INTRODUCTION
Inversion, Pleasure, and Story

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for God’s people to dwell together in unity.

(Psalm 133)

What is the secret that allows L’Arche to exist? I’ll tell you: pleasure!

(Jean Vanier writing to Julia Kristeva, 15 July 2009)1

This book explores big questions. To paraphrase Wade Davis, what does it mean to be human and alive in community? In more practical terms, what transforms and sustains communities? The apparently narrow lens of overlooked stories about connections between the United Church of Canada, Jean Vanier, and L’Arche reveals that communities can spring to life when something unexpected erupts to challenge the familiar, that communities are sustained by experiences of pleasure, and that transformative experiences are negotiated and held in memory when people share their stories.

Some stories in this book are historical and involve particular places and people, while others recount connections on the level of ideas or inspiration. Some of these stories are encouraging, some are delightful, and others are awkward or painful. What makes these stories so profound? As a literary scholar interested in the social and cultural meanings of stories, I argue that the interest lies in their dynamics of transformation and the intriguing pleasure of surprise. This book analyzes ever-changing relationships by exploring inversion, pleasure, and story. In brief, inversion is the first movement of transformation. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, both the United Church and L’Arche were actively shaped by a series of social inversions. Pleasure might be the experience, but not always! I make no effort to idealize or romanticize either L’Arche or the United Church. Pleasure, as used by Vanier in his letter to Julia Kristeva quoted above, is closely related to Aristotle’s understanding of happiness, the pleasure of living responsibly as a valued member of one’s society. The third term is story. Story is a medium for communicating, listening, and interpreting, an accessible way of grasping the lived experience of transformative dynamics. Story is not limited to verbal communication. As the United Church’s Lois Wilson points out in Chapter 1, “It’s harder without words. There are other ways of ‘being with’ other than words.”2

Community is foundational to the United Church, literally. A Church-wide remit voted on in 2017 stated: “We believe God is inviting us to change radically and renew ourselves so we can engage fully and authentically with diverse communities in a changing context.”3 The United Church approved that “communities of faith” replace “pastoral charges” or “congregations” as the basic unit of the United Church. The remit specified, “Communities of faith would include any community of people based in Jesus Christ that gathers to explore faith, to worship, and to serve.”4 Clearly, “community” means more than an institutional category. Communities of faith are the basis of the continuing United Church of Canada.

Jean Vanier, after decades of living in community, provides an important caution: “The time when a community feels it may be dying is not the time to change externals.” Instead Vanier asserts, “This is the time for inner renewal, for a renewed trust in personal relationships; it is a time to stay close to the poor and those in distress.”5 The United Church’s commitment to becoming an “intercultural church” may offer a path to this kind of inner renewal through personal relationships, asking, “What social and material arrangements enable all minds, bodies and souls to worship, grow spiritually, and contribute to the community? The radically accessible faith community includes Christians with disabilities as active, self-identified members in the body of Christ whose vulnerability make the church whole, for ‘difference is how God says beauty.’”6 We could consider the call for “alliance-building” in the 2015 “Theologies of Disabilities Report” to the 42nd General Council as initiating a tender process, tendering a call for practical help to meet a need:

Alliance-building through action is key for the work of social transformation. The ethicist Janet Jakobsen argues that without attention to forming alliances in a context of difference, movements for social change tend to reproduce the very dynamics they criticize in the dominant society. She contends that alliance-building must engage diversity and complexity within and among groups. Only then can movements for change avoid reproducing the barriers of we/they thinking and instead form working relationships for the creation of ‘spaces where differences need not imply hierarchy and domination.’7

A problem with convincing pronouncements like this is that it is hard to get beyond the words. What does it mean to “form alliances in the context of difference”? What is the “alliance-building through action” that “must engage diversity and complexity within and among groups” to avoid reproducing hierarchical we/they thinking? The hundreds of commissioners at the 2015 United Church General Council might well have wondered, “Sounds great, but where do we start?”

