2
Breakfast at the Ecumenical Buffet

Tender (verb): to offer or give something to somebody, or to request an offer or proposal for goods or services.

Whether Jean Vanier is a saint and whether we all are, the United Church Observer’s conclusion that he is “calling us to be the same”1 is inescapable. This chapter is about how the United Church took up Vanier’s message, tracing some key connections between Canada’s “united and uniting church” and L’Arche communities in Canada.2

L’Arche communities and United Churches exist as ideas, well-articulated organizations that aim to make a difference in their society. At the same time, both are located contextually in their local and historical moment and physically in specific places. You can find them on maps. People come and go. In that physical space, particular people are included and excluded, stories are told and remembered or forgotten. Exploring this wider cultural context can help us to understand some of the contradictions, the creative innovations and pleasures of these organizations discovering each other, as well as painful struggles, misunderstandings, and breakages. This chapter unfolds in three parts that explore such contexts in a generally chronological fashion, beginning with several ecumenical retreats that Vanier gave in the early 1970s, then tracing the United Church’s involvement in the founding and growth of several L’Arche communities in Canada, and finally considering the experiences of three United Church ministers whose Presbyteries have accepted their leadership role in L’Arche as a ministry of the United Church.

As we look more closely at the historic and ongoing stresses, Vanier’s comment in his circular letter after the 1972 General Council seems more prescient. Notice that he does not say readers must work for unity, but goes deeper to the common ground of prayer: “This encounter is perhaps one of the most moving that I have ever experienced. We must pray even more for unity.”3 Vanier assumes prayer effects a change of heart and thus action, whether on the part of the person praying or whoever else the spirit moves. The son of skilled diplomats, Vanier really believed that the personal was political, that the world could be changed one heart at a time. But even that movement functioned for Vanier at a level beyond human understanding, so he repeatedly acknowledged in his letters to supporters the critical importance of the people who uphold L’Arche through prayer.4

Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Council of Churches in August 1973, its general secretary Philip Potter, a West-Indian Methodist, asserted, “The most effective service the churches and the ecumenical movement could render to a divided world would be to live a credible fellowship amidst the conflicts and diversities of people and societies of which the churches are a part.”5 Does this sound like L’Arche communities, serving a divided world by living credible fellowship amidst conflicts and diversities? Potter’s remarks were indeed timely as L’Arche expanded rapidly in the 1970s through Canada. But living a credible fellowship was not as simple as it sounds. Sharing life with people with and without intellectual disabilities was more straightforward than sharing life ecumenically.

NARAMATA RETREAT 1973

A few months before Potter delivered his remarks, Vanier led a retreat in British Columbia. Remember Vanier’s 1972 letter that mused, “I had such a desire for unity; maybe Jesus will arrange that my next retreat include Anglicans, Catholics and members of the United Church”?6 Vanier writes in a public letter on 8 March 1973: “From my trip I sense a new hope as many people are thirsting to do something beautiful, to work for universal peace and to follow Jesus in His Beatitudes. I will return to Canada in June for a retreat with people from the United Church, the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church. Pray for this retreat, a time where we will meet together as disciples of Jesus in a common search to live more fully the Beatitudes.”7

Louise Cummings, who later became a United Church minister, was twenty years old in the spring of 1973 when she attended the Faith and Sharing retreat at the Centre at Naramata. Many people who went on to found L’Arche communities across Canada were there.8 It was, she recalls, the first of L’Arche’s “ecumenical” retreats, “by which they meant four hundred Roman Catholics and space for forty ‘others.’”9 Cummings and her mother were initially on the waiting list, but “squeaked in” as two of those forty people.

“The Catholic-Protestant divide was painfully present, and nobody had really thought it through,” Cummings recounts. “Catholics assumed it didn’t matter to the others about communion because the underlying assumption was that communion doesn’t have much of a place in the Protestant traditions.” She remembers Roman Catholic mass on the first day of the retreat: “It was a great community celebration, everybody was so joyful and wonderful, full of life and vigour and isn’t it great!” An announcement was made: at the time of communion, “any non-Catholics can go to that room over there.” That was news to her. Cummings explains, “Nobody really knew what was going to be there – we just knew we were to exit. So we went off and it was a room full of abandoned guitar cases and coats and some things – just a side room – I don’t know what they were thinking.” The Protestants “looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, what we’ll do is plan to have our communion service later in the week.’ That would be okay, and then we all came back out to be with everybody. We were all standing along the wall of the gym as everybody was filing up for communion, and they’re singing ‘We are one in the spirit and they’ll know we are Christians by our love,’ filing past us, and we were just standing there watching this happen, and it was just awful – it was so vividly painful.”

She recounts what happened next with humour: “There was a meeting suddenly scheduled for the Catholic Bishop and Jean Vanier to meet with these Protestants the next day. The angry Protestants! There they are, protesting again!” Cummings continues, “The next day, the crowd of ‘angry Protestants’ had gathered and I was on my way there in the hallway, and along came the bishop. His hands were shaking because he was so scared of what he was going to find in there. I said some kind words to him, and he said ‘Will you sit with me?’ What a sweet kid I was! My brother the bishop, yeah.” There is an unexpected reversal of power, hierarchy, and age here, in the older bishop’s fear of the marginalized Protestant minority, and the confidence and hospitality of the relatively young Louise. The moment required Louise’s active participation to walk into the room with the frightened bishop and sit with him. “I love my twenty-year-old self,” laughs Cummings.

The retreat that Louise Cummings describes was held at a specific place, the Centre at Naramata. Ironically, this was a retreat centre owned and operated by the United Church of Canada. In other words, the place where United Church members and other Protestants were excluded was a United Church space. British cultural geographer Doreen Massey provides a helpful way to think about the relationship of places and stories:

One way of seeing ‘places’ is as on the surface of maps: Samarkand is there, the United States of America (finger outlining a boundary) is here. But to escape from an imagination of space as surface is to abandon also that view of place. If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space. Their character will be a product of these intersections within that wider setting, and of what is made of them. And, too, of the non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions. All this contributes to the specificity of place.10

As Massey insists, every place is both its geographical coordinates and “a simultaneity of stories-so-far.” Other participants at the Naramata retreat hold completely different stories. Most of the Roman Catholics who attended do not remember any particular stress around denominational differences. Massey notes that the “disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions” are also part of the character of the place, as is “what is made of them.” For the Protestant minority, the story did not end with the first painful experience of marginalization and exclusion at the Roman Catholic mass. Instead, the story-so-far continued with meetings to redefine the “wider power-geometries,” beginning with Louise offering kindness and hospitality to the frightened Bishop.

Massey suggests that any given space is characterized by how intersections within the wider setting of power relations are interpreted. Let us step back to the wider cultural setting of the time. First, it is important to state that L’Arche has always worked to respect denominational differences. In a few circumstances the eucharist has been offered and received across denominational lines, but L’Arche has carefully avoided becoming a church itself.11 It is a stance in keeping with the larger L’Arche philosophy of appreciating and celebrating difference. Similarly, the United Church was committed to interdenominational dialogue and ecumenical cooperation as a founding member of the Canadian Council of Churches in 1944 and the World Council of Churches in 1948.12

In the later 1960s and early 1970s, both L’Arche and the United Church were responding to the larger social justice movements of their times. As many have observed, a combination of frustration and idealism led to a burgeoning of new communal efforts to improve society, such as co-operatives, communes, peace marches, shelters for women fleeing violence, and feminist solidarity.13 For people with intellectual disabilities and their families, deinstitutionalization was linked to a vision of integration into local communities. All these movements fit right into United Church priorities. As far back as 1935, the United Church had committed itself to “inclusive Christian fellowship,” a phrase that remains in The Manual of the United Church of Canada. In The United Church of Canada: A History, United Church minister and scholar Joan Wyatt characterizes the 1970s as “Voices from the Margins.” She lists many “new ways to be communities of faith” in the United Church, including “feminist women,” large ecumenical women’s conferences, house churches “some of which were safe places for gays and lesbians,” charismatic prayer groups, the Jesus movement, ecumenical evangelical conferences, and Faith Festivals.14 Meanwhile people with disabilities and their needs were coming into visibility in the worldwide Church. In 1971, the World Council of Churches published “The Unity of the Church and the Handicapped in Society,” suggesting that people with disabilities “remind the Church that Jesus Christ was rejected and broken, yet is for us the model of wholeness and of life.”15 In 1975, the 5th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Nairobi issued a statement on “The Handicapped and the Wholeness of the Family of God” which affirmed that “the church’s unity includes both the ‘disabled’ and the ‘abled.’”16 The United Church’s 27th General Council passed their own resolution in 1977 also titled “The Handicapped and the Wholeness of the Family of God.” This resolution stated that “the Church’s unity includes both the disabled and the abled, and a Church which seeks to be truly united within itself and move toward unity with others must be open to all; yet able-bodied Church members, both by their attitudes and their emphasis on activism, marginalize and often exclude those with mental or physical disabilities.”17

Vanier was inspired by the Second Vatican Council that began in 1962 and “breathed energy and hope back into the Church.”18 In Vanier’s 2013 book Signs of the Times, he quotes the Council’s closing message of 1965: “All of you who feel heavily the weight of the cross, you who are poor and abandoned, you who weep, you who are persecuted for justice, you who are ignored, you who are the unknown victims of suffering, take courage. You are the preferred children of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of hope, happiness and life … Know that you are not alone, separated, abandoned or useless. You have been called by Christ and are His living and transparent image.”19 Vanier explains how L’Arche grew out of the spirit of Vatican II with “its vision of the church as the people of God, with those who were the least powerful at its very centre. L’Arche’s vocation was to stand with them which is why it wasn’t simply a question of welcoming people with a disability. It was a question of living together with them in the joy of helping each person, whether defined as handicapped or not, to grow.”20 In a 2008 exchange of letters with Ian Brown that was published in the Globe and Mail, Vanier summarizes the intercultural, interfaith vision that had evolved in L’Arche: “Our communities want to witness the beauty and value of each person, whatever their culture, religion, abilities or disabilities.”21 Vanier also saw L’Arche as part of the peace and justice movements of the 1960s, writing to Brown:

I did not begin L’Arche because I wanted to help a few ‘unfortunate’ people locked up in dismal and violent institution. My life in L’Arche is part of a larger struggle for peace. During the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. rose up to bring justice to the blacks of the United States. His dream of brother-and-sisterhood flowed from his deep belief that every human being is important and valuable, that everyone has a right to be free and have a place in our society. This dream flowed from his faith in Jesus and the Gospel message: Each person is important, each person is a child of God. My life in L’Arche flows from the same conviction.22

L’ARCHE BEGINS IN CANADA:
L’ARCHE DAYBREAK, 1969

The first L’Arche community in Canada is a study in what Massey would call the “power-geometries of space.” L’Arche Daybreak opened in 1969 in a rural area on the outskirts of Richmond Hill, 30 km north of Toronto. A large home and surrounding land were donated to the Friends of L’Arche by Our Lady’s Missionaries. Given this donation and the entirely Roman Catholic character of L’Arche in France, it is perhaps surprising that L’Arche in Canada was founded by an Anglican couple, Steve and Ann Newroth.23 Even the location and history of Daybreak’s first house are significant. The actual three-storey building was built in the early twentieth century as a novitiate for men training to be Roman Catholic priests, then later converted to a thirty-room sanitarium for nuns with tuberculosis. As a place for healing, doors wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs opened from each bedroom onto wide south-facing verandahs. From the verandahs, you could glimpse the large “Loyal True Blue and Orange Home” a few hundred metres to the south. It had been opened in 1923 by the Loyal True Blue Association and the Orange Order to care for orphaned or underprivileged Protestant children.24 These were the only large buildings on that rural section of Yonge Street, separated only by a small farmhouse. When Daybreak began, the Loyal True Blue and Orange Home was still in operation as an orphanage. Steve Newroth’s secretary Mrs Bell lived in the farmhouse between the two buildings and she joked that her husband put Irish thistles in his south windows facing the Protestant orphanage, and shamrocks in his north windows, facing the Roman Catholic Sisters. The Sisters of Our Lady’s Missionaries had used the former tuberculosis sanitarium as their novitiate, but by the late 1960s they moved their novices to the city where there were more opportunities for post-Vatican II ministry.

