My daughter Maggie, now nearly 30, has lived for the last 11 years in a "family of choice" called the Life Needs Coop, part of a larger community of lifesharing families known as Cadmus Lifesharing Association. Maggie is multiply handicapped -- brain-damaged, with multiple physical handicaps. She is also absolutely at home in this family, where she knows herself to be whole and wholly accepted -- essential, even.

Maggie's particular household is the largest in Cadmus. Nick and Andrea Stanton are the heads of the household, which they share with seven to 10 handicapped adults and three to eight "co-workers." The household is constantly shifting in composition and number, depending on who needs a vacation, who needs respite care, how many volunteers from overseas have come to work and live alongside, and even how many of Nick and Andrea's five children or their six grandchildren are staying over for a few days or a few weeks.

The house, whose kernel is a two-over-two New England farmhouse with a walk-in fireplace built in 1750, has grown, like the family -- a bit here, some more there -- into a rambling, comfortable home surrounded by flower beds. There are now at least four usable common room spaces and 12 or so bedrooms in the main house, decks and balconies and patios on three sides, plus offices and shops in outbuildings and the barn, which also houses an eight-loom weavery and a pasta-producing operation, the handiwork of their middle son, a professional chef.

This lifesharing community is rooted in the Camphill Movement, started by a German pediatrician, Karl Koenig, in Scotland in the late 1930s. Having fled Nazi Germany and its eugenics program, Koenig and a group of coworkers began a household and school to care for "spastic children" near Camp Hill, outside of Glasgow. Camphill has since grown into a worldwide movement of schools for handicapped children and of larger and smaller communities in which handicapped and non-handicapped adults live together.

Lifesharing varies the Camphill model by basing itself in individual family units, each an economically viable, independent entity. Life Needs Coop/North Plain Farm is a lifesharing household, now associated with six other lifesharing households in southern Berkshire County, Mass. Each household stands alone, but they collaborate in sharing activities, community meals, work projects, and each member's own specialized skills. They weave with Andrea, bake with Nina, work on recycling with John, frolic in the river behind Rachel's house. Each household is a "family of choice" or "volunteer family" guided by a married couple or individual dedicated to creating and maintaining a healthy extended family life. People with disabilities are included in these extended families as in a natural family.

In Cadmus Lifesharing, the motto is: "Everyone is perfect in their essential being, and everyone is handicapped in bringing their essence to expression." In practice, that works out to mean that everyone in a lifesharing house genuinely needs and is interdependent upon everyone else there. Or, as the Cadmus Philosophy statement says, "The Cadmus Lifesharing Association seeks to create a community in which it is no handicap to be handicapped."

Maggie knows that, while you might think she lives at Life Needs Coop to be taken care of, instead she is an essential part of the whole functioning family. Yes, she needs help bathing and dressing, and she gets it. On the other hand, one day this spring Andrea called to ask if we could rearrange Maggie's spring vacation time so that she could stay with them for the two weeks they had Amy for respite care. Amy is a more profoundly handicapped young woman -- non-speaking, probably autistic -- with whom Maggie has formed a strong bond of care. She will sit for hours talking with Amy, reading to her -- inhabiting her world and often giving voice to Amy's needs and wants, which she seems to intuit. Andrea called to say that they just didn't think they could manage Amy for those two weeks without Maggie. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. It's also, I think, the essence of "lifesharing." l

Linda Strohmier is a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, N.J.