Dear Jean,
At the end of my Jesuit formation, I had the gift of living for nearly a year in the L'Arche community. At Trosly, I heard you speak at gatherings reserved for Jesuits and during the Eucharist; I listened to you other times here in Italy too. Some of your words marked me deeply. I hope—I believe—they will mark me for life. I don't know if it was easy for you to make such a radical change, leaving the university to found L'Arche with Father Thomas. Yet we expect prophets to make difficult gestures—ones that are revealing, that disclose the excellence of God. Your decision was surely an adventure in charity, but also an interior adventure, spiritual and ecclesial.
You used to say, during my time at L'Arche, that poor people, especially those struggling with mental disability, reveal weaknesses we want to hide—weaknesses that modern society pressures us to conceal. The lives of poor people bear witness to a vitality that our world usually denies, because it disturbs us, and usually erases it from public view, rejecting it altogether. Yet at the same time, they teach us that reconciliation with ourselves is possible. They receive us as we are. They welcome in us what we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves. They are not, of course, "ideals" in every respect—trapped in their own suffering, often living poorly—but they propose inner adventures that reach into the deepest dimensions of our humanity.
I was touched by these teachings perhaps because one of my sisters struggled with serious health problems, and our relationship was not without consequence. My first ministry as a priest came during a "Faith and Light" pilgrimage to Lourdes. In any case, what I learned at Trosly and Ambleteuse has stayed with me and sustained me through the years that followed. I was sent to Rome to teach philosophy—a path quite different from yours, in a way. I teach the most abstract part of philosophy, the part that reflects on principles of unity, of relationship. These are principles I lived in my own body, often in pain, during that year at L'Arche.
I want to tell you something a student shared with me. Some years after taking my course, he came to see me and said that during my lectures he felt empathy stirring in him for what I was saying. He couldn't understand how a philosophy course—the most disembodied of all courses—could awaken such human feeling. Then by chance he learned that I was connected to "Faith and Light." At that time, I was quite involved in the movement. Then he understood why my complicated lectures had struck him so strangely: he had a twin sister with serious mental health difficulties. I must say his testimony filled me with joy. I hope my teaching always stirs such authentic, human responses—openness to our own limits, and joy that we are welcomed as we are, recognized by others, especially by people whom few bother to recognize at all.
Isn't this "authenticity" itself a sign of the Gospel? I thank God for his kindness. I ask to remain always in this truth revealed by the poorest and most wounded in our world. I thank God for those difficult months at Trosly and Ambleteuse, and for your words spoken there and here.
Paul Gilbert, 2010
===FINE===