Steve and Ann Newroth met Jean Vanier in Toronto while Steve Newroth was studying at Toronto School of Theology, then they spent a year in the new L’Arche community in France. Steve Newroth recalls, “We arrived in Trosly in October of 1966 and stayed for a year before moving on to the Bossey Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland. When we arrived in Trosly, Jean Vanier spoke to the local bishop about us receiving communion. The bishop said that the current policy was if no Anglican Church existed within 100 kms communion could be received. Unfortunately, Paris was within the 100 km range. So we just didn’t receive.”25 During their next year in Geneva at the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, the Newroths were in regular contact with Jean Vanier and on at least one occasion he visited them and spoke to the student body. By the end of that time, Steve Newroth had completed all the requirements to be ordained in the Anglican Church, but after a time of discernment and retreat he declined ordination so that he could continue to be part of Vanier’s L’Arche community.

Steve and Ann Newroth took the challenges of ecumenism seriously. Before the founding of Daybreak, L’Arche existed only in France and was explicitly Roman Catholic. The Newroths’ understanding of ecumenism would help transform L’Arche from a French Roman Catholic movement into a worldwide ecumenical and interfaith movement. Both visionaries and practical leaders, they began L’Arche in Canada as an explicitly ecumenical endeavour. The new Daybreak community did have both Anglican eucharists and Catholic masses, but did not practice open communion.26 Newroth confirms that there were “very few United Church communions celebrated at Daybreak, although we did have a wedding with a United Church minister presiding.” Beyond the community, the Newroths and some community members went to St John’s Anglican Church 2 kms north of Daybreak, which had opened in 1848, many years before either the Sisters’ tuberculosis facility or the Loyal True Blue and Orange Home were built. Newroth also actively pursued connections between L’Arche Daybreak and Richmond Hill United Church. He started immediately when Daybreak began in 1969, perhaps in part because the United Church and the Anglican Church were in dialogue about church union. Many were confident that it would happen within the decade. Newroth explains:

I was studying theology at Toronto’s Trinity College during the United Church/Anglican dialogue and some of our professors were directly involved in the discussions. So they kept us up to date on progress. The genius of the United Church/Anglican dialogue of the early 1960s was that they scrapped the old method of comparing theological differences in favour of a new approach that was based on the idea that if we were to begin a totally new Christian church, what would it require in terms of mutually acceptable theological underpinnings? Remarkable progress was made and many were optimistic that union was near but, as I recall, the Anglicans backed away from the process because Canterbury was deep into similar talks with the Roman Catholic Church and the rather Protestant image of the Canadian Anglican Church was threatening the more ‘catholic’ dialogue with Rome. So you see politics is part of every aspect of life – for better or for worse! So did it make any difference that church union was being discussed at the time? I think it did because morale was very high between the two groups. Hope was in the air.

Bob Smith was the minister of Richmond Hill United Church in 1969. Newroth set up a meeting with him as L’Arche Daybreak was beginning, and Smith recalls that it immediately became apparent that this was more than a courtesy call. Newroth invited Smith to come visit the L’Arche community, to occasionally lead worship for them, and to see this new L’Arche community as part of his Richmond Hill United community. The Anglicans and United Church decided in 1975 not to merge, but by then the Newroths and Bob Smith had invented a relationship between the local United Church and L’Arche that continues across Canada to this day. Local United Church ministers are encouraged to participate in L’Arche communities through friendship and by leading prayer services.27

Bob Smith’s successor at Richmond Hill United Church was Robert Shorten. He remembers leading only one worship at L’Arche Daybreak in his four years at Richmond Hill United, but he was moved and inspired by the people with disabilities and the assistants who were actively involved in his congregation. He recalls those years as a difficult time in the Richmond Hill congregation and thus in his own ministry. The stress in the church was so exhausting and discouraging that he thought seriously about leaving the ministry:

Seeing the people with handicaps and the people who worked with them helped me. I was really struggling in my ministry, and the people from L’Arche were a great lesson to me in Christian discipleship. I learned a lot from them. I thought I didn’t belong in ministry anymore, but their example helped me see that it was worthwhile to serve in a congregation. When they would come to an event, they would bring everyone, and that amazed me. Some people couldn’t participate in the discussion, but they always came together. This was an eye-opener for me: I had never had contact with a community like that before.28

Shorten began to see his role for his congregation as a supportive listener, building community in the church and the wider Richmond Hill community. He worked to tone down the strident and sometimes hurtful disagreements within the church. Looking back, Shorten believes he was able to choose to remain in ministry because of the inspiration and encouragement of members of L’Arche. He was also helped by the counsel of Daybreak’s Sr Sue Mosteller, a Roman Catholic Sister of St Joseph who was also the first L’Arche international coordinator after Jean Vanier (beginning that role in 1975) and director of Daybreak after the Newroths left in 1976. An entire study could be done on just Richmond Hill United Church and L’Arche Daybreak, exploring the highs and lows of a relationship that now spans five decades, influencing many ministers as well as members of the congregation.

In the 1970s, as L’Arche grew into an international federation, the Newroths also experienced the same kind of ecumenical lapses and frustration that Louise Cummings describes. Steve Newroth observes, “There were occasions when the non-Catholics were badly treated, not out of malice but just out of insensitivity.” In fact, although Newroth does not remember this, several people recall clearly a meeting of North American L’Arche leaders where he became so frustrated that he pounded the table and exclaimed, “This is a god-d*** Catholic club!” One eye-witness comments, “That was the fist heard round the world! That was the beginning and we formed a committee immediately, not led by a Catholic, although not much came of it immediately.” Newroth does remember that at one point “Ann and I called for a meeting with Jean Vanier and asked him if we were part of L’Arche and his answer was ‘I will not answer that question because of course you are part of L’Arche.’”29

As well as ecumenism, the Newroths and others at L’Arche Daybreak were involved in new developments in theory, policy, and research for people with intellectual disabilities. The big new idea was “normalization.” Instead of being sequestered in large institutions far from neighbourhoods or contact with others, people with intellectual disabilities could live in “normal” houses in “normal” neighbourhoods and do the kind of things “normal” people did. Although limitations to the idea became apparent, overall the initial idea was an improvement over institutionalization.30

The North American proponent of normalization was Wolf Wolfensberger, who was a visiting scholar in Toronto at York University’s National Institute on Mental Retardation (NIMR) from 1971 to 1973. In June of 1973, Wolfensberger edited A Selective Overview of the Work of Jean Vanier and the Movement of L’Arche containing just two articles, one by Steve Newroth and the other by Wolfensberger.31 The preface by G. Allan Roeher, director of NIMR, states: “The movement that has been given rise by Jean Vanier has injected new elements onto the mental retardation scene in Canada, but has not been free of controversy, as few new movements are.”32 Newroth offers a detailed and engaging description and analysis of the ideas and structure of L’Arche, beginning with the claim that “A fundamental role of L’Arche is the creation of a new kind of community where the assisted and the assistant can truly live and progress together in a spirit of mutual esteem and love.”33 L’Arche, Newroth explains, expects that everyone can achieve greater maturity, with primacy placed on mutual esteem and “a spirit of great friendliness.”34 The first priority is to provide a home, then meaningful work for everyone. After that, attention turns to recreation and social events with the community’s rapidly expanding circle of friends, such as the community’s homemade pond for swimming in summer and hockey in winter, as well as outings by individuals or groups to choir practice, dinner, movies, or an evening with friends. Newroth recounts, “The highlight of the week is the Friday night ‘Coffee House’ where friends of Daybreak, coming from Richmond Hill, Aurora or Toronto, bring their guitars to visit, sing, talk, and be enriched by the laughter of the community.”35 The quality of welcome “that comes from the residents permeates the house,” and often requires spontaneous hospitality: “it would be ridiculous to welcome the handicapped and at the same time not be open to those who wish to visit, to meet, or to work with them.”36 He concludes, “If we at Daybreak have something of value to share, it lies most likely in the area of attitude, because the assistants, each one of us, are becoming open to the important role of the mentally retarded in the community.”37

In his article, “A Reflection on the Movement of L’Arche,” Wolf Wolfensburger discusses his experience reading Vanier, meeting him, and visiting L’Arche Daybreak in 1971–72. He admits feeling somewhat astounded by the revelation that having fun is normal. “In my many years of involvement with the mentally retarded, I had consistently opposed the placement of excessive emphasis upon recreation,” he writes, explaining that educational and vocational services were more beneficial, and an overemphasis on recreation was often derived from a “misguided attitude of pity” or a perception of retarded adults as childish. Wolfensburger then clarifies, “I have not changed my views, but I learned from L’Arche that I had failed to recognize a balancing dimension: the proper place of joy in the lives of the retarded. Joy and recreation are not the same … I can scarcely begin to define what I mean by joy in the lives of the retarded, because one has to experience this phenomenon to understand it.”38 He suggests that this joy comes from the spiritual life (the value of which he also confesses to having underestimated)39 as well as from feeling valued and esteemed by others and at social occasions. He is clearly enamoured of Daybreak’s Friday night Coffee Houses “where one can sing and dance out one’s feelings, as David did ‘with all his might’ before the Ark.”40

The joy of Daybreak amazes Wolfensberger. He asks himself “why so many non-retarded members” of the wider local community come to relax and enjoy themselves at the Coffee Houses:

The crowd at these socials can be relatively large, and there is laughter, music, refreshments, and dancing … I suddenly had the insight that there are very few social occasions in the community at which adults can experience joyful vigorous group interaction and relaxation in utter innocence; and where they can express energy and joy in dance with persons of various ages, and with members of the same or opposite sex … Barriers between individuals collapse before the joyful welcome of people who are retarded but worthy, and especially the young people in our society identify with this joy and openness, and share these occasions with pleasure.41

As Doreen Massey notes, the character of a place is a product of “intersections within that wider setting, and of what is made of them.” Wolfensberger’s rapt assessment of the “joy” of Daybreak is remarkable in its semi-abashed excitement and what he makes of it, allowing that the spirituality of L’Arche and the energy of Daybreak’s social occasions are not normal but far better, meeting “a strong social need that is scarcely met anywhere else.”42 He concedes that in some ways L’Arche successfully deviates from his normalization principles.43 The December 1972 United Church Observer with Vanier’s address to General Council had introduced many readers to Vanier and to L’Arche. The enthusiastic circle of joyful friends that Wolfensberger enjoyed at Daybreak’s coffee houses included young members of nearby United Churches, some of whom carried on to become assistants at L’Arche, as well as people with disabilities who were also members of the United Church.

