by Katie Guertin-Anderson, Spiritual Life Director
Eleven months, 10 team members, 4 drafts, 8 reflection circles, and too many meetings and emails to count; passion, dedication, commitment, creativity, tension, curiosity, listening, joy… this is what it takes to create a new mandate at L’Arche Tahoma Hope.
And we’ve done it!
Our 2020-2025 mandate is a document that holds the voices, hopes and dreams of our many members at LTH, and it is something of which we can be proud.
The mandate is organized into three sections, each describing areas in which we want to learn and grow as a community over the next five years: Growing Deeper, Growing Wider, and Growing Stronger. (See our website for the full text, or ask us to send you a copy.) In a recent small group discussion to introduce the mandate to the community, I felt a lot of energy and excitement in the group to prioritize our work in the “growing deeper” area. This section calls our community to engage in some pretty challenging work, such as: making sure our aging community members have all the supports they need to continue thriving in L’Arche; improving communication in all aspects of community so that we can build trust, increase transparency, and foster unity; creating meaningful opportunities for formation, spiritual nourishment, and belonging for all community members; and, prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion work individually and organizationally in order to be a more welcoming, safe and just community for all.
The members of my group also wondered: How will we do the great work this mandate calls us to during a pandemic – when times already feel hard, challenging, uncertain, and scarce?
The conversation about the mandate made me think of something that Ricky Durham often says. Ricky has been a faithful attendee (along with the whole Hopespring crew!) at the Sacred Space Zoom gatherings that I’ve been facilitating twice a week since March. These brief moments together have been one of the consistent bright spots in my days over the past many, long months. During every gathering, we have a time to share prayer requests, celebrations and/or concerns. Every time, I hear Ricky say some version of this statement to me and to everyone present:
“I’ll keep praying for you, because I love you, and whatever we do together, we can do.”
Now, most of us have heard Ricky say this before, but it’s never been more poignant to me than right now. Most recently when I heard Ricky say this, I thought: “Wow, Ricky gets it in a way most of us never do.” He’s right, of course, and he is always finding opportunities to remind all of us at L’Arche Tahoma Hope about what it really takes to be a L’Arche community. His words remind us about what we need and who we can depend on through tough times. Tough times like trying to write and adopt and begin and carry out the vital work of LTH’s mandate.
I’ll keep praying for you, because I love you, and whatever we do together, we can do. I needed to hear this, and maybe you do, too. What this mandate calls forth from each of us is no small, simple thing. It will require us to be bold, to take risks, to ask for help, to rely on one another, to pray for and with one another, and to love each other, especially through the hard times.
