L'Arche GWDC

August 7, 2015

Last week, a group of Muslim scholars from Morocco joined us for supper and for a Muslim-Christian dialogue referencing the experience of a shared meal in L’Arche. One scholar noted the “universal language of love and pain.” Another spoke of God’s love and mercy and told about an Islamic teaching comparing God’s mercy to the love of a nursing mother who would never abandon her child. The teaching says God’s faithful love is only one of God’s mercies and that 99 more will be revealed in Paradise. Several scholars noted the mutual love evident in relationships between L’Arche members with and without intellectual disabilities. One then suggested that the real disability might lie in the failure to recognize that people commonly labeled as “disabled” are in fact fundamentally “sound.” Finally, a scholar wept as she spoke of a cousin with disabilities who was mistreated, who died at age 23 because of the mistreatment, and who would have lived much longer if the cousin had been in a L’Arche home, living in the love she witnessed last night during supper.