CEDAR GLEN RETREAT 1974

In 1973, Bob Smith recalls, Vanier proposed that a retreat be planned for 1974 to include leadership from the United Church, Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. Smith was a young minister, but he was in Richmond Hill and the retreat was at Cedar Glen, a nearby United Church retreat centre, so Smith was the local representative. Smith remembers with some amusement, “I was ambitious and upwardly mobile, and this was big-league!” He was excited to work with Moderator Bruce McLeod and General Secretary George Morrison. And then Vanier added in an unexpected twist. Smith still sounds amazed as he recounts, “He said we need the littlest, the lonely, the lost, real people, a range of people. This was astonishing.”

The retreat gave Smith a different focus than the ecumenism of church union between the United Church and the Anglicans, which he recalls as “excessively institutionally focused: how do we bring two Church bodies together? And within two years, the bishops had voted it down.” Smith remembers vividly the days of prayer, singing and storytelling at Cedar Glen – and, most of all, meeting people: “Not the poobahs, but broken people, people I’d never met before. They knew things I didn’t know, and I discovered my own brokenness.” Smith’s wife Ellen confirms that the retreat was a “big turning point for Bob in terms of perspective.” Smith identifies that week as one of the first instances in his life of experiencing the “gift and burden of seeing the world as it is, through the eyes of the poor.”

Bob Smith went on to become thirtieth moderator of the United Church, delivering the historic United Church of Canada apology to First Nations in Sudbury in 1986. Furthermore, Smith believes that his early experience with Vanier and L’Arche shaped his last five years of ministry before retiring. He spent them at First United in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: “I preached and cleaned toilets and accompanied people.” Those final years of ministry were an authentic expression of faith in action, he said, calling it the “richest experience of my life.” First United rounded out the ministry of presence and solidarity that Smith had begun at Richmond Hill United Church decades earlier.

Sr Sue Mosteller was working closely with Vanier at the time and remembers the Cedar Glen retreat as an early effort to create a genuinely ecumenical retreat:

The people in the United Church were really loving what Jean was saying to them at the General Council and that was mainly about Jesus. They were very socially conscious, and helping a lot of people socially, and they were very connected with what was going on in the city. Jean was talking about Jesus, Jesus’s love for us, Jesus’s message to us, Jesus’s mission and our mission to be like Jesus in the world. And of course for their social consciousness it was what they wanted to hear, and so they really loved Jean and wanted to be connected with him and with us. I have a sense that for Jean, being with people in the United Church and received with such total acceptance gave him a desire to say, ‘How do we talk together from the different churches? They have accepted me totally. I have accepted them. God is with us, we’re walking together. Should we have a retreat?’ Jean said let’s call it an ecumenical retreat, and he said we want a third of the people to come from the Anglican Church because we had a lot of Anglican connections and Steve and Ann were Anglican. Let’s have a third of people from the United Church, and a third Catholic. I think that there were more United Church people there than Anglicans and Catholics. The United Church really turned out.44

Hearing her description, it seems that after the Naramata retreat and a retreat at Gimli, Manitoba also in 1973, denominational quotas were left behind. Further, the lessons of the Naramata retreat had been taken to heart, and the worship at this retreat was different. Mosteller continues:

So we planned this retreat and how do we worship together? We couldn’t just have Catholic mass with all the people, and for the Catholics we couldn’t just have sort of a little liturgy of the Word – that would not be satisfactory at all. For Jean this was not a problem. This was something that we needed to dialogue about, that we needed to plan for, and then we needed to invite people into the experience, not as something that was a problem but as something that would help us to grow and appreciate one another. So what did we do? One day we had a eucharist in the Anglican tradition. Then we had a United Church service with a lot of music and scripture. Then we had a Catholic eucharist. We did that over the days that we were together and Jean said to people again, this is not a problem, this is a gift. We want to live something together with the God that we all love, and who loves each one of us.

The influence of the Cedar Glen retreat in the United Church was not only interpersonal, teaching Bob Smith to see the world through different eyes, nor was it only a more successful experiment in ecumenical worship, openness, and respect. The way in which Vanier spoke about Jesus was significant. McLeod and Smith both recall that Vanier spoke from scripture passages. McLeod describes how “He spoke to us in his inimitable way, beginning with a scripture passage that he would then extemporize on.”45 Vanier spoke of Jesus intimately as a friend, “as though he was in the next room – and maybe he was, is.” But despite their fascination, McLeod, Smith, and others from the United Church also found themselves uneasy, because it wasn’t the way the United Church talked in the 1970s. “The United Church tended to talk more about the Spirit,” explains McLeod. “Vanier was definitely coming in with a different vocabulary of spirituality than we were used to. We were a bit uncomfortable. We couldn’t see ourselves talking about Jesus that intimately and often.”

Jesus-language held a certain ambivalence, in part linked to the theology and ideology of the “Jesus-people” of the time. A quick glance through issues of the United Church Observer dating from the early 1970s reveals both keen interest and reservations: for example, the November 1972 issue features several articles revealing the ongoing United Church desire to affirm and encourage young people’s commitments and idealism alongside wariness of their “hippy” look and fundamentalist theology. At the Cedar Glen retreat, some United Church members of the retreat actually went to Vanier and asked to discuss his intimate way of speaking about Jesus. Smith remembers that they felt “dishonest pretending this was working for us.” The United Church style was to pray to God, and the second person of the Trinity was “teacher.” So Vanier said “I’ll meet you at quarter to twelve tonight.” His late-night stamina astounded them, but they went and laid out their concerns. McLeod wondered, “If we were to respond wholeheartedly to Vanier’s message, should we be talking about Jesus in that way, too?” They told him they were uncomfortable with this spirituality. It didn’t feel natural to them, but they didn’t want to spoil anything for others with their own unease.

Decades later, Smith still remembers Vanier’s answer. Vanier replied: “At Cedar Glen, breakfast interests me – eggs, cereals, sometimes pancakes – and some people are unhappy with everything and bring their own granola. Perhaps you’re so busy looking over to see what’s in your neighbour’s bowl that you don’t see what’s in your own. Ignore the language: be in the experience.” In other words, notes Smith, “I was excessively rational, and so not sufficiently free to be present to what was happening. Jean helped me to appreciate it for what it was instead of sitting in judgment on it.” McLeod felt a “tremendous reassurance for me and for others when he said ‘No, I’m not laying this language on you at all – it’s my way of speaking about the mystery of God through Jesus,’ who he sees in this very personal and vivid way. That was very reassuring to us. He wasn’t saying that if you want to be a true Christian you must do this. It was very broad and accepting of where we were in the United Church at that time.” Smith came away reassured that the language of Spirit was his “breakfast bowl.” Alternatively, McLeod felt freed to speak about Jesus: “I do think that a large part of the reason that we now feel more comfortable using that language is his influence. It is very much more common in United Churches now, and in my life and preaching Jesus is the window.”

Mosteller sums up the effect of the Cedar Glen retreat:

I can just tell you that every day we had goose bumps because it was so beautiful, and because someone had shaped us to the experience, given us a way to look at it which was ‘I don’t have to see the differences and criticize that they don’t have what I have.’ Instead we see the gift of one another. I’m not positive of this point, but I think that after Cedar Glen, Jean’s retreats were more and more ecumenical just because more people knew that he was coming in the summer to give a retreat and nobody was saying, ‘are you Catholic or Protestant?’

Jean Vanier’s letter to his circle of friends dated 19 March 1974 reads:

In Toronto we had an ecumenical retreat and two days of prayer and unity with brothers and sisters from the Anglican and United Churches. As in all ecumenical retreats there was much pain but Jesus helped us live the pain as an offering for all the divisions, hatred and refusals of the past. Deep union can only come gradually, through suffering and through a real deepening of our lives in the spirit of the Beatitudes. Unity can only come about when we are all transformed by the Holy Spirit. We must work more and more towards this unity through prayer and through work with other followers of Jesus. Unity around the Eucharist can only come little by little, when the time is ripe and when the Holy Spirit brings that unity into being.46

What is interesting about Vanier’s letter here is his frequent efforts to decentre himself, to keep Jesus at the forefront, and to build genuinely interdependent and trusting relationships with others that allow for unity in diversity rather than pressing for superficial uniformity.47

1974: THE UNITED CHURCH HELPS L’ARCHE DAYBREAK EXPAND INTO TORONTO

In 1974, the United Church of Canada supported L’Arche Daybreak in a very material way by cheaply renting the community a house on Avoca Avenue in downtown Toronto. One of the core members at Daybreak wanted to live in the city rather than on a farm, and others were more able to find suitable employment in the city. Steve Newroth remembers going with Jean Vanier to George Morrison’s tenth floor office and explaining to him the basics of L’Arche and their desire to add new homes: “With that, George took us to the window and pointed out a ring of houses below owned by the United Church that surrounded their parking lot. He said, ‘Do any of these look like a L’Arche house?’ Thus was Avoca House born.” The early residents of Avoca House do not remember any particular day-to-day connection to the United Church. No one attended the United Church, although one Anglican core member was especially happy to live near a cocktail lounge that served mint juleps.48 There was a weekly mid-week potluck with Roman Catholic mass in the living room, presided over by Jesuit priests from the Lady of Lourdes parish. When Toronto city fire regulations changed, the United Church did not want to invest money into the required upgrades, such as a fire escape, so in September 1986 L’Arche Daybreak moved the Avoca House community to a new house that they purchased on Mortimer Street in Toronto.

“THE UNITED CHURCH HAS GIVEN US IMMENSE SUPPORT AND NEVER ASKED ANYTHING IN RETURN”

There is something about this story that sounds familiar: George Morrison took the L’Arche leaders to Toronto to stand at the highest point of the General Council offices and showed them the United Church’s houses spread out below in all their splendor. “Any of these can be yours!” he said. But here any echo of the temptations of Jesus end, because there was no “if” following. The United Church wanted only a very low rent, with no other conditions attached. The United Church did not ask to be worshipped – indeed, quite the reverse. United Church minister Doug Graves was struck by something Jean Vanier said at a meeting of the L’Arche Church Leaders Group (a group of four clergy from different Christian traditions who met regularly with the international coordinators of L’Arche and Jean Vanier): “I had a talk with Jean at the last gathering. He said ‘One thing I have always liked about the United Church – it has given us immense support and never asked anything in return.’”49 Graves comments, “That is the United Church’s stance, its way of doing things. We would not attempt as a church to take ownership of something like L’Arche. It would be characteristic of the United Church to say this is a Roman Catholic thing we are supporting, and we are very happy to support it. Certainly that was my attitude when I began getting involved in L’Arche. Whereas the Catholics immediately want to build in a structure, we have no structure to say L’Arche and the United Church should relate in any way other than individual people in relationship.”50 Church historian Phyllis Airhart quotes Ron Graham’s 1990 suggestion that the United Church is “the most Canadian of churches” because “like Canada, its strengths may be the same as its weaknesses: diversity, tolerance, compromise, humility, practicality, and niceness.”51 That characterization of the United Church reflects the stance that Graves describes.

