Kathryn Spink in Jean Vanier and L'Arche - a Communion of Love17 records the development of L'Arche since its inception at Trosly-Breuil, just north of Paris, in 1964. The remarkable Jean Vanier invited three mentally handicapped people to leave the institution where they had been living and to make their home with him: 'Because Jesus wanted it'.18 The revolutionary concept was not based on educating but on living together and sharing a life of communion. There are now eighty-five L'Arche communities scattered over several continents. Back in the 1970s I helped secure planning permission for the Liverpool house and subsequently opened their workshops. It would be hard not to be moved by the young people who give up time from their lives to share with disabled people. But they would be the first to admit that the disabled bring their gifts to this communion and flush out the disabilities which lurk inside every one of us. Most of us would rather not admit to our own disabilities but prefer to hide behind a parade of masks. Whether it is L'Arche, the Leonard Cheshire Foundation, or the many religious organisations - like St Saviour's next door to where I live in Liverpool, where women have given their whole life to the service of other women, with disabilities - the spirit of active compassion shows that there are radical alternatives based on truly human values to the violence of eliminating disabled people. William Wilberforce summed up the need to speak and act in this way: 'Christianity calls her professors to a state of diligent watchfulness and active service'.
Endings: Dignity in Death
Increasingly, too, this active compassion will have to be extended to the dying among us. The AIDS pandemic is something which I have addressed in my contribution to Aids: Meeting the Community Challenge,19 but suffice it to say here that just as each of us may have personally to face a disabling disease we will all have to face death. The dignity which we provide the dying is another test of how far we have come in creating a truly human society. In Britain, Dame Cicely Saunders is the latest of an illustrious band of Englishwomen - Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, and Emily Pankhurst are others - who have left a permanent impression on the history of their times. Dame Cicely's first foundation for the care of the dying, St Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham, London, was the first of many similar units in the UK and beyond. The founder of the modern hospice movement said in 1960: 'Suffering is only intolerable when nobody cares and one continually sees that faith in God and his care is made infinitely easier by faith in someone who has shown kindness and sympathy.'20 The Bishop of Stepney summed up the aim of the hospice movement as 'ministering to the whole personality that those whom we serve may be able to lose their fear of death'. In understanding what motivates a Cicely Saunders, a Jean Vanier, or a Mother