I had dill on my hands when Robbie (the Boatman) told me to
write this down. When I lived and worked at L'Arche, a house for five
adults with intellectual disabilities, me and the other people who worked there
were always planning for the future. How long are you staying here?
What are you going to do next? Where are you going to go? What are
your dreams, your goals?
Each of us was looking for our "Life's Purpose."
Meanwhile, we were doing this pretty cool thing. Our
days were full, washing floors, changing diapers, cooking for ten mouths or
more, getting the people with disabilities ready for their days at work.
We went to community events, church, music festivals. Sometimes after
bedtime we'd take Isabelle to a bar for margueritas. Isabelle uses a
wheelchair, and can't walk, talk, or eat by herself. But she loves music,
and she loves people, so we took her out as much as we could.
The first few months at L'Arche were like a honeymoon.
I fell in love with the core members, the L'Arche term for people with
disabilities. I felt so useful, filling Isabelle's plastic feeding bag
with Peptamen, her meal replacement formula, giving baths, going for walks by
the river.
Isabelle, and all the other folks I lived with at L'Arche became
my family. Every day, I continued to love them, but my sense of
usefulness and life purpose wore off rapidly. After about six months, at
least once a week, I desperately wanted to leave.
I hated the cooking, the cleaning, the going to
church. The team meetings were long and tedious. All the other
assistants were also tired and stressed out too and so inevitably, there were
nauseating conflicts. I never had any time to myself. I forgot how to
read. It seemed like I'd regressed intellectually and that all I cared
about was food, sleep, eating and sex. Though I exercised consistently,
my yoga practice was erratic, like my moods and my energy levels. My
eating disorder was tamed to a functional level, but most days after every meal
and snack, I still puked in my mouth and reswallowed, over and over again,
until whatever I was eating became so acidic that the rumination session would
have to end.
I stayed because I loved the people. I stayed because
I felt guilty abandoning them. So many assistants came and went and these
core members would have to welcome them into their home and adapt to yet
another person's personality and idiosyncracies and cooking. Then the
assistant would leave and they'd begin this process once again.
Many assistants came to L'Arche, and stayed because of their
faith. They saw Jesus in the people with disabilities, whose hearts were
so open, so healing. I had already worked a great deal with people with
disabilities, and I had also seen their beauty. That said, it was never
clear to me that what I was seeing in them was Jesus.
I came to L'Arche two years into my university career at
McGill. I was studying English Literature and Religion, in the hopes of
becoming a writer and finding God. Neither endeavour was going very well.
Every essay and assignment seemed like an enormous catastrophe and
tribulation. I spent night after caffeinated night pacing around my tiny
Plateau apartment, taking breaks to stare a computer screen that was either
completely blank or else full of unacceptably uneloquent paragraphs. My
average was something tragically mediocre like a B+. God was not being
very helpful.
One night in the midst of an uninspired literary essay about
William Blake's poem, The Chimney Sweep, I sat on my warped balcony and
watched men walk in and out of the Coloniale Bath House next store.
"Weep, weep, weep, weep," said the Chimney Sweep
in the poem.
I was crying too. This was not my life purpose.
I was going to quit. I needed to do something else. Anything else.
So I left one Life Purpose to try out another.
I'm not sure what was harder, the Blake essay, or L'Arche.
At least at L'Arche, I wasn`t alone, and I got to go to lots
of parties. Every June, at Isabelle's school for blind children, there
was a party. The students got up on stage to read poetry, or sing or
dance. If they were in wheelchairs, teachers helped them sing and dance
on the floor at the front of the stage.
I remember the first year I went to the party, the
principal made a speech. He said, "In life, it's easy to do
things. What's really hard, is to be a person."
So quickly and so often doing things becomes another
competition, another performance, another burden. Finding your life's
purpose becomes another achievement. And life is nothing but a
checklist. It`s really hard to be a person.
Hearing what Isabelle's principal said, I decided to stay at
L'Arche a second year. There were thousands of other things that I could
do, but nothing would help to be fully human more than living day to day with
people like Isabelle, whose greatest gifts are to know how to truly be
themselves.
Sometimes I say that I hit my humanitarian peak was at age
twenty. I couldn't stay at L'Arche forever.
For the last five months I was there, at the end of every
day I would draw a big X on my calendar. The day was finished.
There were 149 more.
149, 148, 147...
I was bored, I was tired of cooking, I hated church, there
was puke in my mouth. I was horny.
117, 116...
I am making it sound much more miserable than it was.
It wasn't all miserable; I just wanted it to be over.
66, 65, 64...
Weep, weep, weep, weep.
For my last fourteen days at L'Arche I went on a trip with
Isabelle, 8 hours north of Montreal to Amos Quebec. There was nothing to
do there but push Isabelle up and down the cracked sidewalks and take Isabelle
to the beach. We left her wheelchair at the edge of the beach and I carried her
over the sand to the water. I never felt so strong in my whole life.
In the water Isabelle would smile and laugh and look up with
her eyes. That meant yes.
When we got back from Amos, I filled in all the X's from
when we were away. There were only two days left on the calendar.
Then none.
Now it is 7:30 A.M five years later on a Wednesday
morning. I woke up without an alarm, after cuddling with the Boatman for
the better part of an hour. I have nowhere pressing to go, nothing
pressing to do. No one else's teeth to brush, no diaper to change.
There is time to ruminate over the best way to conclude this blog post.
After that there will be more time, to bend and twist my various spines for two
hours, then walk the dog leisurely, with no deadline These days I have
been thinking a lot about service, and whether or not my life has a Great
Purpose. So often I feel desperate to fill up my life so I won't have to
think about it anymore. People ask me what I'm doing in Halifax, how it's
going. To try and justify my existence, I give them a frantic list: this
and this and this and this. All this. Please tell me it's enough.
Perhaps it isn't enough. Maybe God wants me to be more
useful and productive, to accomplish a hundred million things before 7:30
A.M. Maybe God wants me to become an enormous success, with an astounding
and memorable life purpose. I`m not ruling these things out, but for now,
my path is uncertain and I must wait, unimpressed by my to-do list, unconvinced
by my day`s contributions.
I want to give to the world, people say. I say this
too. We want to make grandiose gestures and immeasurable
differences. But sometimes it`s more about us than the world.
I know I'll give to the world again. My life`s purpose
will be clear and concrete. I'll be so busy and inspired that the whole
world will disappear.
In the meantime, it might be a good day to call
Isabelle. She never asks me what I`m doing. No matter what I say,
she laughs and squeals. I'll hear her smiling and I'll know she`s looking
up with her eyes. Yes, she`s saying, to everything I`m doing, to
everything I am.
The End.
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