In this book, I suggest that the mutual relationship between the United Church and L’Arche is already an alliance in these terms. L’Arche and the United Church have a half-century of history as allies, creating “spaces where differences need not imply hierarchy and domination,” yet neither has paid attention to the significance of this long relationship, either in the past or going forward. Curiously, neither L’Arche nor Vanier are mentioned in the “Theologies of Disabilities Report” that proposes alliance-building between the church and people with disabilities and their allies. In 2018, a United Church minister active for years in both L’Arche and a regional United Church Intercultural Ministry Network admitted that he had never heard of the United Church’s “Theologies of Disabilities Report.” Similarly, a United Church minister who recently served L’Arche on an international level was also unfamiliar with the report. On the other hand, L’Arche leaders invited to address United Church gatherings are also usually unaware of their shared commitments and vision for society, linked already through a long history of connections between their communities.

To be honest, both the United Church and L’Arche have a history of producing well-crafted documents that are widely ignored. As a scholar, it is tempting to assume that Jean Vanier’s writings have continually shaped L’Arche culture and experience, or that United Church documents such as “Mending the World” (1998) or the more recent “Theologies of Disability Report” (2015) influence the life and choices of United Church communities. However, even the writers themselves admit that few members of the anticipated audience read the documents. Often these kinds of writings prove more popular and influential outside of their respective organizations. Further, both L’Arche and the United Church have become increasingly decentralized since the 1990s, so centrally produced studies or reports are even less likely to impact local communities.

In this study, I include key documents and writings of L’Arche and the United Church, recognizing that they are often more aspirational than descriptive. You may find that the most multi-layered and thought-provoking research is found in people’s stories. That was what motivated my research. The documents will remain in archives and libraries, but stories held only in people’s memories risked being lost.

THE PLAYERS: THE UNITED CHURCH OF CANADA,
JEAN VANIER, AND L’ARCHE

On the world stage, the United Church of Canada, as a uniquely Canadian church, has always been a marginal player. Founded in 1925 as an extraordinary experiment in church unity, Canada’s Methodist, Congregationalist, and most of the Presbyterian Churches joined to create a new national Protestant church, established by an Act of Parliament. By 1928, the United Church Year Book identified the new church as “a Uniting as well as a United Church,” anticipating “a still wider union.”8 The Evangelical United Brethren Churches joined in 1968. Of course, each of those dates simply marks the culmination of years of dreaming, scheming, intrigue, hope, prayer, desire and maneuvering. For most of a century, the United Church of Canada has worked to build a diverse Christian community of worshippers unique to Canada. Like most mainline churches, it reached its membership pinnacle about the time L’Arche began in 1964, but remains the second largest Christian denomination in Canada, after the Roman Catholic Church.

The first L’Arche community was begun in France by Jean Vanier. Born in 1928 into a Canadian diplomatic family, son of Canada’s first French Canadian and first Roman Catholic governor general and winner of the 2015 Templeton Prize, Jean Vanier was a philosopher, a speaker, and the founder of L’Arche.9 In an era before group homes or community living, people with intellectual disabilities lived either with family members or in large institutions. Visiting several French institutions in 1963, Vanier was moved by the residents’ cry of loneliness and anguish as well as their cry for friendship, for love, and for community. A priest he had met years before, Père Thomas Philippe, had been Vanier’s spiritual mentor and was now chaplain to a small institution for men with intellectual disabilities in the small village of Trosly, France.10 After some months of discernment, Vanier decided not to continue teaching philosophy at University of Toronto’s St Michael’s College and instead pursue a more radical lifestyle, ­choosing to live in France with people with intellectual disabilities. L’Arche officially began on 5 August 1964 when two men with intellectual disabilities, Philippe Seux and Raphaël Simi, said yes to Vanier’s extraordinary and unprecedented invitation to move out of their institution and create a family-style home together in a run-down house in the tiny village of Trosly, 75 kilometers northeast of Paris. In 2014, founding member Philippe Seux recalled how it began: “Jean Vanier took me out of a center where I had been placed by social workers. It had really been desolate there … When I came to L’Arche, there was no electricity, none. We used candles for lighting, it was fun! There were no toilets or showers, but I felt like I was exploding with joy – phew! – I was so happy to be there.”11 L’Arche also began with a failure. On the first night, the house also included another man from the same institution named Dany and a friend of Vanier’s named Jean-Louis Coïc. By the second day, it was clear that Dany needed more support than the unstructured little household could offer, and Vanier sadly returned Dany to the institution. Jean-Louis Coïc quickly recognized that the new community’s way of life did not suit him, but he stayed for several weeks supporting the others until more assistants arrived. Vanier, Seux, and Simi carried on.12

