Unseemly Members

It has been common in the Christian West, particularly in the modern era, to define the image of God in terms of rationality or some other intellectual capacity. Confronted by a madman, Christians will no doubt say “Oh, they’re human too,” but by this definition they are clearly defective humans.

In his little book Altogether Gift: A Trinitarian Spirituality, Michael Downey takes a different tack. While he doesn’t hold up mentally handicapped persons as models of human nature, he suggests that we can learn things about being human from the handicapped that we can’t learn from the healthy.

It’s easy for us who are free from mental handicaps to think that being human means being self-directed, rational, or independent. But handicapped people are often entirely dependent, and have to bow at every moment to the direction of others. When we examine ourselves in the mirror of handicapped humans – or fetuses – we realize that we are far less self-directed and independent than we like to think. We learn that being human is less about standing tall than about receiving a gift.

This is not relativism. It’s 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 Paul wants us to learn more deeply what it means to be a “seemly member” by considering our “unseemly” brothers and sisters.