Underlying many of the stories about the United Church is the question of how the United Church imagined itself. We could call these kinds of self-characterization “social imaginaries,” in Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s use of the phrase. He describes it as: “the ways in which they imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations … And beyond the ideal stands some notion of a moral or metaphysical order, in the context of which the norms and ideals make sense.”52 United Church theologian Don Schweitzer uses Taylor’s framework to explore how the United Church’s social imaginary has changed since 1925. He notes that already by the mid-1970s, the United Church was no longer functioning as an integral part of English-speaking Canada in the way that it had prior to the 1960s, and “its social imaginary began to be formed by the contrast between its former privilege, power, and effective programs, and its now diminished size and influence as a volunteer community.”53

Meanwhile, L’Arche too had a social imaginary – a vision for making homes with people with intellectual disabilities. It was a vision that galvanized people’s interest across Canada and new communities exploded across the country: after Daybreak in 1969 came Ottawa and Edmonton in 1972, then Stratford, Calgary, Winnipeg, and Toronto (initially part of L’Arche Daybreak) in 1973, Vancouver and Saint-Malachie in 1974, Arnprior in 1975, followed by ten more communities over the next 10 years.54 A letter of Vanier’s dated 1 September 1975 gives a sense of the social imaginary of Vanier and perhaps of L’Arche in relation to ecumenism:

We lived very deeply the ecumenical reality of L’Arche. Since the last Federation it seems we have become more and more truthful in this domain. Many of our North American communities have an equal number of Catholics and Protestants: it is important that we recognize this reality and that we try to live it with mutual respect. The fact that Daybreak was the first community created after L’Arche-Trosly is very prophetic and I am sure we are going to discover this more and more. It is important for each one to be faithful to Jesus and to our respective traditions, not seeking to make a syncretism which would be false and unrealistic. If each one of us is faithful to Jesus and to our churches then we will live unity as a gift of God.55

L’ARCHE SHILOAH, VANCOUVER 1974

United Church minister Gordon How tells the story of how L’Arche arrived in Burnaby, British Columbia, just east of Vancouver. In 1973, he started a new job for the Metropolitan Council of the United Church in the Greater Vancouver area, which included the oversight of various United Church mission units and projects. Only a few years earlier, the United Church had built a new “Home for Unwed Mothers,” not realizing that social conditions were changing. How explains that this was more than just new methods of contraception: “After only a few years, the United Church could not continue the ministry as costs were increasing, residents’ needs were more complex and social conditions for single parenting were rapidly changing.”56 How was asked to recommend a new use for the home, and he recollects:

Sure enough, this suggestion came that we explore the possibility of it being the home of a L’Arche community. I do not know where this suggestion came from, though I suspect it was made by George Morrison because he had been part of establishing the United Church Metropolitan Council in Vancouver before relocating to the United Church’s General Council Office in Toronto. I was asked to go to Daybreak and meet Steven Newroth and talk about any interest they might have in establishing a L’Arche community in Vancouver. It didn’t take long for one thing to lead to another.

How represented the United Church of Canada on the new Vancouver L’Arche board. He was especially impressed by the community director: “The first director of L’Arche in Vancouver was Judith Leckie, who had grown up in Vancouver and who had been working with Steven Newroth at Daybreak. She became the director of Shiloah57 through its first several years. Judith’s pastoral, spiritual and administrative leadership was exceptional.” How also remembers Judith Leckie’s brother, the late Peter Leckie, who was director of finance for the City of Vancouver at the time. His sister convinced him to volunteer on the first L’Arche Vancouver Board in 1974.

Judith Leckie recounts how she came to L’Arche, and became the founding director of L’Arche Vancouver:

I grew up in Vancouver and was for the first 25 or so years of my life a regular member of the United Church. I had even at one point wanted to be ordained until I discovered that no women were being given churches of their own! I left Vancouver in 1963 to move to Toronto and about four years later became a Roman Catholic (but I have always referred to myself as a low-church Catholic). I think that I first heard of Jean Vanier from Sue Mosteller whom I met when she was working at the Archdiocesan office for religious education and I was working for the Ontario and Canadian Association for the Mentally Retarded. I also met Steve Newroth at that time as he was beginning the first community at Daybreak. Sue Mosteller and I traveled to India and other places together when she was preparing to write her book My Brother, My Sister and it was on that trip when we finally went to Trosly that I met Jean Vanier. I found him scary because I had this sense that he could be an instrument of life-changing proportions and I was not quite ready for that. In any case, he did become such an instrument – I attended a number of the retreats he was giving in North America and so I ended up at Daybreak shortly after Sue. It was during my year at Daybreak that Steve approached me about the United Church’s offer of the house in Burnaby. He and I went out to see it – it was amazing and though in some sense, totally unsuitable for a homey L’Arche community it was only one dollar a year so it was too hard to resist. We thought it could be made into a good, loving place. In January of 1974, I came out with Peggy McDowell to begin to make the connections that were needed – with the United Church, with the local institutions, with the various services. We formed a board which included Gordon How. When we were setting things up in Vancouver we were alas, pretty Catholic oriented initially apart from Gordon’s terrific help. But as more people came – most of the assistants were Catholic but not all the core folks were, so we made connections with the local United Church. Ken Milne went to the local United Church and was welcomed beautifully. We certainly did struggle at all levels to try to work this out because it was clearly important that everyone’s faith be supported and nourished if they wished. And it was important to find a way to be together in worship so that people did not feel excluded but this even now may still be in the struggling stage. The connection got stronger quite a while after I left in 1979.58

Leckie notes that L’Arche Greater Vancouver now has a close connection with the United Church, and their shared history is recognized: “When I was there for the 40th anniversary one of the important events of the weekend was a service at Burnaby United that included Gordon How and Doug Graves. It happily celebrated L’Arche Greater Vancouver’s history with the United Church and of course the fact that without the gift of the house, the community would never have existed.”59

A SENSE OF PLACE WHICH IS EXTROVERTED

In a 12 August 1974 letter, Vanier described yet another ecumenical retreat as:

one of the most peaceful retreats that I have ever had, despite the number: about five hundred and fifty people from the Catholic, Anglican and United Church traditions … I felt deeply united with the Anglican bishop and the regional head of the United Church. One evening all three of us travelled together by car and shared for nearly three hours. We are united in our hearts and in our desire to follow Jesus, in spite of all our poverty and failings. I thank Jesus so much for that retreat and for the unity he gave us. Twenty years ago the different churches were fighting among themselves; ten years ago they were hardly speaking; and now we are able to live and pray in unity even though we are not yet united in the Eucharist.60

In this letter, Vanier recounts a story of three church leaders in a car, an intimate time when these public figures could share personally, including their “poverty,” failings, and deepest desires around following Jesus.

Doreen Massey notes that “places can be imagined as articulated moments of networks of social relations and understandings but where a larger proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself.”61 Massey continues that “this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.”62 Vanier places the very personal conversation on the three-hour drive in a larger context and scale of how ecumenism has been growing over the past twenty years. He sees their sharing as part of a larger whole, the extroverted expression of their place in the wider world. Insofar as their conversation was also about their respective churches, their expression of ecumenism included listening to each other’s denominational social imaginaries.

A different example of this extroverted sense of place involves the participation of a United Church minister in the early days of L’Arche Winnipeg. Eileen Glass, an Australian assistant from 1974 to 1976, recalls how her fellow assistant Jim Lapp’s father, United Church minister Gus Lapp, supported the new community’s assistants in a creative, tangible way:

The first year I was in L’Arche Winnipeg we had a number of assistants who were from a United Church background. One of them had a father who was a retired United Church minister, and I have to say he remains part of my life story and my formation, because he, having an understanding of what we were living as young assistants coming into community, realized that we needed some theological framework to reflect on our experience. He used to send his son a parcel of books from time to time, and he would say to his son ‘Look, you people need to be reading but you don’t have time to read everything,’ so in these parcels of books he would mark particular pages or chapters. He really opened up for me writers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day. When our days away came around we would often go to Jim and ask, ‘What has your dad sent you? What are you reading?’ Because we were reading the same things, we were enjoying endless tutorial-type conversations, reflecting on what we’d read and applying it to our life in community. I found it a very simple thing that this man did for us, and yet so immensely important in terms of stimulating our reflection on experience, which is of course the whole value of entering into the wondrous adventure of community life.63

It was a significant gift not just to the individual assistants, but to L’Arche. Eileen Glass went on to found L’Arche in Australia. Forty years later, Jim Lapp was community leader of L’Arche Winnipeg and Eileen Glass was one of two leaders of L’Arche International.

L’ARCHE HOMEFIRES, WOLFVILLE, NOVA SCOTIA, 1981

Cultural theorists Peter Stallybrass and Allon White ask, “How does one ‘think’ a marketplace? At once a bounded enclosure and a site of open commerce, it is both the imagined centre of an urban community and its structural interconnection … A marketplace is the epitome of local identity and the unsettling of that identity by the trade and traffic of goods from elsewhere … It sometimes seems that the commonplace is what is most radically unthinkable.”64 A similar question could be asked about both L’Arche and the United Church. How does one ‘think’ a L’Arche community? How does one ‘think’ a United Church? Not the larger social imaginary, but a specific L’Arche community, a particular United Church at a particular time: think L’Arche Homefires community and St Andrews United Church in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Both are physical places with buildings for members, but also spaces of hospitality and welcome. Both are imagined as centres of their communities: places of prayer, spiritual nurture, ritual, spontaneous celebrations, music, and social interaction. They are also structurally connected to networks of volunteers, fundraising activities, government safety regulations, tax status, and service provision according to variously evolving theories and ideologies, such as normalization or even ecumenism. Each is independent, with an illusion of self-determined identity and separateness, but L’Arche Homefires is also part of an international federation with its own leadership structure, priorities, and external funding constraints, and each United Church congregation is also part of the national United Church of Canada. Even a United Church can be closed or amalgamated.

United Church members Jeff and Debra Moore began L’Arche Homefires in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, in 1981.65 It had been a journey of more than a decade to reach that point. In 1964, as a high school student, Jeff Moore got a summer job as a recreation worker on the “mental retardation” unit of the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital. He did what he could to create positive experiences but was deeply saddened by the overall living conditions and the experience stayed with him. After university, while working with the Canadian Association for Community Living in Halifax, Moore read about L’Arche and even tried to start a L’Arche home as a way to get people with intellectual disabilities out of the rather bleak Beaverbank nursing home. When that didn’t happen, Moore moved back to Ontario to work at the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital again, but now as a social worker in a position to help make alternative plans for people. He helped the new L’Arche communities in Ottawa and Cornwall to welcome people from the institution into the community. Over time, however, he found the ingrained “cuckoo’s nest” culture of the institution so demoralizing that he decided to focus his efforts on building community alternatives.66 Moore moved to Silver Spring Farm for men with intellectual disabilities, where he met Debra in 1973.

They both pursued studies in social work, but spent a great deal of their free time visiting and dreaming about L’Arche communities. They remember it as a stimulating time: “normalization was going to change the world for people with disabilities and L’Arche was going to change people’s hearts.” In the summer of 1976, they moved to Wolfville in the Annapolis Valley to support Jeff’s brother, Terry, through his cancer treatments. Coincidentally, they were asked to start two new group homes for the Canadian Association for Community Living: one was a pilot project for persons with more significant handicaps and its first residents were Keith Strong and John McNeil, “who came from the abysmal Mountainview Home, the old ‘poorhouse.’” While such group homes were a huge step forward, Jeff and Debra Moore felt they typically lacked heart and too often ended in “blaming the victim” by treating people as if it was their fault that they were marginalized by society.

