Theology, Disability, and Spiritual Transformation: Learning from the Communities of L'Arche (review)

In an earlier issue of Spiritus I concluded a review of an edited collection of Jean Vanier's writings by saying that what was still needed is a comprehensive systematic treatment, which integrates all the various sources, influences and writings into a thorough presentation of Vanier's thought. While Michael Hryniuk does not set out to provide such a treatment of Vanier's vision by focusing on his life and writings, he has managed to provide the most comprehensive and systematic presentation of the spirituality of L'Arche to date. This he does through a study of the spiritual transformation in which the assistants, the "normal" members of the community, encounter those who are developmentally disabled, called the "core" members of L'Arche.

Hryniuk situates his work within the field of spirituality studies, alert to its distinctive subject and methods of inquiry. His aim is to tease out the dynamics of the experience of conversion, or spiritual transformation, as articulated in the interviews he conducts with various assistants in L'Arche and expressed in the writings of Jean Vanier, Henri Nouwen, and a few others. Hryniuk's work serves as model for the interdisciplinary enterprise of spirituality studies. His hermeneutical repertoire includes insights from various currents in psychological investigation, philosophy, Christology, and Trinitarian theology. Of singular importance in Hryniuk's approach to spiritual transformation is the attention he gives to shame and its healing, informed by the work of Sylvan Tomkins and Gershen Kaufman. He charts the spiritual transformation in L'Arche along the lines of three awakenings.

First, the assistant comes to the community of L'Arche with expectations of giving or doing something to help the core members. Often she has finished studies, earned an advanced degree, has been successful in beginning a career. To this must be added the assistant's sense of self, for good or ill, with all the layers of development through the stages of youth, adolescence, young adulthood and, in some cases, adulthood. In other words, the assistant has a sense of self, however well or poorly developed. In L'Arche, there is an awakening or moment when the encounter with the developmentally disabled, the core member, calls into question the reliability or authenticity of all that the assistant is, has, and does. The encounter with the developmentally disabled person who, by common or popular measures is nothing and has nothing, opens the assistant to capacities for loving and being loved at levels much deeper than the intellect or the ability to achieve, accomplish, or produce. In this encounter there is a sort of stripping of the self to the level of the heart, that level at which the developmentally disabled lives quite conspicuously, precisely because he or she has little or nothing at the level of intellect or accomplishment.

The second awakening in this spiritual transformation is the most excruciating. Here shame as the primordial experience of being exposed and eliciting displeasure, disapproval and rejection, stands forth. The assistant is challenged to face the pain of infancy and childhood, the scars brought on by the wounds inflicted in the source relationships of his or her life. Without the layers of protective shielding she has built over the course of a lifetime that have now been shed in the naked encounter with the core member, she must reckon with an anguish brought to surface by the exposure of her own wounds.

The third moment or awakening is that of a radical self-acceptance because one comes to know oneself as loved and accepted for who one is in all vulnerability. This love and acceptance comes in and through the developmentally disabled, who cares not a whit for the intelligence and accomplishments of the assistant, but who reaches out in love to be loved from the heart, to the heart. Thus, at the level of the heart, persons who are vastly unequal in terms of intelligence, achievement, physical strength or...