I’d like to close with one final example of imagination and how it must always relate back to action or what I’ll call habits of practice here.

Most of you know the classic children’s story by St. Exupery of Le Petit Prince. In the story, there is a little boy who loves his single rose faithfully and carefully for ages even when the rose is not particularly kind or thankful. When the little Prince goes traveling, he sees that there are thousands of other roses and momentarily feels naÔve that he has considered his one rose as being so special. With time however, he comes to feel that in spite of common appearances, his rose is unique and special because they belong to each other – they have shared things together and shaped each other.

I remember discussing this part of the story with a new assistant in L’Arche Trois Rivieres many years ago. He felt, and I agreed, that this resonates with our experience in L’Arche – that it is transformative partly because you are getting to know individuals and developing practices that deepen those relations.

At your best, you in L’Arche encourage and provide space for three important habits of practice: presence, patience with and receptivity to others.

Cultivating these habits of practice is a way of changing the contours of what you assistants can imagine is possible in care, in relationships across difference, and in community generally.

Core members’ gift to you is to be open to your imperfect ability to embody these principles when you first arrive – they mostly give you that space to grow. When you cultivate those habits of practice in your way of being, that is your gift back to them – when you are present, patient and receptive, however imperfectly, you are enacting something radical. These habits of practice are part of what makes you more than a service agency.

I leave you with the encouragement to continue this conversation together – to think about how you might nurture your imagination but also to plan for ways to enact what you have learned and imagined – to disseminate and share these experiences and understandings.

There is someone that you might think about as a sort of litmus test case for how you might share. Robert Latimer has made it clear that he believes it was right to kill Tracy, his disabled daughter, and he will continue the work he’s been doing from the inside his prison around lobbying for legal changes in how what he did would be considered. In other words, to change the legal ramifications of murdering people with disabilities in certain contexts. Obviously, from the position you are in, it is easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to his position and to condemn him as incorrigible. But I wonder if you could imagine some different kind of approach.

Jean is famous for never judging parents for decisions they have made to give up their children with disabilities and for emphasizing that no one knows what they would do in the parents’ shoes. Following on this vein, what about finding ways to invite Robert Latimer into your world – of taking a constructive, non-judgmental approach to engaging with him. To communicate with him in a way that does not condemn what he did or what he appears to believe, but instead invites him into a new experience, and hopefully also a dialogue

The new experience that you offer him is to explain that there are people in your community who live with similar conditions as Tracy Latimer did and yet have been able to find a place of contentment and belonging in the world, and who are inspirations and friends to others they live with.

Part of the dialogue would be for you and he to share together more about who Tracy was and what she lived with. What kind of pain did she experience? To what extent did Doctors feel that it could have been alleviated? What kinds of respite support did they have or lack? What were the factors that led Robert to feel that he simply did not see a future for her? It would only work if he felt that you genuinely did want to listen to and learn from him as well as to share your story with him.

I wonder if there would be a way to write to him in jail – many letters from different people but all in a spirit of constructive invitation. This is just one example of an idea but I think it fits with the L’Arche notion of ‘changing one heart at a time’

Thank you so much for the privilege of talking about this subject during a week-end with the L'Arche Daybreak assistants and, again in the Meeting Ground articles.

Sincerely - Pamela

Pamela.cushing@uwo.ca