Swift stride, penetrating gaze, immediate warmth—Stephan Posner welcomes us into the hushed offices of L'Arche in Paris, on the first floor of a residence in the fifteenth arrondissement.
"Want to hear how I got here? I arrived at L'Arche thirty years ago, more or less by accident," he likes to say—this man who has directed the L'Arche federation in France since 2011, overseeing thirty-one communities and twelve hundred residents. At twenty, a conscientious objector, he completed a placement at L'Arche in Lanzo di Vasto, a rural community inspired by Gandhi and nonviolence. When a member saw his reluctance to work with wood and urged him toward the other L'Arche—Jean Vanier's—he went. The young man landed in Trosly-Breuil, then joined the Paris community. "I had no knowledge of people with disabilities, nor of Christian communities," recalls this committed Jew.
"I truly had no idea. For two and a half years living full-time in the community, he confesses to having lived "an intense experience of relationship" and discovered "a thread worth pulling." In contact with people with disabilities, I'm not sure if I was struck more by the differences or the similarities. Maybe by a rather rare mix of both!" This sharp-minded man, who deploys paradox with ease, reflects. "I found joy where I never would have expected it!" After this experience, he returned to the family business, started his own family—he has four adult children—and has remained a friend of the community ever since.
Witnesses to an Experience
Does this former conscientious objector see L'Arche as a site of social protest? "L'Arche is subversive because it questions our society's fixation on maximum efficiency. We're not activists for a cause; we're witnesses to an experience. Our invitation is simple: 'Come and see.' Our only concern is that handicapped people be recognized as whole persons and as citizens—that we acknowledge they are not first and foremost a burden, but that they contribute to the life of the nation." On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary, the director expresses his hope that public authorities—even the French President—will recognize the contribution disabled people make to human fraternity. The future of L'Arche, which is the same age as Stephan himself, he writes in terms of fidelity to its identity, but also to its fragility and uncertainty, especially regarding funding. An uncertainty he wants to embrace as a "motor" pushing forward: "You have to stay alert to the call—to where people cry out, to where you are summoned, convoked." On his office wall hangs a Chagall poster. Born in Paris to an English father and a Jewish mother whose parents fled Germany for France in 1933, Stephan respects the boldness of those who placed him at the head of the federation. He has made his singularity a strength and hopes he has brought to L'Arche an experience of communion across the diversity of identities. "I have made friends among some Christian brothers. I've discovered the Christian reading of what we live at L'Arche—the mystery of life and resurrection—a reading that strikes me because it touches a universal theme and is not foreign to Jewish culture," he explains. For someone who studies Hebrew Scripture every day, L'Arche became rather an opportunity to deepen his own identity: "L'Arche shakes me on extreme questions, and this pushes me to dig into the resources of my religious tradition." While he believes L'Arche capable of adapting to different cultures, he remains faithful to the distinctly Christian inspiration of the communities: "If we lose this past, we seriously mortgage our future!" One might call it a taste for paradox. Or perhaps, for this reader of Emmanuel Lévinas, a demand for freedom within the quiet of truth. And he quotes Christian de Chergé, the late prior of Tibhirine: "The secret joy of the Spirit will always be to bring communion, to seek out likenesses, playing with differences." Cyril Douillet, 2014From Ombres et Lumière no. 198