Jeff Moore finished his masters in social work and the Moores started a family while continuing to be involved in deinstitutionalization and the development of community options in Nova Scotia. They stayed good friends with Strong and McNeil, and often invited them to visit. In a 1989 article, Jeff Moore writes:

When I first met Keith, I was part of an effort to open one of the first group homes in North America for people who were classified as severely mentally retarded. The guiding principle behind such efforts was ‘normalization.’ When this approach was initially conceived in Scandinavia in the late 1960s, it was concerned with normalizing the general physical and social living conditions for people with intellectual handicaps. When it was reformulated by Wolf Wolfensberger (1972) for North America, the emphasis was changed from normalizing conditions to normalizing people, i.e., their behavior and appearance … On the surface normalization seemed simple and made so much sense – helping people who had been segregated to fit back into society. From my experience, however, it seemed that people, and especially people who were handicapped, were too often taking a back seat to ideas, to the agendas of others. These agendas – to reform institutions, to rehabilitate individuals, to establish rights for the handicapped, to change society – were often well-­meaning but misguided. They were not being carried out in a way that was responding to the basic needs and interests of the people involved.67

Jeff Moore remembers, “In time, the group home system wasn’t working for Keith or John, and Keith asked if he and John could come and live with us. It seemed like the natural thing to welcome them to live in our home though some thought we had lost our marbles. It wasn’t long before we realized this was a long-term commitment and we had really started our own L’Arche type community with John and Keith at the centre, not us.” In his 1989 article, Jeff Moore ponders how Keith Strong caused him to rethink normalization: “After spending many years figuring out how to normalize people, I was now living with a man who did not want to be my project or my cause. He wanted to be my friend.”68

When the Moores discovered that many people in their community supported the idea of beginning a L’Arche community in Wolfville, they contacted L’Arche and began the long process of finally joining the L’Arche federation. They started small, by turning their house over to the new organization called Homefires and getting a winter works grant to put on an addition. Jeff Moore continued to work full time and teach at the university and they actually paid rent to Homefires along with his mom who got adopted by all as “Granny Joe.” “But what wonderful years those were for the community and our family,” Debra Moore recalls:

We had a terrific community of support and were part of the development of the network of L’Arche homes in the Atlantic Region including Boston. In a sense we had a lot going against us at first. We had an unusual low-key beginning because there was a provincial moratorium on starting new community residential services, and very little funding. But things just kept falling into place. I remember Henri Nouwen saying, ‘If you do the right thing for the right reasons, you will be given what you need.’ We were given the people, the support, the competence and the courage to develop an amazing community – we were recognized in Nova Scotia as an exemplary community service within and outside of L’Arche.

Gordon Haliburton is a former board member of L’Arche Homefires. He and Edith Haliburton were long-time members of St Andrews United Church in Wolfville. They had just returned from working in Africa to be closer to the extended Haliburton family in the Annapolis Valley around the same time that the Moores and their children, along with Strong and McNeil, arrived to live just up the street with Jeff’s mother. They quickly became friends. When the Moores decided to bring their little community into the L’Arche federation in 1981, Gordon Haliburton served on the board of the new L’Arche commuity. “The members of the board were mostly from the United Church,” he recalls.69

Members of the church were supportive and excited about L’Arche. Members of the community were part of the church. L’Arche used the church hall for events, such as an annual fundraiser featuring local ad-hoc band “Men will be Boys.” The wider community was welcomed to potlucks and prayer services midweek. Jean Vanier came to visit. One of the Haliburtons’ nephews married an assistant from L’Arche, and the whole L’Arche community was at the outdoor wedding, which included a pig roast. Soon there were five houses in the area. L’Arche was good for the church, the Haliburtons recall, because “it brought us out of our complacency.” People with disabilities had a higher profile, which led to “more acceptance within the community.”

L’Arche in Wolfville was unique in being founded by United Church members and supported primarily by local United Church connections. As the Moores relate:

In short, our story was that we were captivated by L’Arche – by the meaning, the experience and the lessons it gave to the world. We thought L’Arche would embrace ecumenism as it made sense. Many of the people with special needs were Protestant, so L’Arche had already made a decision to live diversity. It’s also true, right from the get-go, that L’Arche didn’t really know what to do with us. We had started a very successful L’Arche community both in attracting assistants and building extensive involvement in the community and churches. The community was financially stable. We had not come from another L’Arche community and I think we were one of the last communities to be welcomed into L’Arche this way. We didn’t quite fit the mold and we couldn’t quite figure out why, or at least we couldn’t talk about it.

The Moores began L’Arche Homefires in Wolfville at a time when interchurch ecumenical coalitions were thriving at an institutional level, but understandings of ecumenism at a local level varied from place to place. Perhaps that is why in 1988, the Interchurch Interfaith Committee of the United Church’s General Council launched a project “to rediscover the nature of the ecumenical imperative in a time of ‘ecumenical winter.’”70

A painful example of the difficulties of being Protestant in L’Arche came out into the open during the 1987 election of a new regional coordinator for the Atlantic Region of L’Arche. Jeff Moore was willing and able and seemed the logical choice. The Regional Assembly included more than fifty delegates and was chaired by the zone coordinator who was a former Roman Catholic nun. She was outspoken in her opinion that Moore should not be elected, citing vague concerns about “spirituality.” At several points, she abruptly adjourned the meeting to go make mysterious phone calls that delegates believed were with L’Arche International or perhaps Roman Catholic leadership. To participants, it appeared to be an unexpectedly controlled process with many straw votes and multiple adjournments. Moore was elected, but after thinking about it overnight, he felt he had to decline because of the faulty and divisive process. He remembers:

It was said afterwards by people in the know that L’Arche International was under some pressure at that time not to have non-Roman Catholic leadership or their long-term support as a Roman Catholic lay organization would be threatened. The overall issue of support from the Roman Catholic hierarchy was said to be a big concern of Vanier’s for the long-term continuity of L’Arche. In any case, the message was clear and we went back to focus on our own community and all of the extraordinary gifts we had been given. We were continually reminded however in all kinds of ways of our place as non-Roman Catholics in L’Arche. We persevered quite happily and successfully in spite of this due to some incredible people in L’Arche that embraced ecumenism, embraced our community and its gifts, and embraced Debra and me and the work we were doing.71

The rules of L’Arche in the early 1990s limited directors of communities to terms of three years with a two-term limit. By 1995, Debra Moore had been founding director for two terms and Jeff Moore for two terms. As their time of leadership was winding down, they found themselves left out of any discussion on succession:

In June 1995 we were given a six-month sabbatical while an interim Director took over. Towards the end of our sabbatical, we were told by the Acting Director that Homefires could not afford to offer either of us a position. I suggested, because Debra did not want much and I was willing to get work outside of L’Arche, that it would cost Homefires less to keep us than not, as they would have some obligation to pay us severance. Unfortunately, while this was meant to be positive, it was taken as a threat and our relations with the Board began to really deteriorate. The board was clearly divided in the following months, many resigned and that was the end. We were heartbroken. Like with any acrimonious divorce, we have moved on and kept up relations as well as we could but it has not been easy.

At the time when the Moores left L’Arche, Gordon Haliburton was teaching in Botswana. The story he heard from a distance was that the bishop of Yarmouth was very conservative, and wanted L’Arche Homefires to be more Roman Catholic.72 The Moores were on a sabbatical, and were asked not to return. It was very painful. They remember:

The Haliburtons capture the reality pretty much. It’s true, the community was largely started by people associated with the United Church, including us (Jeff and Debra) as this was our community at the time. We wanted to build an ecumenical community, so we reached out to the Roman Catholic Church and welcomed people into our community and on our board that were Roman Catholic. On leaving, we saw Homefires as our community of choice, our family, and we had thought that we would continue to be involved in some way. In no way did we see ourselves dropping out of people’s lives. We just wanted to step down from the leadership and give others a chance. We had been doing it for fifteen years and it was time. But obviously there were forces in L’Arche, and then in Homefires that preferred us not to be involved in any way. A wise friend of ours used to say, ‘If you want to treat somebody badly, you have to think badly of them’ – basically vilifying the enemy. We did feel vilified, even shunned and were told to stay away and to have no contact with the community. This took us many years to recover from, as we were never told why.

The United Church noticed that L’Arche events in the church hall stopped. Fewer L’Arche community members attended St Andrews. But although the connection with L’Arche dwindled, the Moores were loved and respected as part of St Andrews United, and the church community supported them in their new fair trade coffee venture, the Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-operative. St Andrews United Church closed in 2012 when four local pastoral charges amalgamated into Orchard Valley United Church in New Minas.

There has been a lot of healing between the Moores and the L’Arche Homefires community over the years since they left. Again in Debra Moore’s words:

Jean Vanier is an amazing man, a holy man with a beautiful life-giving and healing message. L’Arche is magical – transforming the unwanted, the unvalued into precious friends and teachers. That being said – both Vanier and L’Arche have their limits, their needs and their responsibilities that shaped the reality of L’Arche. As United Church members, we can admire Vanier and L’Arche and learn from them – but it was almost impossible for us to take leadership in L’Arche unless we converted. We didn’t bring with us any baggage about the Roman Catholic Church. Jeff grew up in the high Anglican tradition which is very close theologically to Roman Catholicism. Many of the people we shared community with were Roman Catholics who we came to love and admire. Maybe we were naïve but we just assumed that because we had no issues, they would have none with us, and in fact we were helping them to bring about this vision of diversity, acceptance and love. We had no desire to take any big leadership in L’Arche but we wanted to stay in L’Arche. It was family. We also wanted to continue bringing the message of L’Arche to our community of Wolfville and Nova Scotia. Almost from the ­beginning (with Vatican II and all), I think Vanier and others in L’Arche have felt awkward about this. It seems they were more open in the early days to ecumenism – but then things changed in the 80s and 90s. It was sad for us to see L’Arche seemingly go backwards in their efforts. Looking back, it seems we just have to accept that L’Arche is fundamentally Roman Catholic. We have to appreciate them, even admire them, and forgive them for not becoming what we and maybe they hoped they might be.

In 1997, the United Church’s Interchurch Interfaith Committee’s decade of work culminated in the report “Mending the World.” One of its principal authors was Bob Smith, who had been the young minister in Richmond Hill when Daybreak began and by 1997 was also a former moderator of the United Church. “Mending the World” assessed the priorities of Canadian mainline churches: “We find ourselves today in a time of what Mary Jo Leddy has called ‘ecumenical eclipse.’ The mainline churches of Canada, faced with aging membership and dwindling resources, have responded by turning inward. The United Church of Canada has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of survival. The vision of a church united and uniting in order that it may witness to the purpose of God for wholeness has been lost.”73 This seems in contrast to Canada’s active ecumenical justice coalitions, but it echoes the Moore’s local experience that the shared vision of ecumenism dwindled in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Mending the World” looked to the original meaning of “ecumenism,” from the word “oikoumene,” which referred to “the whole inhabited earth”: “While not departing from our commitment to seek the unity of the body of Christ we are called to set as priority for The United Church of Canada God’s work of earth healing, sharing the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and making common cause with all people of good will, whether they be people of faith or not, for the creation of a world that is just, participatory and sustainable.”74 That accurately describes Jeff and Debra Moore’s initiative after L’Arche. Committed as the they were to a world that is “just, participatory and sustainable,” they began Canada’s first fair trade coffee roasting co-op: “Fortunately, we found something, the Fair Trade Coffee business, to consume our time, energy and passions and help us to heal. We hired a few of the core members to work at Just Us! and this began the healing with the community.” In 1997, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops joined the Canadian Council of Churches and Janet Somerville became the first Roman Catholic and the first lay person to be General Secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches. In 1999, in office space shared with the United Church General Council offices in Toronto, coffee and ecumenism met as the Canadian Council of Churches office began ordering its coffee from Just Us! Co-operative.

