Reckless Caring

The news we had all been waiting for, nay, hoping for, finally came last night at the L'Arche Community meeting at their house in Didsbury. After months of building, preparing, praying, joys and disappointments,fundraising, liaising with social services and rallying support: community leader Kevin Coogan announced that the first core members for the Manchester house would finally be arriving at the house in late April!

Naturally, the student volunteers representing SVP (as well as Fr William, our spiritual director) were delighted to hear this news. It came at the tail end of a community meeting that had centred around testimonies of residents and support workers visiting from the Preston and Liverpool L'Arche houses. Core members had the opportunity to voice their opinions and experiences of day-to-day life within a L'Arche community, giving a great insight into the workings and variations to be found within each individual branch community of the international organisation. Listening to the stories of the  personal struggles and hurdles that these communities overcame in the process of getting established was clearly something that the Manchester group could identify with, and served as encouragement to keep striving towards the goal in sight.

With setbacks varying from burglaries of the house to social services delaying funding of residents; the journey has not been an easy one for L'Arche Manchester, and there are inevitably going to be challenges for the future too. Does that ever discourage them from being optimistic about the work that they do? Not by the looks of things! Kevin is due to give a talk at the upcoming 'Seeds of Liberation' Student Christian Conference at St Peter's Chaplaincy on 2nd March; the name of his talk: Life at Close Range: Spontaneous and Reckless Caring. L'Arche support workers and volunteers are a witness of truly Christian compassion and untiring hope -it is this passion which enables them to care recklessly for the people entrusted to them.

May we at SVP all have a share in this passionate and 'reckless caring' for those we encounter in our outreach.

For more information on the Seeds of Liberation Conference, please visit www.movement.org.uk/seedsofliberation

For details about L'Arche, visit L'Arche Manchester