These rained-upon pilgrims were attending World Youth Day in Krakow.
This remark of the explorer Levison Wood set me thinking about Pilgrimages: In my travels I have often found that the most meaningful journeys begin with a single, often uncertain, but manageable step.
The state of my health prevented my joining L’Arche Kent’s pilgrimage this year. These events have always been an opportunity to get to know each other better, but I would have had difficulty keeping up and keeping going on the long off-road stretches. I’m rather too big to be carried or supported along unmade paths, even though L’Arche is good at carrying and supporting each other at difficult times. The weather was wet, the going, as the horse-racing fraternity might have it, soft-to-liquid.
I caught up with people later. One pilgrim told me: it was terrible on Friday, as soon as we got into the woods the rain came down and most people got soaked. But it improved for the barbecue, the sun came out.
Someone else said, It was very sticky and the ones using walking trolleys got bogged down in places. but they kept going.
A trolley user told me how his wheels got stuck in the mud and friends cleared the mud off his wheels with sticks. They all got to the end, well done. People seemed energised after a few days’ rest.
I hope you can find a little pilgrimage to undertake this summer. As the pilgrims in Krakow were singing, (in many languages) Now with You I will seek other shores.
Sadly, I am not yet back to walking very far, and certainly not to undertaking a four day pilgrimage with my L’Arche friends. That happens next week. This year, Mrs T and I can at least help with catering – or should I say with cake? Cake is the fuel for our pilgrimages!
Here’s a message from the Columban Missionaries, inviting us to walk ”united as brothers and sisters.” Follow the links when you’ve read this page, and pray for our L’Arche pilgrims, following Augustine’s journey from Thanet to Canterbury – he whose feast was yesterday!
Missionary Society of St. Columban May 2024 A year ago this week, nine Columban companions walked, as pilgrims, in the footsteps of St. Columban in Cornwall listening to ‘the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor’ through the voices of St. Columban and Columban Missionaries around the world.
This summer, we invite you to walk as we did “…united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his creatures…” (Laudato Si’ 92).
Design a walk near to where you live, walk an established pilgrimage route, or organise a retreat or recollection day for family, friends, your parish or community. Be a pilgrim for Christ! Read ‘Be a Pilgrim for Christ’ on our website Download the Columban Way Pilgrimage booklet, full of prayers and reflections for you to use as you wish.A quick look back…Let’s look back on last year’s pilgrimage.
Once again we share an interesting and topical post from the Catholic Union on a matter very close to our heart.
The Holy Father and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences met last week to discuss ‘Disability and the human condition’. The President of the Catholic Union, Baroness Hollins, addressed that plenary session; and the work (outlined below) of an award-winning organisation led by one Scotland-based subscriber to our Weekly Briefing demonstrates the vital contribution our laity undertakes at the praxis of these important issues.
Chris Gehrke, Director of L’Arche Highland, writes: Earlier this month, in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Pope Francis commented on the stuttering progress made by the international community in acknowledging the rights and dignity of persons who live with disabilities. Our “throwaway culture”, he said, discards people with disabilities by failing to recognise their contributions to the shared project of human flourishing.
Pope Francis is right about this. Today, we excessively value qualities such as autonomy and efficiency. And no group is more acutely excluded by this than people with learning disabilities. The Pope’s remedy is to seek out “forms of social friendship that include everyone”. If you want proof that such friendships are not just utopian fantasy, I suggest a visit to L’Arche Highland, in Inverness.
L’Arche is a Community movement, bringing together people with and without learning disabilities in equality and mutual respect. Our shared life is a joyful rebellion against a society that’s often unfair and unkind to people with learning disabilities. The form of inclusive social friendship we have in L’Arche is neither utopian nor perfect. But it is real – in the stories and daily life of individual people, with and without disabilities, who come together in our Community.
Today we are happy to share L’Arche UK’s annual Impact Report. This colourful leaflet (with plenty of links to other stories of our members) will give you a taste of who and what we are in this jubilee year – 50 years of L’Arche UK, 60 years of L’Arche internationally – and what we hope to achieve in the next 5 or 50 years. Click the link and read on!
Just before we turn into Holy Week, here’s a reflection from Eddie Gilmore, now ensconced in L’Arche Ireland. I should have borrowed this earlier in Lent but it can remind us to focus on next week’s events, and set aside distractions, however good and right it would be to pay attention to them at other times. Thank you, Eddie!
If you click on ”L’Arche Ireland” below you’ll find the whole of Eddie’s reflection alongside much that is very interesting and even (just now) distracting. The rest of Eddie’s article is worth reading now !!!
What, I wonder, would Jesus have done with his smartphone if he had been going off into the desert for forty days in 2024?
