicles through which love makes the encounter with Christ possible. It is not the analytical gaze of the detached observer that opens us to the mystery of Christ in another person, but rather the committed gaze of one who has chosen to love and to make love concretely present. It is in encounter and loving engagement that Christ is made visibly present and contemplation becomes a genuine possibility, and it is in committed moral action that reason, enlightened by the Spirit, yields the wisdom needed to be grasped by that which reason alone can never grasp. My friends at L'Arche Montreal have helped me better understand all this, and yet they have also helped me glimpse an even more amazing truth: Even if a human being's possibility for action and engagement is particularly limited or almost non-existent, Christ continues to dwell silently in the mysterious core of every individual manifestation of personhood, ever waiting to be seen, known, loved...