The second country where L’Arche began was Canada. In 1969, Steve and Ann Newroth with Bill Van Buren opened L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, and it immediately became an ecumenical community. The Newroths were Anglican. Bill Van Buren arrived from the Lawson School for Retarded Children, whose staff told the Newroths that Bill’s church affiliation was the United Church of Canada. Half a century after the first Canadian L’Arche community began, L’Arche has become an international federation of more than 165 L’Arche communities and projects in almost forty countries. Still, on a global scale L’Arche recognizes itself as a small seed, a “sign” offering an interfaith model of community and social engagement along with a theology of disability and, most importantly, an orientation of the heart, a way of being.

Throughout this book, you will find that people connected to L’Arche sometimes refer to “core members.” According to L’Arche legend, many years ago members of L’Arche with intellectual disabilities voted to call themselves “core members,” because they form the core of any L’Arche community. Theologian John Swinton aptly describes L’Arche as “an international network of communities in which people with intellectual disabilities live with people who do not share that life experience.”13

As United Church member and ordained minister Northrop Frye might have observed, the United Church and L’Arche are metaphorically similar. Both are carried by a social imaginary that is far larger than their size. Both are influential internationally. To offer just two examples, Lois Wilson, the first female moderator of the United Church, extended the United Church’s international reach when she was elected to the six-person Presidium of the World Council of Churches from 1983–91. In a similar vein, L’Arche may be small but it is widely respected even in government social services: a 2006 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation review of options for people with intellectual disabilities identified L’Arche as the only group-home-type living arrangement named as “best practice.”14 How to account for the outsized influence of both? How can we theorize L’Arche or the United Church in relation to the larger social contexts and cultural and religious forces that shaped the latter twentieth century?

Scholarship around the United Church of Canada has focused mainly on church history, histories of specific United Church movements, theologies and ethics, biographies, essays in honour of individuals, and collections of sermons. A whole sub-genre of speculative discussions about the United Church’s imminent demise began in the 1970s.15 National church and regional archives hold historical documents such as records of proceedings and committee reports, and the United Church Observer holds pride of place as “the oldest continuously published magazine in North America and the second oldest in the English speaking world.”16

In contrast, L’Arche does not have comprehensive archives of its historic documents or working papers,17 but it has stimulated academic discussion in an astonishing range of disciplines. Articles and books in English have been published in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, social policy, theology, philosophy, political and cultural studies, ethics, social work, disability studies, history, geography, and biography, as well as poetry, drama, memoir, and even fiction.18 L’Arche International published the magazine Letters of L’Arche from 1971 until 2014. There have been many documentary films about L’Arche and interviews with Jean Vanier and others, in addition to Vanier’s own voluminous writings in philosophy, theology, memoir, and anthropology.19 Perhaps this is even more surprising when we remember that most people at the core of L’Arche would not be able to read any of these studies. But right from the founding by Jean Vanier with his newly acquired PhD, L’Arche has attracted people at both ends of the intellectual spectrum.20

“THE SPIRIT OF IT”

In 2013, theologian John Swinton responded to my question of what the United Church could learn from L’Arche with this insight: “L’Arche in principal should function as a catalyst, that by being itself it changes things, rather than people copying it. Just the fact that it exists should be transformative if people notice it and hear the spirit of it.”21