He would probably have been tempted to take it with him. He was human, after all, as well as being divine. Ah, sure there might be an important message, he might have surmised. Or, like me, he might fancy having a little peep at ‘Sacred space’ or listen to some Taizé chants to get him in the mood for prayer. And then maybe, while he was on Youtube, he could just see a few of the goals from the previous week’s Premier League matches. A little bit of celebrity gossip? Hey, where’s the harm in that? We all need our bit of escapism, don’t we? You can’t be praying all the time.
And then, I like to think, the battery would run out on Jesus’ smartphone and that he would take a deep breath and feel perhaps a tinge of panic but then relief. And that he would walk further into the desert, where he would still face temptations: for power, prestige, acclaim. Temptations, big or small, will always be there. But perhaps, without the distraction of the phone, he could now face those temptations full on, and a little bit more aware and prepared.
I like to think as well that, without the constant pinging of that phone, Jesus would be a little bit more conscious of what was around him; for deserts can be bleak but they can also be places of beauty. And I like to think that he would take heart in the words of Isaiah (C. 35):
The desert and the parched land will be glad. The wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom. It will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
And we can put flowers on the Altar again in just a few days’ time!
I think I’m stuck, for the time being, with my two phones but I hope that during this season of Lent I might have a bit more freedom around their use so that I can be a little better prepared for whatever battles I will have to face with the devil, and so that I can be a little more able to see the incredible beauty in what can appear at times like a bleak world.
Remember Eddie Gilmore, who used to write from the London Irish Centre? He is now the National Leader of L’Arche Ireland, and has sent a few blog posts for us to share. This one I chose to go first, because the day I met him in the street the snowdrops were just breaking out in the L’Arche Kent garden. More to come from Eddie, but enjoy this one first!
One of the great joys of living in the same house for twenty-five years was growing a garden and, at this time of year in particular, I would be revelling in the signs of new life.
The snowdrops are usually the first ones to peep out from the apparently barren ground. I had them arranged in clumps around the trunk of a gnarled old apple tree near the shed at the bottom of the garden. I had made this whole secluded area into a feast of spring colour. After the snowdrops, the crocuses appear, as if from nowhere, out of the lawn. At one side a strip of yellow crocuses, on another side purple ones. A bit later on, in another bit of that lawn, there will emerge dwarf daffodils, and by the trunk of a different apple tree will be a host of brightly coloured anemones. These include some ‘St Brigid’s’ amemones that I was given as a gift. Then, along the fence, that great harbinger of Spring, the forsythia, will burst forth in its yellow brilliance.
Finally, the tall red tulips arrive to complete the incredible show. Meanwhile, the buds will appear on those apple trees and on the other trees and bushes and, bit by bit, break into leaf. And they are followed in turn by the rose bushes and the clematises, which had looked lifeless over the winter.
In the Christian faith, death and new life are closely tied together. And there’s a line in the bible, spoken by Jesus, that is challenging yet surely has an element of truth, especially when we look at our gardens: ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies it bears much fruit.’ In the garden, and so too in our own lives, sometimes things need to die before new life can emerge. In the winter, after the leaves have fallen and withered and everything in the garden looks completely bare, it’s hard to believe that new life could come. But come it does. Those snowdrops are out again, this annual miracle is underway and I’m looking forward to another great show!
And on this theme I’ll finish with a few words from an Australian poet Michael Leunig, some of whose prayer poems have, I know, come from places of deep darkness in his own life:
Dear God, we celebrate Spring’s returning and the rejuvenation of the natural world. Let us be moved by this vast and gentle insistence that goodness shall return, that warmth and life shall succeed, and help us to understand our place within this miracle. Let us see that as a bird now builds its nest, bravely, with bits and pieces, so we must build human faith. It is our simple duty; it is the highest art; it is our natural and vital role within the miracle of spring; the creation of faith.
This month saw the first celebrations of fifty years of the L’Arche Kent community where people with and without learning disabilities live and work, pray, play and celebrate together. It is appropriate that this anniversary should fall in Christian Unity Week, as the community was ecumenical from the very beginning, and has welcomed people from Jewish, Muslim and secular backgrounds who sign up to the values L’Arche proclaims and lives out. Our first date was a zoom call uniting past and present members across Britain, Europe and Canada. It was good to see old friends looking well and happy.
Then we gathered in Canterbury Cathedral to mark those 5 decades of growth and development, with members from each decade bringing symbols of the gifts the community received or nurtured in their time. The challenges of the pandemic period were noted. Core members were not allowed out, assistants had to comply with rules for staff of care homes, wearing masks on duty and not allowed to eat with core members.
This second photograph shows the congregation waving their flags in response to John Casson, the National Leader, who called for a ‘Joyful Rebellion’. Joyful because we have joy in our hearts as friends and community members, our Rebellion being against a system and mindset which treats people with learning disabilities as second-class citizens and a burden on society.