The Moores conclude, “But in a real way, we have continued to live L’Arche. Our son Greg, who we adopted as a baby with Down Syndrome in 1989, has been such a gift to our family and our community. We deeply believe he is one of the finest human beings we know, not perfect by any means – but he truly loves everybody and will not stand for conflict, hurt or exclusion of anyone. What a joy it has been for L’Arche and Greg to come into our lives.” Looking back, they express a gratitude for L’Arche that has never left them: “In truth – L’Arche models a way of being. When we started Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-operative, we brought many of the values and beliefs we had learned in L’Arche, with one of them becoming a workplace that embraced diversity.” Their story with L’Arche continues to evolve:

One of the most healing moments was when the L’Arche Homefires community celebrated the 20th anniversary and we were invited to come. By this point there had been some healing and so we decided to go. Jean Vanier had also been invited. We sat down and there was a seat left open beside us. Just as things were about to start, Vanier came down the aisle and sat down beside us. He then asked to see us after the celebration to hear how we were and what we were up to. I could see all those people that had hurt us and shunned us couldn’t believe that Vanier would spend time with us. Of course we know that this wasn’t the first time founders had been hurt and Vanier was so amazing at rising above it and valuing you as a person.

In a 2004 article titled “Building Inclusive Communities of Life,” Marilyn Legge, professor of Christian Ethics at the United Church’s Emmanuel College, commended Just Us! as one of several communities “with Christian ties that express a quality of relationship that involves personal history, identity, mutuality, and fellowship.”75 For their work in L’Arche and Just Us!, the Moores have been awarded Acadia University’s President’s Entrepreneurial Award for combining entrepreneurial success with social and environmental responsibility, a Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission award for their ongoing commitment to education, innovation, and collaboration in the field of human rights, as well as honourary degrees from Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia Agricultural College) and Saint Mary’s University.

I am grateful for the Moores’s willingness to share these painful and complex aspects of their story. How do we think about their experience? Part, of course, is a conundrum that is well known to leaders in the United Church: when ministers retire or leave a congregation, they (and their families) limit contact to give new leaders opportunity to establish themselves. This can produce an awkward ambiguity. L’Arche offered to find a place for the Moores if they had been willing to move, but they were well established in Wolfville. They did not expect the almost complete separation that ensued, with firm instructions to have no contact at all with their friends in L’Arche.

But that problem is only part of the Moores’s story. Other painful parts involve the confused messages around ecumenism. Remember Doug Graves quoting Jean Vanier’s appreciation that the United Church has never asked for anything? Graves observed that requests for recognition or a formally structured relationship would not be in the culture of the United Church. Does the experience of the Moores in Wolfville suggest some problems with that aspect of the United Church’s social imaginary? Are there times when a clearly defined institutional relationship would help to support individual relationships? Perhaps a more identifiable relationship would have allowed some of the tensions or anomalies to come into the open and thus into conversation. Further, if the connections had been more conscious, could core members have been better supported to remain members of the United Church?

Perhaps it can be framed in this way: at the ecumenical breakfast buffet, it is hard to enjoy your own bowl if your neighbour fears it might be inappropriate to pass you the milk and no one knows how to talk about it.

HENRI NOUWEN, L’ARCHE,
AND THE UNITED CHURCH OF CANADA

Meanwhile, during some of these same years as the Moores’s story unfolded and the United Church discussed what ecumenism could accomplish going forward, well-known Roman Catholic priest and writer Henri Nouwen was a member of L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill. When he arrived in 1986, Sue Mosteller recalls, the community held a meeting and described for Nouwen a big problem at Daybreak: members came from many different Christian denominations and even faiths. Any celebration of any tradition excluded someone, and while the community wanted to help each member grow in their own tradition, the reality was often tense and frustrating. Mosteller remembers that Nouwen listened carefully, then suggested that the community change the word “problem” and instead use the word “gift.” For Mosteller, Nouwen’s insight changed her perspective entirely. The ecumenical and interfaith reality of Daybreak could be understood as something that God gave as a treasure for their life together. The community began to welcome their differences with new energy.

Mosteller and Nouwen were close colleagues throughout his time at Daybreak, offering pastoral care to the community and friendship, wisdom, and guidance to each other. She recalls that building relations with the local United Church was an early priority for Nouwen: “When Henri came in the mid eighties, he went down and visited Richmond Hill United Church. There were a number of things that happened because Henri connected with the ministers.” Long-time Daybreak member Beth Porter grew up in the United Church and discovered L’Arche through reading the selections of Vanier’s talk to the 25th General Council in the December 1972 United Church Observer. She recalls that soon after Nouwen arrived, he encouraged the community to do an inventory of where each of the core members worshipped and their church affiliation. This led to several core members seeking baptism, confirmation, or membership in their own tradition.76 When invited to local church, Presbytery, and Conference events, Nouwen usually brought members of L’Arche with him or redefined the invitation to use L’Arche leadership and skits. He famously observed once that “People won’t remember a word I said, but they’ll remember that Bill Van Buren and I stood here as friends and equals and spoke together.”77

Sue Mosteller remembers difficulties in some of Henri’s ideas for Daybreak’s ecumenical liturgical events:

I also recall that one of the hard things for the United Church ministers, and I don’t think Henri got it at first, was that at Christmas and Easter we had a reconciliation service. Of course for the Catholics that meant going to confession. But we invited the United Church minister, the Anglican Church minister, and sometimes the Presbyterian when there was somebody going to that church, to come to that service. Henri wanted to have the ministers available to people who might like to speak to them privately. Henri would give a little homily about reconciliation, about speaking the things within us that we weren’t so proud of to another person who was of God, who then could bless us and say for God ‘Don’t worry about that. I know about that but I love you anyway.’ Henri would give that homily then people could go individually to their minister. Who knows what some of the core members had to say? I don’t think it was always simple or easy. I know that occasionally United Church ministers just said, ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’ We had to listen and try to find what they would be comfortable with. Henri wasn’t wanting to force anybody. He just said, ‘People know you, they love you. You’re their minister, you represent God to them.’78

While Nouwen’s unusual reconciliation services initially appear to model inclusive Christian fellowship, on deeper analysis they reflect dynamics similar to the Moores’ experiences of Roman Catholic dominant culture in L’Arche. As Mosteller represents this scene, United Church ministers were invited to be included in a service shaped by acts of reconciliation that would be familiar to Roman Catholics. In other words, the Protestants could join in and be included, but their inclusion did not transform the event. According to Mosteller, Nouwen encouraged Protestant ministers to step over their discomfort by calling them to a sacramental interpretation of their role as ordained ministers: “You’re their minister, you represent God to them.” In most Protestant traditions, however, the minister does not represent God in that way. Ordination is not a sacrament, and the ordained person has not been ontologically changed. Rather, the minister is understood as someone to stand before God with their community members, rather than someone to represent God to their community. Even leaders as visionary as Mosteller and Nouwen could, with all good intentions, have moments when they were oblivious to the limitations of inclusion in the context of ecumenical differences.

Still, Nouwen’s ministry at Daybreak built many respectful and enduring bridges between the United Church and L’Arche. United Church minister Keith Reynolds describes how he discovered both the United Church and L’Arche through Nouwen. After Reynolds graduated from Hope College in Michigan, he contacted Nouwen who invited him to visit L’Arche Daybreak. This in turn led to Reynolds joining the community for a time in the early 1990s. Reynolds recalls:

I grew up in a community church in the States and had only heard of the United Church through some books that I had read, but had no idea of the United Church before I came to Canada. I came to know the United Church through a man named Lloyd Kerman who I lived with during my first year in L’Arche.79 At L’Arche, I met Jeffi and we were married. We left Canada in 1993 and went to Princeton where I had already been accepted. That was a wonderful year, but what called us back was probably two-fold: it was L’Arche and the United Church. I wanted to be a part of the United Church having gotten to know it that year in L’Arche, and we wanted to be connected with L’Arche in some way. I think both of those things were clarified for us when Jeffi and I went on retreat together with Henri Nouwen. After the first year I transferred from Princeton to Emmanuel at the Toronto School of Theology. Jeffi worked in L’Arche while I was a student, which also gave me opportunities to connect again with L’Arche through the year while I was studying and also during the summer.80

Nouwen also widened the ministry of L’Arche to welcome United Church ministers on individual retreat. For example, Doug Graves speaks of a “huge gift” while he was serving on the Division of World Outreach for the United Church. When Graves came to the quarterly meeting he would stay at Daybreak and have spiritual accompaniment from Nouwen. Graves attests, “This provided a huge integration of things for me. I honestly think there is a theological gift that is just now starting to be felt.” Graves found Nouwen’s writings on the “wounded healer” powerful, and Nouwen’s subsequent books about L’Arche deepened that focus for him as a minister.

In 1991, United Church minister Gordon Turner wrote to Nouwen at L’Arche Daybreak when he was leaving his General Council Division of Mission in Canada role as program officer in evangelism and congregational development, and moving to congregational ministry in Vancouver.81 Nouwen replied by saying “I am convinced that there are some graces hidden in Daybreak for you that can prepare you well for your future ministry.” After consulting with his colleagues Sue Mosteller and Elizabeth Buckley, Nouwen suggested a month of retreat, structured with times in the Daybreak Seniors Club and times of prayer, silence, reading, and spiritual accompaniment “so that you have a concrete context in which to work and to explore in greater depth your relationship with Jesus.” Nouwen’s plan had to be approved by Daybreak Council. In a letter to Council, Nouwen explained the wider significance of his invitation to Turner as a pilot project, concluding, “I do believe that this is one very significant way in which our community can really offer a gift to the Church.”82

TENDERING RECIPROCITY

Tender as a verb suggests reciprocity. A request can be tendered, sent out into the world for a response. This initiates a tender process. In response, a bid or an offer can be tendered. What is tendered is usually practical. This chapter has set out in a roughly chronological way some stories of what the United Church and L’Arche have offered and received from each other. United Church minister Loraine MacKenzie Shepherd, in her 2004 article “Church of the Margins: A Call to Solidarity,” commends “a reciprocal relationship of receiving and giving instead of distancing ourselves through a handout relationship.”83 She explores why the United Church’s reconciliation program with First Nations seems at an impasse. Quoting theologian Dr Musa Dube from Botswana, she suggests that “liberating interdependence” can grow as the question “How can we help?” is replaced with “What can we learn?”84

In this light, these specific stories about moments of reciprocal relationship between L’Arche and the United Church are instructive. What is given and received is quite different, because of the unique singularity of each organization. Both are helping the other, and perhaps both are learning. The United Church offered L’Arche houses, people, property, and practical support. L’Arche offered the United Church inspiration, counsel, committed members, retreats, prayer, and friendship. Often both experienced what was tendered as “gift.” Many of these stories are about the pleasure of discovering and learning from each other. But sometimes painful mismatches between what was included and excluded caused hurt and rupture. Those relationships took time, patience, and mature goodwill to begin reconciliation.

