RETREATS IN L’ARCHE

I have just returned from retreat in France.  Every year I join a L’Arche team providing a “walking retreat” in the French Alps for L’Arche assistants in their first year in a community. One of the things that makes L’Arche more than just a good ‘service provider’ is the importance given to the spiritual life both of people with learning disabilities and assistants.  In October L’Arche UK are running what we call a Friendship Retreat for people with and without learning disabilities.  Adapting the traditional retreat model this retreat is done in pairs where a person with learning disabilities and someone who knows them well do the retreat together; accompanying each other through the retreat.  Developing their relationship with each other and exploring their individual spirituality and relationship with God at the same time.  So often people with learning disabilities are not deemed capable of this kind of reflection or are seen as not having spiritual needs at all.  It is true that we do often approach spirituality as a kind of intellectual exercise like a kind of Religious Cognitive Behavioural Therapy!  But of course there is nothing to say it has to be approached this way and in the Friendship Retreat we explore different ways of thinking, feeling and expressing what we feel and think about our relationship with God and with each other.

The walking retreat is also another way of trying to think/feel/experience a way into reflecting on our own spiritual journey.  Each day we have a talk in the morning and after this we set off on a long walk into the mountains.  We are organised into small groups of about 6 or 8 and we spend a lot of time on the walks in these small groups.  Sometimes talking, sometimes walking in companionable silence.  We take a picnic with us and at lunchtime we stop and eat together and have a time of sharing in our small group.  We can talk about what we have been thinking about and feeling on our walk up the mountain and what the talk in the morning meant to each one of us.  Walking in the mountains is a great medium for exploring who we are.  Your body gets well and truly exercised (we walk for about 4 hours all together each day); you do an awful lot of thinking when you get into a nice rhythm of plodding along; all your senses seem to be stimulated by the smells, colours, sounds, tastes and feel of a mountainside in late Spring; and above all it’s good to talk when you walk.  When two people are walking together you are experiencing so many of the same things from the feel and smell of the alpine flowers to the pain and discomfort of the latest incline – and on retreat where you have also both heard the same talk that morning it gives a complete framework to share what you have in common and what you are thinking, feeling, living differently from each other.  It’s a joy and as a retreat experience it works!