"Although L'Arche filled many of my needs for friends, support, community, security, love, affirmation, and a family, I continued to struggle with the heaviest burden: intimacy. Even writing about it scares me. As was probably true of most teens in the '60s, Simon and Garfunkel's 'I Am a Rock' was my theme song. Maybe it still is. 'I have my walls and my poetry to protect me. . . .' I let only a few trusted people into my walled garden. Perhaps it's why being with core members is easy — they don't put demands on their love. Attachments with them are usually not so deep nor so messy as with other people. But they are real attachments.
"On my worst days, my soul longs for spiritual connections and the loneliness feels like a boulder I am carrying all the way to the top of Mount Everest. I can be honest and open; I will tell the truth I see; I'm unpretentious with core members; and that all does spark some intimacy. But it's not enough. And why not? Because there are limits to intimacy with core members. For one thing, it's unethical and illegal (it would be considered adult dependent abuse) to form anything but friendships with them, and for another, I simply need a peer to be one with. But perhaps the gift of this emptiness is that it stretches my soul and pulls my heart apart to make room for God's grace.
"We come to L'Arche with cracks and wounds. We come to L'Arche for an hour or a lifetime, for a reason that perhaps may be buried with us at death. Do we arrive on the ark to serve? Definitely. I think we also come to grow and to be healed. We'll all climb a mountain or two here.
"I've discovered that if I have God as my Sherpa, my guide, I will live."
