Thoughts and Questions from A Good and Perfect Gift

Last updated on: January 27, 2012 at 2:09 pm by Amy Julia Becker

Thoughts and Questions from A Good and Perfect Gift 2012-01-27T12:01:57-05:00 Amy Julia Becker

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Cary Umhau, co-creator of a very cool website (and more) called Spacious, has written twice about A Good and Perfect Gift this past week. In her first post, “People with _________ just aren’t my thing” she challenges herself, and her readers:

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?

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