Page 8 - C.A.L.L. #45 - Summer 2019

These communities can vary in form and size and may comprise one or several households

where people with and without disabilities (the latter are known as “assistants”) share their
lives.

“Our community life is beautiful and intense, a source of life for everyone,” says Vanier - who
has won a host of awards for his work including the French Legion of Honour, Companion of
the Order of Canada and the 2015 Templeton Prize - in comments released with the film.

“People with a disability
experience a real
transformation and discover
confidence in themselves;
they discover their capacity
to make choices, and also find

a certain liberty and, above
all, their dignity as human
beings.”

Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche communities Glass, who had been raised as
a Catholic but became
disillusioned with the institutional church as a young person, first visited the Trosly-
Breuil community in 1974 while travelling the world and was deeply impacted by Vanier and
what she found there. “I was a young person who’d been at university in the late 60s in the
foment of the expressive revolution…and we were going to change the world. And at L’Arche
I was confronted with another way of changing the world, really,” she says.

“I was confronted with something that challenged the rhetoric of that political movement of
the Sixties… because if you’re really going to change the world and create a world where
everyone belongs, then you have to be prepared to align yourself with people who don’t
belong, people who are put on the margins. And to

live with them, to share life with them in
communal households, is really to put yourself in
the position where your vulnerability will be
exposed, your powerlessness will become evident
and you will be changed by the encounter. “

Glass describes it as a "radical way to live the
Gospel".

"[I]t felt so authentic to me," she says of her
experience at Trosly-Breuil. Eileen Glass

Glass went on to spend two years living in another
L’Arche community – this one in Winnipeg in Canada before she returned to Australia where
she was involved in establishing the country’s first L'Arche community in the Canberra area
in 1978.

There are now five established L’Arche communities in Australia – in Brisbane, Sydney,
Canberra, Melbourne and Hobart - and four communities in development as well as a “seed
group” in Alice Springs.