By Rita McInerney

“L’Arch?”

“What’s that?”

Hardly a household name, L’Arche terms itself a worldwide federation of communities in which handicapped people and others live, work and share their lives together. L’Arche tries to follow the Gospel message and Beatitudes of Jesus in 20th century society.

French-Canadian Jean Vanier started L’Arche (the ark) in 1964 when he made a home for two mentally handicapped men who were confined to a crowded asylum. From the beginning, this house in the small village of Trosly-Breuil, France, was to provide a family, a community of friends living together in a way that each person might find security and dignity in human relationships, respect for one another, and fulfillment in giving and sharing life.

Soon Vanier was drawing people from all over the world to Trosly to become “assistants.” Eventually these assistants went home to their own countries and started L’Arche communities.

Nine years ago, George Durner, a native of Statesboro, GA, went to the L’Arche community of Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. Four years later he became director of the L’Arche community in Winnipeg where he, wife Danielle and their two daughters live now.

On Sunday, Nov. 10, Durner will speak at an open meeting on forming and supporting a L’Arche community in Atlanta. It will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. in Suite 509, Kennesaw Life Building, 1447 Peachtree St. The Georgia Advocacy Office, Inc., will be host and the award winning documentary, “The Heart Has Its Reasons” will be shown. The video was filmed at Trosly which is now the center of an L’Arche community of hundreds of people in neighboring villages and the town of Compiegne.

Durner wrote of his experience at L’Arche in a column for Seeds, a Canadian periodical ministry. He speaks of the gifts and talents he brought as fine and good, but not what was really needed. He eventually realized what caused the void he felt:

“Now the one who came to teach is being taught. The one who came to help is being helped. The one who came to serve is perhaps learning the most. He has discovered that always serving, always being the one who gives can be a way of dominating the one who must always receive. Now he is learning how to let himself be served, how to receive the gift of the other.”

“All of this is my journey today; it is the result of living with men and women who have touched me deeply, who have taken me to my own heart, to my gentleness, my compassion, my tenderness. These are the ones who have led me to Jesus and helped me to believe that He loves me in my own weakness and poverty.”

Entering into the life of L’Arche, the relationships, Durner wrote, seem to make disabilities disappear. At L’Arche we forget that Jim, or Hazel, or Maressa are mentally handicapped, but not because there is something special in us in being able to see past the disability. On the contrary, it is completely normal that after living with people day after day we just become accustomed to everything about them. Who people are becomes the most interesting thing about them. Everything else becomes incidental and less important. We have learned to meet one another at the level of person.

Jean Vanier comments in a similar vein in an article, “L’Arche: Its History and Vision.” The handicapped person, he wrote, “needs people who see him as a person; who eat and laugh with him; who pray and work with him. He doesn’t want to be a ‘case’ or a ‘schoolboy’ or a ‘resident’; he wants to be part of a family or a community; he wants to find his place in a home.”

Sister Rosemary Cawley, G.N.S.H., is committed to working with the handicapped after years of teaching including about 15 years at schools in Atlanta. She spent two and a half years in a L’Arche home in Syracuse, NY, and is now working with the handicapped in Montgomery County, PA.

Her Syracuse “family” included a sister from another community, a married couple and three retarded people; two men, one 58, the other 36; a woman, 43. Each had one other disability -- one was blind, another crippled and the third suffered seizures.

“I choose to do it in order to be open to learning the real feelings and real needs of people with mental retardation. I found that as I got to know them I became more confident that what I was doing was just the same as dealing with any other people. But I had to learn a new way of teaching.

“In a way their needs, their joys, sorrows are the same as everyone else’s. I was amazed at how prejudiced everyone is toward the retarded. The biggest disability is other people’s attitudes.” The mystery to her is why “some of us can talk more clearly, walk more steadily. They have exactly the same needs.”

The retarded, she said, are aware of the prejudices of people and they are also aware of the acceptance. She treasures the lasting friendship with one of the men at L’Arche that developed over nightly cups of coffee. He drank his coffee alone until she asked to join him. Gradually, he shared his life with her, telling of incidents he remembered from his childhood and of being institutionalized at 13. Through this friendship, she said, she learned the importance of being “present to people.”

Sister Crawley has been working with the retarded for about seven years and is now training the mentally disabled in job skills. It was when she became principal of an inner city school in Buffalo that she began working with retarded children.

“They came with a message to me,” she said. She read about L’Arche and then went to the community in Syracuse, for two years in summer and then full-time. “I learned a lot but also felt I was contributing a lot, having lived in the community.”

What’s important, she said, is for people to make a long-term commitment and concentrate on the abilities rather than the disabilities of the mentally handicapped.

A Georgia State coed majoring in special education, Monica Maranville, of St. Ann’s parish in Marietta, has “always been interested in helping people with handicaps.” One way she helps is working with the mental retardation programs Cobb and Douglas counties.

She visited the L’Arche community in Mobile, Ala., after making a retreat last August at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Jean Vanier directed the retreat.

“He’s a real gentle and peaceful man. He really seems to want to live like Jesus,” she said. She told him she had been thinking of setting up a community although, until the retreat, she hadn’t known about L’Arche. He advised her to visit Mobile and she spent several days at the community. There are two homes occupied by six retarded people and three assistants and an apartment where two handicapped women live. The dwellings are within a block of one another.

There is “a sense of family, not just living in a group home. There’s a lot of loving and sharing and praying,” she said. Quiet prayer and Bible sharing after the meal was cleared from the table was a time of the day she especially liked.

Each community, she learned, is guided by an outside board of directors made up of supportive people. Contributions from “working” members, payments to the disabled, fund raising and donations maintain L’Arche communities.

Everyone in the community has a voice in accepting new comers. If someone wants to join, the individual is first welcomed for a one-month stay. If everyone is agreeable at the end of the month, the new comer is then invited to stay three months. If all goes well then, a one-year covenant is made. At the end of a year, an assistant then stays on for three years.

Joe Durner of the Holy Family parish in Marietta, is working to stir interest in the Nov. 10 meeting featuring his older brother. He and Latisha, his wife, visited Trosly in 1979 with George and Danielle, a Belgian native who had been an assistant at the original L’Arche. The younger Durner speaks with enthusiasm of the village which seems to be mostly L’Arche and the talented metalworkers and their creations he saw in the workshops.

That’s a brief outline of L’Arche. Radical Christian communities of love and acceptance in the Gospel way around the world. Homes where people who have experienced rejection and ridicule can develop a sense of self-worth and become capable of integrating more fully into life.