Theology, Disability, and Spiritual Transformation: Learning from ...

The focus on spiritual experience in this study of L’Arche is inclusive of all dimensions of human life which actualize or realize this capacity to integrate one's relations with self, others, and world in the light of a transcendent horizon of meaning and value. This functional definition obviously encompasses both religious and nonreligious experiences and practices of life integration through self-transcendence, depending on the nature of the ultimate values perceived and around which one organizes oneself and one's life as an existential project. Life integration through self-transcendence takes place not only through mystical experience and religious commitment but through the commitments to more mundane but equally sacred values such as family, occupation, community, nation, and other causes that actualize the human capacity for self-transcendence. This functional dimension of spirituality as life-integrating is a common theme in the experience of the members of L’Arche, who have all made a conscious decision to live in an intentional community that challenges them daily to reintegrate their lives in relation to sacred values that are profoundly countercultural.

The focus of this study is a lived experience of Christian spirituality. What functional difference does this make? When applied to theistic religious traditions such as Judaism and Christianity, the study of spirituality is ordinarily informed by theological assumptions about the ontological character of the sacred as not only psychologically integrative but an actual power belonging to a divine order of existence that transcends the visible human world and has effects upon it.¹¹ And if the ultimate concern or center of value and power is understood in Christian Trinitarian terms, then the study of Christian spirituality is concerned functionally with the personal experience of consciously integrating one's life in terms of responsive relatedness to God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit within the life of the Church as a community of faith. The spiritual experience of most L’Arche assistants in this study is framed in terms of relationship to God in Christ. It bears on their sense of ultimate meaning, is life-integrating in terms of ultimate values, and is lived in relation to a felt sense of ultimate power framed in the theological categories of the Christian faith.