The United Church has also tendered another significant contribution to L’Arche. Ever since United Church minister Louise Cummings first came to L’Arche Greater Vancouver in 1995, many Presbyteries of the United Church have recognized work by its clergy in L’Arche as a United Church ministry. By keeping seniority and pension fund contributions intact, the United Church has made it possible for at least three ordained United Church ministers to take up full-time leadership in L’Arche: Dennis Butcher in Winnipeg, Dan Kirkegaard in Saint John, and Lynn Godfrey in Hamilton.

DENNIS BUTCHER IN ALBERTA AND WINNIPEG

Dennis Butcher of the United Church was Community Leader of L’Arche Winnipeg for nearly a decade, from 2000–10. His sense of ministry was hugely influenced by Henri Nouwen in the 1970s, long before either was involved in L’Arche.85 He had first become connected to L’Arche in Edmonton when he was minister of Sherwood Park United Church. A member of L’Arche named Norman wanted to attend that church, members of the congregation volunteered to bring him on a regular basis, and because of Norman, Butcher became involved with L’Arche. Butcher remembers Henri Nouwen speaking in Edmonton at Grant MacEwan College in the 1990s: “There were a thousand people present and the evening started out with a dramatized scripture reading. Norman was the Christ figure on the stage which made it even more memorable. Unfortunately he died about a month later. They called him one of the original ecumenists – he came to the United Church on Sundays, then in the midweek he would go to Bible study at the Catholic Church, so at his funeral in the United Church, the Catholic priest and I co-officiated.”

After Norman died, Butcher was leading a prayer night at L’Arche Edmonton when a man named Rick visited from the Michener Centre in Red Deer to see if L’Arche was a fit for him. “I didn’t think much about it,” says Butcher. “I led the prayer service, I met Rick, and I went home and he went back to Michener Centre. About a month later he walked into my congregation and from that day on he has been and still is a regular member of the congregation.” The Sherwood Park United Church youth group took part in L’Arche Edmonton’s “one and only fundraising walk.” Several members of Sherwood Park United Church have also served on the L’Arche Edmonton Board, two as board presidents.

Butcher was next called to a United Church in Winnipeg. When they had to downsize from two ministers to one, he started looking for his next pastoral charge. At the same time, L’Arche Winnipeg was looking for a community leader, sending notices to Catholics, Lutherans, Mennonites, Anglicans, and the United Church. Butcher phoned and asked, “Would you seriously consider a non-Catholic?” because the L’Arche Winnipeg community “was at that time the only community outside of Quebec that was designated Catholic.” It had started in a convent that was donated by Catholic nuns right beside a large Catholic church. The story was that an Oblate Sister met Vanier at a Faith and Sharing retreat in Gimli, Manitoba,86 and felt a strong urge to give the Oblate Sisters’ house to L’Arche. The Mother Superior agreed and told the archbishop, who also agreed to give the house away. The sisters then invited the fledging L’Arche members to dinner – and when dinner ended, the sisters picked up their suitcases and left, leaving all the furniture and household supplies for L’Arche.87 It is not recorded who did the dishes. Butcher describes the relationship in this way: “So that parish essentially became the founder. Sister Marie Paradis, a Catholic sister that used to live in the convent, was identified as the first leader and that was her convent and her parish. It had a strong Catholic orientation and it was identified as Catholic.”

By the late 1990s, the Regional Council and the board were rethinking the social imaginary of L’Arche Winnipeg, from a Roman Catholic community to a more ecumenical vision, but that direction had not been shared with all the community members. Some of the more long-term Catholic assistants in the community found the hiring of a United Church community leader especially difficult. On the other hand, Butcher ponders, if that ecumenical direction had been discussed more fully in the community, it might have received even stronger pushback. Fortunately, Butcher was known in the wider Winnipeg community through curling and ministerials both in the north and the south end, so there were good relationships already in place with many of the Catholic priests. Butcher thinks that the long-term assistants who were initially resistant eventually recognized that some of L’Arche Winnipeg’s major developments would need the support of the entire Christian community. In his words, “There have been strong buy-ins particularly from Mennonites and United Church in the community. Our fundraiser was a Mennonite, which I think was also a first. She was very successful and so the community is now seen as an ecumenical community. We bought the office, we built a million dollar building for the community space and the largest of our houses. We renovated two other houses to make them accessible. We raised 2.5 million dollars and that wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t moved out beyond the Catholic circle.” For many Canadians, Butcher’s description fits aspects of a social imaginary of Winnipeg itself, with bonds built through curling, a socially active Mennonite community, and co-operative inter-church organizations.

Butcher’s decade of leadership turned out well for the community. He admits that it “was pretty demanding because you had all the regular stuff dealing with the government, as well as dealing with the L’Arche structure. Also, constant construction projects all the way through. But I was very happy to be community leader and enjoyed the nine-and-a-half years very much.”

DAN KIRKEGAARD IN L’ARCHE SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK

In 2004, United Church minister Dan Kirkegaard and his family moved to his hometown of Saint John to found the first L’Arche community in New Brunswick.88 Like Wolfville, L’Arche Saint John offers an interesting example of the differences in structure and expectations between the United Church and the Roman Catholic Church. It began in a house that had previously been the Catholic priests’ residence. The Roman Catholic Diocese gave it to L’Arche, but not completely: should L’Arche ever want to sell it, the house would revert to the Roman Catholic Diocese. Thus the house could not be counted as a L’Arche asset, and the community could not borrow against it to fund their second house. This structural relationship was built into the property ownership documents. It was a different logic than the United Church used in Vancouver, where its Burnaby property was initially rented for one dollar a year, then sold to L’Arche, and that community now has no structural ongoing relationship with the United Church. A board member explained the ownership logic to Kirkegaard: to the Diocese, L’Arche was not a stand-alone organization. The Catholic Church remains on the deed, thus ensuring that L’Arche will continue.

Dan Kirkegaard grew up in the United Church in Saint John. After high school, he travelled with the evangelical theatre group the Covenant Players all over the US. Returning to Canada, he attended Acadia University in Wolfville where he met Jeff and Debbie Moore. The connection with the United Church in Wolfville was very much part of Homefires, he recalls. Kirkegaard found that the other Nova Scotia L’Arche community on Cape Breton was “much more Roman Catholic” and remembers that the dynamics of denominational differences sometimes caused tension between the communities. Kirkegaard met his wife, a teacher visiting from Vancouver, at a L’Arche Homefires barn dance. The whole community came to their 1991 wedding at the United Church in Grand-Pré and core member John McNeil was Kirkegaard’s best man: “He stood with me and signed his X on the documents.” After they moved to BC, Kirkegaard worked at the L’Arche Vancouver day program and was ordained to the United Church by the British Columbia Conference in 1997 with L’Arche people on stage to pray and lay hands on him. Kirkegaard also served as Chair of the Board of L’Arche Vancouver when the board looked for members with more direct L’Arche involvement.

In 2000, by this point with three children, Kirkegaard accepted a call to East Burnaby United Church, one of the United Church’s more theologically conservative renewal / covenanting congregations. “I came knowing that, and I was fine with that,” says Kirkegaard. But he was surprised that some members of the congregation were vocally opposed to new things. He recalls, “A few months into our second year, I got a list of complaints brought to me of apparently unacceptable practices, and one was that I accepted people with disabilities without any question.” Examples included his welcome of a young man from a group home nearby: “He had cerebral palsy and his voice was hard to understand and his body, awkward.” In his pastoral ministry, Kirkegaard supported people who were connected to church but not well-accepted in the church, and spent a lot of time with them. “And within a year of being there, we adopted a four-month old baby with Down syndrome,” Kirkegaard adds. He addressed this from the pulpit, saying that he was “happy people recognized that our ministry is with people with disabilities. These people are blessed by God.”

Meanwhile, the New Dawn community in Saint John had been working since 1991 towards establishing a L’Arche community, and in December 2004, Kirkegaard became the founding director. Kirkegaard worked through the regulatory complications of starting L’Arche in a province that did not distinguish between people with mental illness and people with intellectual disabilities. His family welcomed a young woman with mental illness to live with them for two years. Enormous fundraising was needed for the fledgling L’Arche community. L’Arche Canada’s new membership document unexpectedly confused and alienated long-term community supporters. Kirkegaard spent every other Sunday travelling to United Churches and churches of other denominations throughout New Brunswick, speaking about L’Arche and building connections.

If we consider again Doreen Massey’s articulation of place, we can see that Kirkegaard forged for L’Arche Saint John a complex layering of a Roman Catholic property, ambiguous government regulation, confusing L’Arche Canada directives, and widespread networking amongst numerous United Church congregations in the city and surrounding area. By making the new L’Arche community well known, ecumenically and especially among local United Churches, Kirkegaard worked hard to establish numerous strands of congregational connections and funding that supported the community, rather like a tent upheld by its various tie-lines. At the same time, Kirkegaard’s outreach challenged many United Church members to greater awareness of the experience of people with intellectual disabilities. Just two years earlier, in the World Council of Churches 2003 meeting in Nairobi, the WCC Ecumenical Disabilities Advocates Network published “A Church of All and for All.” This document acknowledges the effect that people with disabilities can have: “People with disabilities, and particularly people with learning disabilities, disturb and confuse the accepted order in many societies. Disabled people disturb human notions of perfection, purpose, reward, success and status.”89 Calling for Christian solidarity, it nonetheless goes on to strongly assert: “In our attitudes and actions toward one another, at all times, the guiding principle must be the conviction that we are incomplete, we are less than whole, without the gifts and talents of all people. We are not a full community without one another. Responding to and fully including people with disabilities is not an option for the churches of Christ. It is the church’s defining characteristic.”90 Kirkegaard’s leadership in L’Arche and in the United Church has been dedicated to boldly living and ministering this defining characteristic.

Returning to Vancouver in 2008 was a wrenching decision for Dan and Sandra Kirkegaard, but one they felt was necessary because Sandra had not been able to find work as a teacher in New Brunswick. Kirkegaard was called half time to the Vancouver Japanese United Church English-speaking congregation for two and a half years, then full time to Tsawwassen United Church. He remains involved in L’Arche, leading community prayer, helping with retreats, and connecting with the Vancouver community as vice-chair of the Operations Board. He says “the connection with L’Arche is relational, not intellectual.” In his ecumenical vision, Kirkegaard considers L’Arche foundational to his “relationally-based ministry” and his commitment to “different ways of being God’s people.”

LYNN GODFREY IN L’ARCHE HAMILTON, ONTARIO

In January 2015, United Church minister Lynn Godfrey became community leader of L’Arche Hamilton, eighteen years after first being introduced to L’Arche.91 Godfrey arrived in Sudbury in 1997 and her friend Louise Cummings, who was leaving, asked Godfrey to replace her on the Board of L’Arche Sudbury. Godfrey remembers, “I really didn’t know anything. The board was fairly active in the community, and I was invited to lead the spiritual component of a community weekend.” She went on two formation events – one with Jean Vanier in Montreal, and the other with Sue Mosteller in Guelph. She describes her experience:

I was hooked by the whole aspect of mutuality and living in partnership with each other. It was the gift of the core members, the joy of the community, the spirituality. In the church, we have a hard time even praying before the start of each meeting, but in L’Arche spirituality is very deep. In L’Arche Sudbury, prayer was such an automatic thing that happened. It wasn’t talking about good ways to live: it was struggling to do it. Another draw for me was a sense of trust and risk, being invited to use my gifts where people didn’t know me well.