A key to understanding “the spirit of it” is to consider how Vanier’s unique character and energy shaped the project from its earliest days. In a 1965 interview on CBC, Jean Vanier explained his new L’Arche house as a place of social levelling, “where we live all together without this kind of distinction between the director and those who are directed … a family together, brothers and sisters if you like, in a very happy family atmosphere where we eat together, where we live together.”22 Louis Pretty, a Canadian architect who went on to a distinguished teaching career at Université de Montréal, was involved in Vanier’s purchase of the first house in Trosly. Within weeks of its beginning, Pretty came to live there as one of the community’s early assistants. Looking back, he remembers: “Jean was always very optimistic, he didn’t see any problems, anywhere; everything was perfect, there was no need to worry, everything would go well! … His spirit was certainly a little contagious, but one did have some doubts.”23

More recently, Vanier described the process of building a L’Arche community in three stages: “The first thing is doing acts of justice, taking people who have been treated cruelly out of those situations. Then the second thing is that the assistants are changed. And the third thing is that we come together, and we don’t know who is changing whom and it doesn’t matter, but we have fun. This is part of the complexity.”24 In other words, Vanier describes community life as a complex process without fixed positions of hierarchy, of high and low. It might start in what appears to be a unidirectional movement of a preferential option for the poor so that the “poor” are raised up, but then the assistants are also changed, then it turns topsy-turvy so that who is high and who is low isn’t identifiable and it doesn’t matter, because, Vanier insists, they are having fun together. As Vanier explained at a fiftieth anniversary of L’Arche celebration in 2014: “God wants unity between all human beings, and we can’t celebrate humanity if the poorest and the weakest are excluded. So we must have a place to welcome those who are the weakest, those in wheelchairs, those who have difficulty speaking, walking, who can’t go to university, a place for them where life can be celebrated, because if we haven’t got this place, we can’t celebrate humanity. That is God’s vision.”25 This suggests something interesting about unity: unity is entirely different than uniformity or even coherence.

Unity is the ultimate project of both L’Arche and the United Church, but both have had to give up limiting ideas of what unity might look like. The United Church has had to give up a simplistic notion of unity as a single church structure into which more and more denominations were expected to merge together. Recently, the United Church has redefined unity as simultaneously embracing radical inclusiveness and maximum diversity with the goal of fostering a genuinely intercultural church. For example, the “Theologies of Disabilities Report” to the 42nd United Church General Council in 2015 states, “An intercultural church honours difference, works to transform relations that exclude, and is committed to be changed by those who have been seen as ‘other.’ When difference is recognized as ‘necessary to truth and goodness’ differences become sources of energy, alternative visions of reality, and ways of moving beyond binary thinking into models of multiplicity, mutuality, and dialogue.”26 In other words, unity is more than bringing together differences. For the United Church in the twenty-first century, unity “honours difference” that leads to mutual transformation.

This formulation of the transformative power of an intercultural United Church is close to the “L’Arche Identity and Mission,” which states, “We are people with and without intellectual disabilities, sharing life in communities, and belonging to an international federation. Mutual relationships and trust in God are at the heart of our journey together. We celebrate the unique value of every person and recognize our need of one another.” The L’Arche statement continues, “Our Mission is to: Make known the gifts of people with intellectual disabilities, revealed through mutually transforming relationships” and “Engage in our diverse cultures, working together towards a more human society.”27

L’Arche too has had to let go of simplistic models of unity, right from the first year when Vanier agreed to expand his one household to include a small institution of thirty men with more serious behavioral issues. L’Arche expanded from its Roman Catholic beginnings, becoming first ecumenical and then interfaith, while developing into a complex worldwide federation of communities in many cultures, negotiating myriad regulations and contexts. For both the United Church and L’Arche, unity is not what they initially imagined. Yet each tenaciously holds onto a mission or call to unity.

