“Looking to those persons we are inclined to overlook… may throw light on who and what the human person is in Trinitarian perspective. Those who are wounded and weak, the last, littlest, and least in church and society, can be instructive in what it means to be human. They draw attention to forgotten and marginalized dimensions of ourselves. Indeed, those at the margins can be the teachers of the clever and the efficient. In particular, people with mental handicaps, the mentally retarded, the developmentally disabled, can open up new horizons of personhood for the bright and robust…

“The least often remind the clever and the robust that the chief characteristic of the human is to be open to relationship with others… The handicapped often remind us that our whole being cries out for relationship. Often they have a heightened capacity and propensity for authentic communion…

“The mentally handicapped serve as a catalyst in the recognition that one’s personhood is not grounded in what one does or achieves. They remind all of us, highly intelligent, strong-willed overachievers, that our basic humanity, who we are as persons, lies elsewhere… What makes the person a person is something prior to, deeper and more fundamental than intellect and will or thinking and choosing. It lies in the heart, in affectus, in the ability to be in relation, the relations of interpersonal love… Human dignity and destiny are not to be found in unbridled autonomy. We are not autonomous…

“The necessity of being in relationship to others is often denied by the clever, the strong, the robust, the healthy, even though we know in our marrow that it is an illusion to think that we are not ineluctably related. ‘Normal’ people find countless ways to perpetuate the fantasy that relationship is external to who we are, and that there is a self-subsistent, self-made self that is prior to and somehow more real than the relations of interpersonal love that are constitutive of who we are. But to exist as a person is to be a distinct one in relation. Those with quite conspicuous needs serve as a smack-in-the-face reminder of this relational character which the clever and robust are all too often inclined to overlook or flatly deny.”

— Michael Downey, Altogether Gift: A Trinitarian Spirituality