That joyful rebellion will remain part of L’Arche all through this year and into the future, whatever that may hold. Find out more by following the links below.
Christmas cribs might start life as commercially produced figures, but your crib can be your own creation. Families in some European countries add extra figures to their cribs, and so do we! I expect that by the time you read this our family crib will be on the windowsill for the passers-by to see and reflect.
In the big picture the wise men are completing their pilgrimage during an Epiphany evening for a group of us in L’Arche Kent. Here Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar have found their way to the manger, the stable and star borrowed from a Christmas card. The smaller pictures show encounters they had on the way to Bethlehem.
We have a few extra guests who certainly do not appear in Matthew or Luke. Here is one of them, Oskar, named after the family cat who showed up one Christmas after being lost for years. This little resin figure was lost for probably 20 years. He was being played with in the garden, then overlooked and forgotten. Black against the dark soil, he only turned up when I was weeding and recognised him.
God won’t have forgotten us, even if we’ve buried ourselves where we cannot see him. Let’s pray that his light will shine upon us this Christmas and that we will bravely follow his star.
Let us remember too, the L’Arche community in Bethlehem, who have lost their income from hospitality and tourism, and for all the people of the Holy Land at this terrible time.
Pope Francis embraces a child as he meets the disabled during his general audience in Paul VI hall at the Vatican Jan. 13 2016 (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
For persons with disabilities
We pray that people living with disabilities
may be at the centre of attention in society,
and that institutions may offer inclusive programmes
which value their active participation.
'Does he take sugar?' was the title of a BBC Radio series on living with disability. Even the most benevolent among us can be flat-footed, as when asking a companion whether a disabled person takes sugar in his coffee, when he could answer very well for himself, by gesture if not verbally.
Pope Francis takes the opposite view. Of course there is his own limited mobility for all to see, since he doesn't retire to the back of the Vatican, out of sight. He goes about the business of being pope undaunted, thanks to those around him. So do many people with disabilities too, and much has changed for the better since the International Year of Disabled People in 1981.
People who once would have been put away at birth are included in society but by no means all, everywhere, and when disability is counted as a reason to abort a foetus, babies, children and adults with disabilities are problems, not quite full citizens.
Let us add to Pope Francis's prayer, 'May all of us see people with disabilities as part of the bigger picture, part of God's plan.'
October 11, 2023Letter from Sylvain Brabant (Interim CEO) to the Federation
Dear friends and members of L’Arche around the world,
We know that many of you are concerned about the war situation and crisis unleashed in Israel and the Palestinian territory in Gaza. During this time of crisis in the Middle East, we are monitoring the situation, remaining in close contact with L’Arche Bethlehem and joining them in our thoughts and prayers.
Saher, the community communications officer, told us about the situation:
“To be brief, the situation and the fighting between Gaza and Israel weigh directly on us. As you probably know, we rely on tourism and the sale of our wool felt decorations to survive. Since yesterday we have been receiving cancellations from tour operators because tourists cannot reach Bethlehem. Today the hotel is empty and closed. Additionally, there remains a big question mark as to whether or not we will be able to participate in Christmas bazaars to sell our products.
Additionally, our members with disabilities’ attendance has also been affected by the situation and the majority of their parents are concerned about sending them into the community.
Please keep us in your prayers! »
The L’Arche community in Palestine is located in Bethlehem, which is in the West Bank and approximately 115 km from the Gaza Strip. Bethlehem was therefore not directly affected by the violence and members of the community are safe for the moment. However, the situation remains unpredictable. There are barriers everywhere, the roads between towns are blocked; no one can leave the territory. The internet connection remains unstable.
Our international envoy who accompanies L’Arche in Bethlehem, Souzy, is in daily contact with them. “Faced with the current situation, the Ma’an Lil Hayat community lives day by day. The current concern is about income for future months, due to the closure of the community-run hotel and the very minimal possibility of participating in Christmas bazaars or shipping craft products for outside. As a safety measure and to continue the activities of the workshop, which provides a workplace for 45 people living with disabilities, the community preferred to ask parents to provide transportation, because the roads are not always open and drivers are no longer available. »
The United Nations has recognized that people with disabilities are more affected than others in times of war and natural disasters. As a Federation of communities, many of which are located in unstable regions of the world, L’Arche does everything possible to support its most deprived members. Let me reiterate that the current situation reminds us that in times of crisis, people with disabilities must not be left behind in emergency responses and support.
I invite all communities in the Federation to remain in solidarity with the Bethlehem Community, Ma’an Lil Hayat – Together for Life – and to pray for those who live in fear, violence and distress every day.
October 11, 2023 Letter from Sylvain Brabant (Interim CEO) to the Federation
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