While at her next congregation in London, Godfrey again connected with the local L’Arche community, leading worship services for the community every month or so. After another move to a congregation in Hamilton, Godfrey became a friend of L’Arche Hamilton and after a few years, L’Arche Hamilton asked her to work full time as homes coordinator and spiritual guide. In 2015, Godfrey became the community leader of L’Arche Hamilton. The United Church continues to support L’Arche by recognizing Godfrey’s L’Arche role as ministry. Godfrey reflects on her ministry in L’Arche:

What keeps me in L’Arche is the relationship with the core members. And I see the young people being transformed by the core members, and I just really want to be part of that, and help them to do that. The young people come in and live as assistants, and then they go off and do other things, but they take this experience with them. When they keep in touch, they don’t keep in touch with the leadership team: they keep in touch with the core members, because those are the ones they have the relationship with. It’s a real privilege to be supporting the core members so that they can do their magic with these people. I find my life in community is joyful. It’s tough, but there is joy and love and it makes it all worthwhile. Instead of just talking about the gospel, we struggle to be authentic about what the gospels teach us or try to teach us. People have the impression that it’s difficult to work with our core members, but the core members are the ­reason we are here. I can only work in the office so long before I need to go out into the day program or into a house!92

JESUS, PRAYER, AND ONGOING ECUMENISM

A few months before Bruce McLeod and Bob Smith had their late-night conversation with Vanier concerning the way in which he spoke of Jesus, an unsigned editorial in the January 1973 United Church Observer was titled, “The United Church Has a Special Role in 1973.”93 It began with an assessment of the ecumenical situation: “When church historians a century hence survey this period of Christian history, they will note two things: the growth of goodwill among major Protestant, Anglican and Roman Catholic churches; and the widening gulf between liberal and conservative evangelical Protestant churches.” The editorial encouraged United Church congregations at a local level to work with other denominations on “a continental evangelism program” called Key 73. A few pages later, another editorial titled “The value of saying Jesus” quoted Vanier’s talk to General Council the previous summer:

Recently Jean Vanier put it: ‘Those who live in insecurity turn to God.’ He added that when he visits hospitals for the aged he finds it helpful just to put his hand on the head of an old person and say, ‘Jesus.’ Even in these times of affluence in the relatively secure western world, great numbers of people live in personal insecurity in the midst of economic plenty. The church … has good news of security and hope for them. But it is sad to note that in our time so many churches with a rich evangelical heritage seem unable to say ‘Jesus.’94

Decades later, this possibility of speaking comfortably about Jesus is carried in many L’Arche communities, not just by Jean Vanier himself. When Maggie Enwright was minister of Comox United Church on Vancouver Island, she “found in L’Arche the freedom to talk about Jesus, a place to be Christocentric.”95 In her church community she has “total freedom to talk about the Spirit, and some freedom to talk about God or Creator, but talking about Jesus gets tricky because people say they feel like a fraud in relation to Jesus. But at L’Arche there is space to be Christocentric and it is embraced.” She notes with wry amusement that she used to feel “too new-agey” in the United Church, but now “not new-agey enough,” and worries that L’Arche could try to be so vaguely multi-faith that it loses something essential to its identity. From her perspective, “If L’Arche becomes as multi-faith and new-agey as many United Church congregations then it won’t be as nurturing for people like me.” United Church minister Dan Kirkegaard made the same point in 2018, appreciating Jean Vanier’s persistence in speaking about Jesus in a way that remains rooted in his Christian traditions while being broadly accepting of other faiths.

Henri Nouwen did not need the help of L’Arche to talk about Jesus, but in L’Arche he found something new in his relationship with Adam, a man with profound disabilities. Nouwen wrote, “because of the vulnerability of Jesus we can see Adam’s extremely vulnerable life as a life of utmost spiritual significance … I know that I couldn’t have told Adam’s story if I hadn’t first known Jesus’ story. Jesus’ story gave me eyes to see and ears to hear the story of Adam’s life and death.”96

Theologian Kwok Pui-lan observes that every person has multiple, shifting identities.97 Individuals are complex and can change, and the same is true for communities. Nearly every L’Arche community in Canada outside of Quebec has some history of connection with the local United Church. Those connections come and go, depending on the religious affiliation of core members, the interest of local leadership in nurturing those connections, and practical logistics such as whether L’Arche members need a ride to church. In this regard, the experience of Comox United Church is interesting. United Church minister Maggie Enwright comments:

I was on the local L’Arche Spiritual Life Committee and we had a big debate there about ‘Is it helpful for core members to be paraded around to different churches?’ They used to go as a group, so one Sunday a month, three of the four core members and some assistants would come to our United Church. They had not a shred of self-consciousness about standing up at welcoming time and saying ‘YAY!’ Or Cory saying ‘Maggie! Maggie! Amen! Alright!’ It just didn’t faze Cory to stand up and do that. I think it was a great thing, and the congregation would say, ‘Good! The L’Arche people are taking one pew today!’ But it raised questions for the Spiritual Life Committee. I tried to hear their concerns, that it maybe wasn’t the best for each core member not to be able to put down roots in a congregation. Through a discernment process they decided that each core member would choose one church and be part of that community consistently. One person decided she would come to our church. The other ones don’t come anymore. I wouldn’t say it has deepened her relationship with the church, because although the intention is to come to the United Church, it is sporadic. Now that they aren’t all going one place, they have to rely on people who know them to bring them and that hasn’t really happened.

Doug Graves noted in 2010 that problems still spring up even in well-intentioned efforts towards ecumenism:

It’s going to be so hard to overcome the Catholic ethos. Even when they try they stumble over it. We had a service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity at L’Arche Greater Vancouver recently. It was my turn to lead the service. The person who oversees the local L’Arche Spiritual Life Committee was away and so other members of the Spiritual Life Committee, which is a very strong committee, had taken over. Anyway, at the last minute Sister Normande said, ‘Oh my God, we haven’t planned communion, we haven’t planned the eucharist for this!’ She said ‘We’ve got to have the eucharist’ and the other members of the Spiritual Life Committee said, ‘Of course we do!’ It was with the best of intentions. Normande said, ‘Because that symbolizes our coming together.’ And I said, ‘Not in L’Arche it doesn’t.’ Not anywhere! And she is such an ecumenical person. She just hadn’t made the connection. She hadn’t stopped to think that a communion service in the context of unity doesn’t work. In the Roman Catholic tradition, if it’s a ‘special’ service we’ll have communion. They said that I redeemed it when I offered the reflection. I just talked about how we struggle for unity in the midst of some of the realities like this one. People will rightly describe L’Arche Greater Vancouver as one of the most actively ecumenical of all the communities but they still have these moments like that, when something just doesn’t connect.

Jean Vanier continues to think about his experiences with the United Church of Canada. In his 2017 book of autobiographical reflections, Vanier titles one section “Painful Unity,” writing:

One of the best presentations I can remember took place at the United Church of Canada’s General Assembly, in close cooperation with L’Arche. How moving to see our witness received with such intensity and listening! Soon after, we had an ecumenical retreat with Catholic and Anglican bishops, as well as moderators from the United Church. I remember the pain many felt when we could not share Communion at the same table, despite the spiritual unity we had experienced.98

Of course, sometimes people simply take ecumenical decisions into their own hands, open to follow God’s call. Judith Leckie, founding director of L’Arche Vancouver, tells how she became a Carmelite nun in England but more recently has come back to worship in the United Church of Canada:

About those of us who grew up in the United Church and then became Catholic: I think that had I remained in the United Church I would never have been in contact with L’Arche. But I was exceedingly grateful for my United Church background, which gave me a bit of a different perspective. But it was the richness of the Catholic tradition that gave me what I needed at that time to help me to see L’Arche as Jean was trying to witness to it. When I left L’Arche in 1979, it was to go to the UK to enter the Carmelite Monastery at Quidenham. There were in fact, several other women there who were also former L’Arche people. I remained in Carmel for almost 30 years and was very grateful indeed for that. But our little monastery had to close, and I realized that I was not prepared to go to another community because I had become pretty unhappy with the institutional aspect of the Roman Catholic Church and its male domination under the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict. So, ultimately I returned here to Toronto and though I do from time to time go to the Catholic Church, I most regularly attend the services at Rosedale United. There I find the nourishment and community that I need for the moment.

When Helen Humphries, one of the early core members of L’Arche Daybreak, moved off the Daybreak farm into one of Daybreak’s houses in town, she became a regular member of Richmond Hill United Church. It was only a block away from where she lived. After the service and fellowship time, she liked to walk a block further to slip into the latter part of the Catholic mass still in progress at the Roman Catholic Church. Either a blatant rule-defier or an insistent ecumenist, Humphries confidently joined in to receive the sacrament at communion time. Clearly she felt at home in both churches. Each week she also chose spontaneously at which church to tender her United Church offering envelope. This provided another ecumenical link as the amused church secretaries got to know each other through sorting out Humphries’s offering. In the space of a few short blocks up and down Church Street, Humphries walked an ecumenical path that refused to take sides and instead double-dipped to feed her remarkable spirit.

New connections between L’Arche and the United Church constantly sprout up. In 2017, Donna Tourneur, minister at Trinity United Church in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, replaced Doug Graves on the four-member L’Arche International Church Leaders group. She joined Ruth Patterson, a Presbyterian minister who in 1976 was the first woman to be ordained in Ireland and director of Restoration Ministries, a non-denominational, Christian organization committed to peace and reconciliation; Pierre d’Ornellas, a former theology professor who is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Rennes, France; and Stephen Conway, the British Anglican Bishop of Ely. Tourneur is the only member of the Church Leaders group who is married with a family, and the only member currently in pastoral ministry. She grew close to the L’Arche community on Cape Breton from 2003–14 when she was at Stewart United Church in Whycocomagh.

After more than a year of representing the United Church of Canada on the L’Arche International Church Leaders group, Tourneur said she had not used any United Church documents about disability or being an intercultural church.99 As argued earlier in this book, even the most articulate and insightful documents are often overlooked in both L’Arche and the United Church. People connect through relationships and stories.

Accepting a role on the L’Arche International Church Leaders group meant taking on the challenge of building connections between L’Arche and the United Church, so Tourneur renewed her interest in L’Arche. In May 2018, she successfully nominated Jenn Power, the leader of the L’Arche Atlantic region, with her husband Silas Donham who runs a work program at L’Arche Cape Breton, for the Atlantic School of Theology’s “Honourable Mayann Francis Faith in Action Award,” which “honours exceptional community outreach that is recognized as having provided significant benefit to the wider community.” Along with their wide-ranging community work, Power and Donham have been going to family camp with their children at the United Church’s Berwick camp for years. Power notes how often L’Arche comes up in presentations by United Church leaders at camp events.100

In September 2018, Tourneur invited Jenn Power and a L’Arche core member to speak at the last meeting of the local Presbytery.101 They used the central L’Arche words of relationship, transformation, and sign, urging their listeners that every community is called to these three things through reaching out, being vulnerable, and remaining always open to transformation. Yet, they emphasized, no one can observe their way to transformation: it is a participatory exercise. A few weeks later, also through Tourneur, Power and another core member spoke about hope to a local Council of Churches gathering. They pointed out that hope isn’t needed when things are easy: hope is needed in hard places and times of hopelessness. Moments of transformation don’t spring from nothing, they announced, but are the result of long commitments to hard work in community.