Serena points out a mailbox to me. I walk closer. On the nameplate it reads "J. Vanier." I should have expected it—even founders have homes, after all—yet I'm taken aback all the same. So it's true. So we have actually arrived at the Ark of Trosly, where Jean lives and where, most of all, he has been able to bring everything into being.
This is how our days at the Ark begin: a brief, singular kind of vacation filled with many encounters. With Jean. With countless figures from the Ark's past and present. With the young people who live here, with friends, with other guests, with civil service volunteers from countries all over the world. Yet there was also space for silence. A profound silence, different from what we know: the kind of silence untouched by noise, news, internet, and newspapers—something so hard to find and keep in our daily lives. And how difficult it is, now that we've left, to describe the Ark of Trosly. It's truly an undertaking to capture everything that reveals itself, everything capable of absorbing us, of tugging at us and reminding us that we can choose to be authentically human.
L'Arche, Val Fleury, Les Rameaux, l'Ermitage, la Nacelle, la Vigne, la Forestière—these are just some of the names of the many homes, the many hearths that make up the Ark, scattered across the small village of Trosly-Breuil in Picardy. During the days we stayed at the Ferme, the guest house, we were invited to lunch and dinner at a different hearth each time. We discovered that the hearths have absolutely nothing in common with one another. Each house has its own history—L'Arche is the oldest, where Jean went to live with Philippe and Raphaël in 1964; l'Ermitage, the largest, was once the village's old psychiatric hospital. Each has its own members, more or fewer in number. Each has its own faces, its own character, its own furniture (nothing discarded), its own menus—shaped by the skills of those who cook, by their roots, by their age. It was exactly like going to eat with a different family from the village each time. Families bound together only by the love that holds their members, by the journey they have walked and still have to walk, by being a community of life.
Not far from Jean's new home—he moved only a few weeks ago—are the various workshops where the young people work each day. Some take on contract jobs; others produce their own crafts. It's not just those who live here permanently: every day, many workers from elsewhere come to the workshops at Trosly. A cafeteria was created for them. The handmade goods can be bought at the "artisanat d'art" shop, which carries pieces—especially ceramics—that would make even the most exclusive boutique envious. Of course, not all the young people at the Ark have disabilities compatible with workshop labor. For them, there are special structures that welcome them every day for all kinds of activities: horseback riding, swimming, music therapy, massage work. Because everyone—truly everyone, regardless of the type or degree of disability—must leave their home on weekdays and spend the day elsewhere.
The Church near the guest house is a place unto itself. Simple, made of stone and light wood. It's a former stable, with a small decorated window from Taizé. Through a door near what was once the manger, you enter a garden where Father Thomas is buried. At the weekday Mass on the morning we arrived, the singing was accompanied by guitar and violin.
The smiles. The colors of the hearths. The joy. The energetic calm of the young seminarian. The welcome. Christine's contagious energy. The sorrow too. Odile's afternoon snack. Agnesca's salad. The "discovery" that in Rome (besides the Pope) there are "wonderful suitcases." Ivò's kindness. And yet—none of this is what truly moved me in those days at Trosly. Perhaps the peacefulness of Jean Vanier? The long conversations with him? No, not even that. Was it love, then? A sense of friendship or community?
No. What truly struck me about the Ark of Trosly—what silently showed me that it-is-possible-after-all, what gave me an enormous hope by whispering that the message could be different—was intelligence. The intelligence of the life project itself.
The intelligence that seasoned the love, the friendship, and the community, making the Ark what it is.
Giulia Galeotti, 2012