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A Pat of Butter |
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"Meals are sharing, so it's important that the food be shared too. Nowadays it's a tendency for everyone to have their own little pat of butter..."* (96). Jean Vanier founded L'Arche community, whose goal is to live community with handicapped men and women, to create bonds with them and thus to discover their prophetic call. To Vanier, even a little pat of butter or individual packets of salt and pepper signify a type of individualistic isolation or insulation from one another.
While we all experience loneliness as a fundamental force of the human condition, pathological isolation arises from dire shame or guilt or recoiling into a situation we think we can't get out of. Jesus reached out to free those caught in isolation with expressions of love, healing, and forgiveness, thus bringing them back to community.
L'Arche was founded on pain. There, many of the people with mental handicaps have been victims of much contempt and violence which is stored up within them. Jean Vanier bonded with them by listening deeply to even those who had no voice. "I had to listen to their heartbeat, understand their greatest needs, and discover what would help them find meaning in life and hope and trust in themselves. They led me to communion of the heart." (83)
In his letter of 1994, Vanier calls readers "to believe that each gesture has its weight in the balance of love and hate in the world." (167) Does our awareness today bring us to communion of the heart? - a pat of butter or creating bonds by listening to a heartbeat? --by Jan |
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*Jean Vanier, Essential Writings. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2010 |
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On the Outskirts of Each Other - by Bill
In a short story by Deborah Galvan, the narrator describes a difficult time in her marriage with these haunting words, "That fall we lived precariously on the outskirts of each other."[1]
In a poem entitled "Remember," David Whyte[2] mourns the lost intimacies of brothers in childhood:
Once we were one
and now we are two
and the second has grown
and forgotten the first.
The ancient love
we felt a mere fable now,
a story across time,
a distant recognition
across the table,
an ache beneath
the glance and
the seemingly necessary,
ordinary request
to pass the salt.
We live most of our lives teetering somewhere between true intimacy and utter aloneness. We can never fully know another person, even those with whom we live most intimately. Too often, we do live precariously on the outskirts of each other.
But bridges can be built across the chasms of alienation. Songs of love can fill the empty silences. Broken hearts may never fully mend, but they can be held together by the tender hands of friends.
Lauren Winner writes of seeing an elderly woman receive the bread and wine of communion on behalf of her husband, who stands beside her but cannot partake because of a diseased stomach. "Perhaps, Winner comments, "this is the way I come to know such intimacy: as part of the body of Christ, this body that numbers among its cells and sinews an octogenarian husband and wife who are communion."[3]
[1] Deborah Galvan, "The Incredible Appearing Man," Best American Short Stories, 1996, pp. 126-150.
[2] David Whyte, "Remember," River Flow: New and Selected Poems, 2007, pp. 165-166.
[3] Lauren Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, as quoted by Katelyn Beaty, "Girl Meets Grace," Christianity Today, Jan. 2012, pp. 61-63. |
