‘If you share your life with the poor, they will change you’

I first met Jean when I was a young priest getting to know the L’Arche community in Canterbury, L’Arche’s first in the UK. Jean invited me to join him in leading retreats for hundreds of Assistants, young adults who had come from all over the world to share their lives with people who had an intellectual disability. Listening to them opened my eyes to a profound truth, so often expressed by Jean himself: if you share your life with the poor, they will change you.

Jean discovered in people with an intellectual disability nothing less than “a path towards God”. He grew used to people thinking those with an intellectual disability “are poor little things we need to take care of”. He had discovered them to be, in fact, nothing less than “messengers from God who bring us closer to Jesus”.