L’ARCHE WAS AT GREENBELT 2008
What’s Greenbelt?
It’s a Christian arts festival attended by around 18,000 people – most of them young.
Where was it?
Greenbelt is annually held in Cheltenham, West of England in the beautiful Malvern Hills.
What happened?
Mike, a L'Arche Bognor member, excelled at telling people about L'Arche from our stand in the G-Source. This is a sort of market place where all sorts of organisations can have a stand to advertise themselves. Ours was in a great position right opposite the Fair Trade café. Everyone – all 53 of us – helped in turn on the stand. Lots of people made an origami L'Arche boat and we had a string of them above the stand. A lot of people were interested in becoming Assistants. Some wanted to know about coming to live in L'Arche as a core member, and others wanted to know about Faith & Light.
L'Arche gave two Lunchtime Liturgies. Brian's Story on Saturday told his story. He was a founder member of the L'Arche Community in Lambeth and a regular at Greenbelt, who died in October 2007. The Community shared their story of love, pain and reconciliation through songs, words and pictures, 'From Darkness To Light' told of the pain and transformation of the raising of Lazarus. Through mime, song, action and listening we went from sorrow to partying. Every Community had brought biscuits to share and Martin, a L'Arche Ipswich member, was the star as Lazarus.
As usual L'Arche ran 'The Ark', the restroom where anyone with disabilities could come just to get some quiet when the excitement of all the events got too much. It was also appreciated by parents of young children!
Our orange tee-shirts were very evident as people prepared for the big Communion service on Sunday afternoon. Everything else stops while this is happening and the processions of people coming from all over the site are wonderful to see. We were handing out service sheets as they approached. Even Greenbelt can't accommodate 10,000 people all in one place so the service is videoed to an additional smaller arena. Here Rachael and Richard, L'Arch Lambeth members, took up the elements before we all shared. You couldn't miss them following a man dressed in orange on very tall stilts!