In his little book Altogether Gift: A Trinitarian Spirituality, Michael Downey suggests that we can learn things about being human from the mentally handicapped that we can’t learn from the healthy.  Handicapped people are often entirely dependent, and have to bow at every moment to the direction of others.

It is easy for us who are free from mental handicaps to think that being human means being self-directed, rational, or independent. When we examine ourselves in the mirror of handicapped people – including fetuses – we realize that being human is less about standing tall than about receiving a gift.

This is not relativism.  It is not true that we are “all handicapped” or that mental deficiencies are only so in the eye of the beholder.  But it is true that all human beings share, to one degree or another, the very dependencies that make the handicapped so strange and awkward.

Perhaps this explains why Paul says that in the church we bestow abundant honor upon the “unseemly members.”  Perhaps he wants us to learn more deeply what it means to be a “seemly member” by considering our “unseemly” brothers and sisters.

- Taken from Peter Leithart, Touchstone, p. 5, October 2008