Dispatch Faith: Finding the Good Life in an Age of Designer Babies and High Achievers, by Amy Julia Becker:
When our daughter Penny was born, I was a student at Princeton Seminary. I stumbled through the basic Greek of the New Testament and enjoyed the hours of theological debate over concepts like atonement and salvation and the nature of evil. My husband and I were churchgoers too. We showed up at 9 a.m. on Sunday mornings and dutifully sang hymns and praise songs and listened to the sermon and tithed and prayed and ate the bread and drank the grape juice and desired to follow Jesus.
Still, for all the theology, for all the good intentions, for all the checked boxes, we weren’t prepared for the news we received two hours after Penny was born—that the doctors suspected she had Down syndrome. As many parents will attest, any unexpected diagnosis feels shocking, and scary, and sometimes sad, and sometimes strangely shameful.
I walked into the labor and delivery unit, 37 weeks pregnant, with a vision of what lay ahead for us. Not a specific vision, mind you. Just a vague idea that I could imagine the contours of our daughter’s future—the good grades and good deeds, the sports she might play, the colleges she might attend, the husband she might marry. I imagined Penny living a good life, even if I didn’t know exactly where or how that would happen. But the words “Down syndrome” erased that vision.
Twenty years later, I not only believe that Penny can live a good life, I believe that I would have had a hard time ever living a good life without her. …
[W]hether we pursue the good life through moralism, meritocracy, or materialism, many of us still find ourselves wanting. The sociological data indicate an increase in anxiety and depression among Americans in recent years. The most recent World Happiness Report shows Americans at the top of the global heap in terms of income, and only in the middle when it comes to a sense of well-being. We are lonely and disconnected. We are sad and worried. Many of us seem to be discovering that the American good life isn’t able to deliver on its promise.
Our family was given the gift of that knowledge early on. A child with an intellectual disability and developmental delays could never conform to the American ideal of the good life. Penny’s risk was higher than that of her typically developing peers for contracting a host of diseases, including everything from childhood leukemia to Alzheimer’s. She would almost certainly struggle in school, struggle to get a job, and struggle to have friends. She wouldn’t attend an Ivy League college. It would be surprising if she got married. If we wanted the good life for Penny, the good life for our family, we would have to reimagine it. …
Jesus’ words about the ones who experience the good life … help me understand. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ most famous and most comprehensive sermon, he begins with a series of unexpected blessings, known as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, the ones who mourn, the ones who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Biblical scholars explain that the word “blessed” can be a confusing one for contemporary English speakers, because we interpret it as an antonym to the word “cursed.” We read “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” and we think Jesus is making a promise: If you do X, then you get y as your reward. But the blessings of the Sermon on the Mount don’t stand in contrast to curses. They stand in contrast to woes. They aren’t statements of reward or punishment. Blessings and woes are not indications of God’s promises, but descriptions of spiritual reality. They tell us how life goes when we live in the presence of God.
In The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, biblical scholar Jonathan Pennington writes that these statements of blessing are “a pronouncement, based on observation, that a certain way of being in the world produces human flourishing.” We might translate Jesus’ blessings with the phrase, “the good life belongs to … ” According to Jesus, the good life belongs to the ones who know that they are needy, vulnerable, dependent creatures. The good life belongs to the ones who are honest about pain and loss and receptive to comfort. The good life belongs to those who live within limits. The good life belongs to those who are dissatisfied with moralism, materialism, and meritocracy. The good life belongs to people like Penny, and the good life is available to people like me, if I am willing to understand myself as needy, if I am willing to lean on others for help, if I am willing to receive care, if I am willing to stop trying to prove my worth and instead receive the blessing God wants to give.
Back when Penny was a baby, I picked up a copy of Parents magazine. The cover asked, “Will your child be tall? Smart? Athletic?” I threw the magazine in the trash can without opening it. I knew that Penny’s value wasn’t based on her physical traits or her intellect, even if the cultural messages I received daily said she should be measured and tested according to achievement, ability, and appearance. Her identity would never be achieved through ability. Her identity was bestowed, and received, through belovedness. It took me a little while to believe that the same could be true of me. I had refused to measure my daughter according to words on the cover of a magazine, but what if I also refused to measure myself that way? What if I received my own life as a gift, given to me in love? What if I could give my life to others in love in return? …
Jesus’ idea of the good life is being needy and dependent. Cared for and comforted. Gifted and beloved. For those of us who have been conditioned by our culture to think we need to prove ourselves and pursue the good life with our own efforts, the Beatitudes offer a different path. As Father Gregory Boyle, founder of the gang rehabilitation and reentry program Homeboy Industries, puts it in his book Tattoos on the Heart, the Beatitudes are not a spirituality, but a geography that “tells us where to stand.” The way for us to receive belovedness, to learn the truth of our dependence and need, is to stand among the poor in spirit, the meek, the ones who mourn, the ones who do not have it all together, the ones who cannot prove their worthiness according to a checklist of developmental milestones, 401(k) plans, or Instagram followers.
At the end of the Beatitudes, Jesus stands among these bedraggled peasants seated on a hillside. He has described their lived reality of being overlooked and oppressed, with lives of lament and hardship. He then says, “You are the salt of the earth … You are the light of the world.” It seems impossible to imagine what Jesus asserts here: that when you live in God’s presence in all your weakness and need, you also shine a light into the darkness all around.
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