Empty pockets (The Trinity Forum - 2012)
"This is a story of empty pockets. During a recent trip to Rome, I enjoyed an evening in the company of a group that included a young Jesuit who had spent a year in El Salvador and was due to return there soon. At one point over the course of the evening’s discussion, Father Michael described the time he had spent at one of the L’Arche communities founded by Jean Vanier. L’Arche began in 1964 when Vanier bought a home in rural France and invited two adults with mental retardation to live there with him. Some sixty L’Arche communities now exist worldwide. The guiding spirit behind L’Arche differs dramatically from the therapeutic paternalism that often structures relationships between the “normal” and the “mentally handicapped.” L’Arche is a community dedicated to the unlikely proposition that the more able should not do things to or for the less able but should, instead, live with them in covenant. Writes Vanier, “Handicapped people are teachers of . . . the strong. With their tre