A Unique Way of Learning Patience

Here are L'Arche, we have prayer each night with the core members. At our specific L'Arche community, Irenicon near Boston, we have four houses and each house has prayer at their own home with the assistants and core members in them.  I live at Assisi house with 4 core members, 2 live-in, 1 live-off assistant, and the founding member. At each home prayer is very unique, just like the core members and the people themselves who are praying, and yet the foundation is the same: we are all crying out to a God who loves us, adores us and is hearing our plea.

At Assisi house the nightly prayer routine is basically as follows: opening song from a CD, Chris picks a short verse from a children's book by Jean Vanier, Phil "reads" from it and says a prayer, Deb reads the prayer petitions and we all add our own petitions, then we gather in a circle around the candle and pray the Our Father. You may read this and say to yourself, wonderful, you pray, that's great. Why share every detail? Well, it is in one of those "details" where I have been learning a great deal of patience!! If we are truly open to the Lord and what He has to teach us, and if we truly surrender our WHOLE lives to Him, and we listen EVERY moment, then we can grow in ways we would never imagine. 

When it's time to say our petitions there is a core member who goes on and on for what can feel like 10 minutes naming every person he has ever known and people who are very close to him. He prays for situations that is going on in life at the time, things that happened over 10 years ago, etc. To make it even longer, he has slight alzeimer's so he forgets where he was and names things all over again. When I was first introduced to this "practice" at Assisi, some other assistants would just get up in the middle of his list and form the cirle for the Our Father and so I got up also and we began the prayer. I didn't think anything of it. But this past weekend it was just him, another core member and myself. We began prayer then the petitions and I had an urge inside to let him keep going as long as he needed. I listened and prayed with him in my heart. I heard things I never heard him say before and never knew he had in his mind. I never knew he actually cared for these things or people. This little down syndrome man I love so dearly who gets rushed so often ... if we just sit and listen long enough we get to hear the deepest part of his heart where he keeps the most sincere prayers.

St. Padre Pio once said, "Pray, hope and don't worry." I feel like our core members live this out so well, if we let them. Sometimes we push them too much. When we let them be at peace and pray and connect with the God who loves them soooo much, we are letting them do what they were created to do: be children of God.