TENDER STORIES

Many key stories about L’Arche and members of the United Church initially seem like merely individual accounts of transformation, but for Vanier these experiences are the building blocks of changing the world. He concluded Becoming Human, his best-selling CBC Massey lectures, with his oft-quoted invitation to “change our world one heart at a time.”28 Consider United Church minister Maggie Enwright’s testimony about L’Arche: “Not to get too dramatic, but it probably changed my life. The first or second time I went, we sang ‘How could anyone ever tell you that you’re anything less than beautiful’ and I thought – that’s what I’ve been needing to hear all my life.”29 From the outside, I suspect no one would have imagined that Enwright was someone in need of affirmation. By the time she encountered L’Arche, Enwright was an experienced United Church minister with an undergraduate degree in psychology, a law degree, several years working as a lawyer, then a variety of other experiences before entering ministry. She had served both rural and urban churches as well as several years as United Church overseas personnel with the Moravian Church in Nicaragua. But something completely new happened for her when she got to know the people of L’Arche Comox Valley: “Until that moment, no matter how accomplished, I had such low self esteem inside. L’Arche changed that for me. How? By witnessing how valuable people are who don’t have accomplishments or smarts. And how coming into community they don’t seem to suffer the same intimidation that most of us do. When you walk in the door at Jubilee House, Lisa will say ‘Maggie! Hi Maggie!’ and Cory will shout out, and it’s been like that since day one and they knew my name.”

I am not trying to perpetuate reductive stereotypes of either the open-hearted person with an intellectual disability or the anxiously self-critical United Church minister handicapped by an overly developed intellect. Rather, I want to slow down and pay attention to what Enwright says here: “L’Arche changed that for me. How? By witnessing how valuable people are who don’t have accomplishments or smarts.” People who will never grasp the implications of her degrees and life choices knew her name. Notice two inversions here. Enwright suddenly discovered that she is intrinsically valuable because she witnessed how people who are often dismissed or marginalized are valuable. In a movement that Aristotle might call recognition and reversal, recognizing their value transforms her own. It’s not only a transformative double-inversion, but also a story of pleasure. Her story is simple: from the very first day people knew her name and shouted it out with joyful welcome.

Even more profoundly, Enwright’s story is tender. Tender is an important word in L’Arche. As Vanier explains, tenderness is physical, “a meeting through the flesh.” He adds, “it’s also to look tenderly, to listen tenderly and in that tenderness there’s no judgment, no condemnation. Essentially tenderness is the road to communion, to mutual presence. So tenderness is something that we are called to live with people with all forms of disabilities. And essentially the whole reality of life is to reveal to people that you are more precious than you’d ever believe. You’re important.”30 In the chapters that follow, we will listen to stories of encounters. Might the history between the United Church and L’Arche offer a unique model of a tender relationship? Perhaps at a time when the United Church continues to wonder about its very existence and L’Arche searches for new ways to respond to social changes, their history with each other says to both, “You are more precious than you’d ever believe. You are important.”

Tenderness is also a sign of maturity. People’s intellectual disabilities are frequently defined as quantifiable immaturity in phrases like “the mental capacity of an 8-year-old.”31 In L’Arche, it is often noted that intellectual disability does not necessarily handicap someone’s spiritual life or ability to love.32 But few efforts have been made to explain what that maturity looks like. L’Arche psychiatrist Patrick Mathias believed that tenderness is a mark of mature solidarity: “Tenderness is a way of life, where gentleness and kindness remind us how different it is from sentimentalism or romanticism and that it requires maturity.”33 To Vanier, tenderness also implies unity. The opposite of violence, he suggests, is not simply non-violence, but tenderness. He adds, “it’s the coming together of the inner and the outer worlds. It’s the unification of the whole person, of the spirit and the flesh coming together in a unity.”34

