The following is a reflection on life in L'Arche Belfast by Emily, a live-in volunteer that left at the end of December.
But the first few weeks were quiet. I am generally a more introverted person, I was in a culture that was fairly foreign to me and I enjoy spending time reading and writing. Mostly, though what marked the real silence was the lack of perpetual buzzing and ringing from my mobile phone.
In Seattle, where I attended university and worked as a journalist, I became accustomed to my mobile’s alerts as a call to work. I often worked from home, the car, or on the run, waiting to hear back from people I wished to interview, checking facts on the go and checking in with other journalists at hours many people do not work. At times, I could come to dread voicemails, as these calls often interrupted time with friends, roommates and time I spent writing for myself. I loved being a journalist, but there are natural drawbacks.
When Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’ (my ringtone) did not mark a business call, I received constant texts from friends making jokes during class, inviting me to go get drinks or requesting a moment to talk.
It was thus fairly freeing, in one sense, to be so disconnected from my mobile when I was first in Belfast. I maintained a mobile phone almost entirely for emergency purposes and for texting a friend who was in Europe at the time. I kept in touch with others in Seattle and California (where I grew up) via email and Skype, but I appreciated that my life was a bit more silent than it used to be.
This act of disconnecting in the hope of re-connecting represents for me an important aspect of L’Arche. As friends of the L’Arche community know, life in L’Arche moves much more slowly than life outside of L’Arche. I’d like to think that in an ideal world, there can be more of a balance between the viewpoints held and lived out in L’Arche and in the outside community, but there is not always.
I went back to Seattle for a week in the midst of my time in Belfast and was shocked to see how much more quickly I used to live, how different the things were that I focused on—namely, my career, my time, what others thought of me.
Around that time, Scott told me that for many assistants, L’Arche can be a steady place where the volunteers who come and go, for relatively short times, and from far-reaching places, can find a deeper sense of self, community, strength and return with renewed energy to their previous life. Maria’s formations were often challenging for me, but they asked me to question: if I was not defined as a student, a journalist, a daughter, a girlfriend or a friend, who was I?
And oddly enough, without all those definitions, I think I settled on an answer.
I do not want the things that I learned in L’Arche, the memories I have and its way of being to be in complete conflict with the rest of my life. L’Arche frequently allowed and required that I find a balance between these two worlds. Working at the Allotment allowed me to have some more hands-on experience with philosophies of sustainability and deep ecology that I held dear before arriving in Belfast. Every time I told someone I met randomly in Belfast that I was from California, and yes chose to move to Belfast, and worked with people with learning disabilities, I experienced what it means to involve a L’Arche community in the local community. And living with Jill, Larry, May, Thomas and Matthew taught me to focus on the day that was before me, the present moment, in the company of friends. L’Arche taught me that living in a way that honors the importance of relationships is neither easy nor glamorous, but the returns of daily labor are worth the effort.
My previous writing instructors often told me to trust the process that they proposed for me—ways of getting into a poem or story, the process of re-drafting, the process of sharing with others.
L’Arche was also about trusting the process. And it paid off.
When Lucy asked me to write this reflection, it probably seemed natural to others that I would want to write it. I did, after all, often mention that I write frequently and in abundance. Journalistic habits dying hard, I set a word limit of 500 words, while instantly feeling as though 500 words, written only a month after I left L’Arche, would not suffice.
Silence did not seem as though it would suffice in this instance though. So here it is, four days before I head off to the Czech Republic, where I will stay for two weeks before 4 months of studying German and working in Germany on an organic farm.
To those at The Ember and The Ark, I think of you often and miss you. Hope all is well.
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