I sit on the board of Dayspring Homes ("Through the tender Mercy of our God, With which the Dayspring from on high has visited us; To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, To guide our feet into the way of peace." Lk. 1:78), a not-for-profit corporation that runs residential homes for mentally challenged adults. The founder of this organization is a devout, passionate, indefatigable nun. Though Dayspring accepts residents from all religious backgrounds, the atmosphere in the homes is distinctly Catholic.

Recently, I attended a Mass for the residents, employees and board members of Dayspring Homes. Though I had spent time with the residents before, I had never had the privilege of worshipping with them. As I watched them receive the Body and Blood of our Lord, I was deeply moved by their obvious, if somewhat boisterous, reverence. The look of sheer, childlike joy on their faces was unlike anything I have ever witnessed.

When I am with my mentally challenged friends, I am acutely aware of what is lacking in my relationship with God - childlikeness, amazement and wonderment.

For several years, I have taken a group of students from my children's school to one of the Dayspring homes to help out with cleaning and yard work. Every time, several mothers have told me they make their children go so that their kids might see how fortunate they are in comparison to others. It is so easy, they point out, to take all that we have for granted. Though I have never had the courage to tell them so, these well meaning moms are mistaken. We do not learn how blessed we are from the mentally challenged, we learn how small and how deficient we are in comparison. They are the saints who reveal to us our shortcomings.

When I think about my experiences with the mentally challenged, I am reminded of a short story, Revelation, by the great Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor. The main character, Mrs. Turpin, is a middle-class, Southern, church-going, white woman who in her own words has "a little of everything, and a good disposition besides." Whenever she thinks about her blessings, she brims with gratitude. She just feels like shouting, "Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is! I could have been different."

However, this sanguine view of herself and her life is shattered while she sits in a doctor's waiting room reflecting upon her good fortune in comparison to the poor creatures who are waiting with her. Suddenly, unprovoked, a very unattractive, upper middle-class white girl attacks her saying, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog." Mrs. Turpin knows this is a message from Jesus, and she is furious. She demands to know what He means by such a statement. The answer comes in the form of a vision. She sees a purple streak in the sky.

Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who...had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right...They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

We value technological knowledge and power because they give us the illusion we can control our own fate.

Mrs. Turpin pities all those who have not had her luck in life. In fact, "to help anybody out that needed it was her philosophy of life." But her pity is the face of contempt. She pities those to whom she feels superior, those whom she has determined serve no use. Yet, those whom society sees as serving no purpose are often the ones closest to God because they recognize their dependence upon Him. Meanwhile, those traits which we admire most in ourselves and others—intelligence, wealth, self-reliance, common sense, respectability—become occasions for sin. They create barriers in our relationship with God because they become points of pride and prejudice. We shall have to give them up (or, at least, our reliance upon them) in order to enter the kingdom of God.

When I am with my mentally challenged friends, I am acutely aware of what is lacking in my relationship with God—childlikeness, amazement and wonderment—qualities which are so much in evidence when they receive the Eucharist. In Unless You Become Like This Child, theologian Hans Urs Von Bathasar says childlikeness is a sense of the intrinsic worth of each moment of existence. According to him, Jesus, Himself, looks up to the Father with an eternal childlike amazement: "this amazement derives from the much deeper amazement of the eternal Child who, in the absolute Spirit of Love, marvels at Love itself as it permeates and transcends all that is." Therefore, to be Christ-like is to be childlike.

Our culture, the culture of death, does not value those qualities that make people childlike and, therefore, Christ-like. We give lip service to the idea that every individual has intrinsic worth, but our actions belie the sentiment. The notion that every individual from the time of his or her conception matters to God is as radical an idea today as it was in Jesus' time. Jesus, in fact, takes it one step further and proclaims those who are of no value to society are precisely those to whom the kingdom of God belongs. "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven" (Mt. 19:14). As von Balthasar points out, the value of childhood lies in its "uselessness." Children understand they are wholly dependent upon another. A culture that does not understand the importance of "uselessness" (utter dependence) will be a culture in which abortion is widespread, and mentally challenged babies will be the first to go. That which is not useful is dispensable, and the unborn are useful only insofar as they serve our needs, which is why, as a society, we both dote upon and kill our children depending upon the value we assign to them.

Our culture, the culture of death, does not value those qualities that make people childlike and, therefore, Christ-like.

Above all else, we value technological knowledge and power because they give us the illusion we can control our own fate; there is little room for the weakest among us. As Pope John Paul II writes in Evangelium Vitae, human "conscience itself, darkened as it were by... widespread conditioning, is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what concerns the basic value of human life." If we are ever again to see clearly, our "virtues"—those qualities we admire most in this society—will have to be burned away.

The mentally challenged can help us regain our sight. They remind us that existence, itself, is intrinsically beautiful because every life has been created by God. My friends are not to be pitied. God chose them from all eternity to be His saints among us and to teach us what is truly important. I am indeed blessed to know them and to learn from them something about the true nature of sin and virtue, faith and love.