The word tender has not been used much in the United Church. Tender is not in the 1940 Statement of Faith or any version of the New Creed or the 2006 Song of Faith or even in the Manual of any year. The 1925 Articles of Doctrine refer to Micah 6:8, but translates it as “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God” while most Roman Catholics using the Jerusalem Bible know the central verse as “to love tenderly.” The word “tender” has not been overused in the United Church. It is not over-determined. Tender is a noun, an adjective, a verb, even an adverb. Tender’s multiple meanings escape simple reduction – thus I propose that tender is a timely word now.35

Theologian John Swinton suggests, “I think the United Church can learn a lot from L’Arche: in L’Arche you have reclamation of the gifts of the Spirit in the sense that gentleness, kindness, and patience are at the heart of any community.” Paradoxically, “tender” can also imply something not yet mature. The term “tenderfoot” suggests a lack of experience, a deficiency that may need extra understanding and patience, with the potential for growth. At a still deeper level, tender hints at vulnerability, weakness, even suffering. A tender subject can be a sore point, something painful, requiring care and delicacy. Jean Vanier insists that “We must not be idealistic about people with mental handicaps. Some have been victims of so much contempt and violence, which they have stored up inside themselves, that there can be an explosion of violence.”36 Tenderness as a way of life must be able to encompass this kind of vulnerability in anyone, as well as in communities. Vanier continues, “At L’Arche, there are moments of elation, but there are also moments of great pain and anguish.”37 His description of L’Arche applies equally to the United Church.

United Church minister Doug Graves, speaking at the fortieth anniversary of L’Arche in Greater Vancouver, commented on why he likes the “L’Arche Identity and Mission” statement: “I like the fact that it’s not a statement we created out of our heads, but is, in fact a summary of what we have learned about ourselves over the years – a statement of what we have discerned about ourselves and our role in God’s mission through our living and serving together.”38 Exploring the tender story of the United Church, Jean Vanier, and L’Arche moves “out of our heads” to claim a mutually transformative reality that is already being lived.

THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

This book unfolds in two parts. The first two chapters trace aspects of shared history between the United Church and L’Arche. Vanier is frequently called a “saint,” but when members of the United Church say that, what do they mean, and how does he respond? Chapter 1, “Are You a Saint?,” explores early links between the United Church and Jean Vanier himself, beginning with his address to the United Church 25th General Council of 1972. We look back to his inclusion in the 1960s United Church “New Curriculum” for Christian education, then trace United Church involvement in Vanier’s televised 1983 address at the World Council of Churches opening assembly in Vancouver. In each instance, Vanier’s message offered a way to notice and welcome surprising social inversions, similar to those that the United Church itself was experiencing in the 1960s and 1970s.

A tangible sign of the United Church’s inspiration through and affection for Vanier has been its support and commitment to L’Arche. Chapter 2, “Breakfast at the Ecumenical Buffet,” focuses on partnerships between the United Church and L’Arche, practical relationships that have been reciprocal though not symmetrical. In the 1970s context of the ecumenical movement and new developments in social services, connections between Canada’s “united and uniting church” and L’Arche in Canada included close collaboration, generous gifts, painful struggles, misunderstandings, and even breakages. We follow some key connections between the United Church and L’Arche leadership to the present day.

The second half of the book is more thematic. Chapter 3, “Just Stories?,” explores L’Arche and the United Church as storytelling communities. Narratives of identity and revitalization encompass suffering and hilarity, revealing how the unique social levelling of L’Arche has impacted the lives and experience of United Church members involved in L’Arche. Chapter 4, “Secret Agency and Surprising Subjects,” reminds us that in L’Arche, “core members” are the energy and fuel of each community. Canadian society in general has had low expectations of people with intellectual disabilities, so moments when they claim their own agency have often been a surprise and revelation to their fellow United Church members. Social and cultural theorists help to understand the dynamics, paradoxical complexities, and significance of unexpected agency in the United Church and L’Arche.

“Tell the story!” United Church writer and speaker Ralph Milton urged me. Quoting Aristotle, he added: “Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, hopefully not too far apart.”