As we mentionned in the previous article, the hypothesis was that if you could just get people of different races to interact – to come into contact, then racism would diminish. In reality, it was not that simple.

After years of studying many such ‘integrated’ settings, researchers concluded that, not surprisingly, things are not that simple. In fact they found that if no new information or positive representation or understanding was provided, such contacts were most likely to simply reconfirm a person’s prejudices and could even increase racism. With appropriate intervention, education and supports however, there can be a kind of blossoming of imaginations. Indeed, L'Arche helps people develop beyond their imagination.

Failures of the imagination

Failures of the Imagination are very common in society; in general and for disability. I will talk about 3 instances of this failure:

Rabbi who is taking the train to another synagogue that invited him to come but had not met him. He decides to dress poorly for the train as he wants some peace and quiet – and not to be recognized as a rabbi. As it happens, he is seated in a section with several members of the synagogue he is to visit and they treat him quite rudely as they think he is a vagrant. At the synagogue, after he talks, they are mortified at their error and beg his forgiveness to which he says nothing. For months they continue to ask his forgiveness with no success. Some of you may know that forgiveness is a central concept for the Jewish people – they even have a special period of the ten days of awe or atonement between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, during which every person must ask forgiveness of those they have wronged and also grant forgiveness to those who have wronged them. By this period, the people asked the Rabbi again and again he refused. When they cried out “how can you be so unfair?” he replied simply – “You are asking the wrong person.” (Annie Dillard)

Not only did these people treat someone badly, but after a year of apparently thinking about what they did ‘wrong’ – they still could not imagine who was really wronged in this situation. The Rabbi was unharmed by their treatment – he knew he was not a poor man. But the many who do experience poverty and rejection continued to be ignored by these people.

A second sad example of the failure of public imagination has to do with the way that the institutions turned out in the West. As we discussed, these ended up being places with substantial direct abuse as well as extreme neglect and lack of caring. The absence of positive, hopeful imaginative work was palpable. What is especially telling about this example is that things did not generally start out that way.

Early pioneers of asylums and institutions had high hopes that these would be places to rehabilitate all the ‘deviant’ people collected in them. Later, as they had to account to their funders for the lack of adequate ‘success,’ they began to separate people into categories – who was trainable or curable and who was not. Even then, the most positive reports suggest that there was hope that these could be sanctuaries where the vulnerable were protected from the harshness of society. Unfortunately that notion slipped rather quickly into a model that was more ‘custodial’ than utopic. As society learned of evolutionary theory, eugenics and the ‘norm’ through statistics, it seems that the direction of our public imagination was more towards achieving biological perfection, rather than social compassion and inclusion.

The third example is that of Robert Latimer, who killed his profoundly disabled daughter, Tracy, over a decade ago. This is a case that has gained international repute because it is so controversial. The father claims that he loved his daughter and could not see her suffer any longer – that this was the best thing to do for her. And tens of thousands of people support his decision and signed petitions to try to help him be sentenced as a “mercy killing” instead of murder in court. We’ll come back to this later because I think it is easy to condemn what he did but for our purposes it would be much more interesting to reflect on why what he did was so generally accepted.

But this is not to say there was no imagination - as Wolfensberger has shown,

people with developmental disabilities have always fired the public imagination;

however, as is evident in the many stereotypes that he names, all of the archetypes are negative, one-dimensional or condescending. The holy innocent, the soulless being; a result of the sins of the father, deviants, lacking in morality, child of god, freakshow, buffoon, menace to society and so on. So there was imagination but it was completely uncreative – it drew on humans’ worst, base instinct to fear difference.

Public representations were not all negative.

Public representations were not, however, all negative. For instance, during World War II, in lieu of military service many Quakers and Mennonites were numbered among the conscientious objectors who had to do community service in Institutions and Asylums where they did not normally work. What they observed in terms of poor treatment and conditions for people with disabilities or mental illness at that time appalled them.

Many of them wrote letters of protest to public officials and made various efforts to raise awareness generally of what they considered to be unacceptable. These efforts were in some ways foreshadowing the eventual scandalous exposes in Canada and the US that used a journalistic approach to bring this story to the public. All of this was part of the shift in public opinion about what to do with those they had rejected from their communities.

While the public did not generally abandon its view of people with disability as a problem, they did come to feel that the extreme form of rejection that had evolved in asylums was unacceptable. Among other factors, this edged the field closer towards closing the institutions and reintegrating people into communities and families to some extent.

Imagination at Work

At this point it would be helpful to consider a case where imagination was at work in a creative and progressive way. The late 1950’s and the 1960’s were as you know times of extensive social and religious change in general and this was also a time of change in the disability field. People with new visions for the field included Wolfensberger mentioned above as well as Dybwad who our own Carl MacMillan (Daybreak) studied with at Brandeis University’s Heller School. These people along with many others championed the community living and normalization movements that aimed to create better life circumstances for those labeled with disabilities.

Jean Vanier and Pere Thomas founded L’Arche in France and Canada amidst this thriving ethos and optimism of change in the mid to late 1960’s. As Sister Sue Mosteller and Jean himself have written in their books, none of them had all of their radical ideas clearly articulated at that time.

Clarity about and commitment to what we now recognize as the charism of L’Arche evolved out of the productive tension of their initial, faith-based ideas and sharing life with the core members. In other words, it was in the encounter of faith based ideas with the realities of everyday life and the will and desires of early core members, that imagination could really enter in – to experience and observe the life that was unfolding and to imagine a mission and organization out of that was an incredible feat of imagiation that we would all do well to read about further for instance in Jean or Sue’s books or those distinct perspectives of Kathryn Spink, John Sumarah or Father Bill Clarke, SJ.

L’Arche needs your imaginative input so that it does not calcify into routines; so that it does not settle for good enough out of fatigue; so that it does not forget how many people in the public you have not yet reached – who have no idea how to imagine, let alone have, a mutual engagement or friendship with some of our members.

L’Arche also needs ways to draw on the imaginative resources of the core members – obviously this is part of what Jean and other leaders in L’Arche are doing each time they share stories with us, but there is immense room for growth in this area at the other levels – particularly among the newest assistants who, in their first three years, spend by far the most direct time with core members and who therefore have the time and current relationships with core members to try to work through some of these questions on their terms.

A great example of this is the work of John Smeltzer in the New House (L'Arche Daybreak) with film-maker and former New House assistant, Deiren Masterson. (See Spoon Man video below) Deiren has found a compelling process and format to collaborate with John to harness John’s considerable imagination in a way that helps them both to convey more about John to those outside the community who will never be able to cultivate the personal relationship that these two have. But each of you has the means and the creativity to find a distinct way for you and someone you support to imagine connections and collaborations as well.

I mentioned that at a retreat in the summer, Jean Vanier mused about what it will take to inspire the new assistants in L’Arche to have a passion for the mission of L’Arche and a passion for their own mission. This question resonated with me because I grapple with this with the university students I teach as well.

In my experience, one route for generating greater passion and sense of mission, is when people can become authors of what they are doing. This does not mean they have to redefine the entire approach or organization but they do need to have the space to imagine what is possible and the permission / responsibility to enact some of those ideas.

So something for you to discuss further internally is:

And for the new assistants to discuss:

What do I need in order to author and act on my ideas? What stops me from taking the initiative sometimes?

Next Article : Wednesday June 18th

Part 4 : The Ongoing Story of L'Arche : Everyone`s Imagination