At
home ...
with
respect, hope and love
by Ana
Watts
John and
Debbie are retired. He is 57 and spent 27 years with a small
manufacturing company. She is only 45 but left her bakery job for
health reasons.
Debbie
keeps busy with a bit of community volunteer work, knitting, word
puzzles, bowling, and a very active church and social agenda. John
enjoys bowling too, and is part of the same full church/social scene,
but his favourite pastime is music. He has an impressive collection of
vinyl albums –– rock, country, folk, blues –– from the 1950s, 60s and
early 70s that he plays on his jukebox stereo.
 I visited them one afternoon in January when the Beach
Boys’ Two Girls for Every Boy ignited spontaneous dancing in the
hallways –– Debbie really knows how to jive and John really had two
girls to twirl. There usually are at least two girls to dance with him
because John and Debbie don’t live alone. They are core members of the New Dawn L’Arche Community in Saint John and share
their West Side McKim House with Marilyn Moore and Gray Gillies, two
live-in assistants.
They live as friends, share their lives as well as
their home, their time as well as their talents so the meals get
prepared, the table gets set, the laundry gets done, the cookies get
made, even new musical instruments get learned. Debbie made her musical
debut at a huge Christmas party for family and friends.
They have
regular company as well as party guests. Community leader /executive
director/ United Church minister Dan Kirkegaard has an office in the
basement and spends a whole lot of time at McKim House, but officially
lives with his wife and four children in Quispamsis. This isn’t as bad
as it sounds, because his wife and children are deeply involved in
McKimm House as well.
Two
mornings a week a friendship circle meets in the Van Oorchot Room, also
in the basement, for devotions, exercises, chit-chat. Occasionally they
plan little trips.
McKimm
House residents bowl, visit family, go shopping, entertain friends,
pray, talk, watch TV. Everything and everyone stops for The Price Is
Right at 6 o’clock. There are fans of Danger Bay and Touched by an
Angel. There are fans of hockey and football. They work it out.
 “John and Debbie are very loving of each other,” says Gray,
an Anglican Church Army officer who loves the peaceful lifestyle she
lives at McKimm House. “I am constantly touched by them, I see the
heart of God in them.”
It doesn’t
take much time in the house to see that John and Debbie see Gray,
Marilyn, Dan and the many other New Dawn Community members in their
lives in the same affectionate light.
 L’Arche is French for ark, specifically Noah’s Ark, a
vessel of deliverance and salvation, a symbol for God’s covenant with
humanity, and a reminder that we’re all in the same boat. Canadian Jean
Vanier, son of late Governor General Georges Vanier, chose it to
describe the community he established when he welcomed two men with
developmental disabilities into his home in a village in France in
1964. He envisioned a home where faithful relationships are
nurtured, the unique value and vocation of each resident is realized.
He wanted to encourage people to live relationships in community as a
sign of hope and love. None of his goals left room for the
institutional isolation of people rejected by society.
Jean
Vanier was a Roman Catholic inspired by the Beatitudes. The first
L’Arche communities followed his Roman Catholic tradition, but today
there are more than 120 communities in several cultural and religious
traditions in 30 countries around the world. Some communities have as
many as eight houses and most run day programs and workshops. A few
operate spirituality or retreat centres.
The New
Dawn L’Arche community opened McKim House in 2005, but the New Dawn
community that supports it began in 1991 when an ecumenical faith
fellowship, many of them from Stone Church (a mission-minded Anglican
church in uptown Saint John), began to envision a L’Arche home in the
area. Although there was a time when those with a heart for the kind of
community Jean Vanier envisioned could simply open their doors and
welcome others as he did, that is no longer the case. L’Arche
affiliation is very carefully granted indeed and it took a lot of
planning, patience and hard work to achieve.
The New
Dawn Community could have opened a group home at any time over the past
15 years, but it chose to grow as a community while it worked toward
the L’Arche accreditation.
McKim
House was donated by the Saint John Roman Catholic archdiocese and
named in memory of George and Charlotte McKim (among the original Stone
Church visionaries), whose dedication played a key role in bringing
L'Arche to Saint John. The house is licensed for four core members and
three live-in assistants, the community would some day like to have its
own workshop.
According
to Dan, this is just the beginning of “a community where individuals
with disabilities are nurtured and valued for who they are and everyone
is transformed by the undertaking.”
If
you want to be part of such a community there is room for you and lots
you can do. Contact
L'Arche Saint John.
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