What I had to wrestle with while reading this book is this: "What categories of people do I ignore or avoid, not acknowledge the existence of, or refuse to get to know?" and "About whom do I say, ‘Being with those sorts of people just isn't my thing?'"
In her second post, "What's Sad About Having a Child with Down syndrome?" she picks up on one of my very favorite passages from the book (is it weird for me to write about my own favorite passages?), in which I reflect on the question of goodness and disability. I wrote:
"I realized that I had always assumed it was very sad to have a child with mental retardation, or, for that matter, to be a person with mental retardation. But why? Why was that sad — because our culture held the intellect in such high regard? Because life was only as valuable as what we could produce or what academic degrees we had attained or how attractive we were or how big our house was? What was sad about having a child with Down syndrome?
And then Cary asks:
Great questions for all of us to ponder: "How do we typically define ‘good?'" and "What are our standards of perfection?"
For those of you who have read A Good and Perfect Gift, what thoughts or questions did it spark in your life? And how would you answer Cary?
