Corner View: December Holidays

See what’s going on around the world:

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Fave-O-Lit Friday

Funny Face

 

Diagnosis

by Sharon Olds

By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

“Diagnosis” by Sharon Olds, from One Secret Thing. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Fave-O-Lit Friday

The Beatitudes of the Exceptional Child

by Andre Masse C.S.E.

 

Blessed are you when by all these things you assure us that the thing that make us individuals is not in our peculiar muscles, not in our wounded nervous system, not in our difficulties in learning but in the God-given self which no infirmity can confine. Published in National Apostolate for Inclusion Ministry – Summer 1998

  • Blessed are you who take time to listen to difficult speech for you help us to know that if we persevere we can be understood.
  • Blessed are you who walk with us in public places and ignore the stares of strangers for in your companionship we find havens of relaxation.
  • Blessed are you who never bid us to “hurry up” and more blessed you who do not snatch our tasks from our hands to do them for us, for often we need time more than help.
  • Blessed are you who stand beside us as we enter new and untried ventures for our failures will be outweighed by the times when we surprise ourselves and you.
  • Blessed are you who ask for our help for our greatest need is to be needed.
  • Blessed are you who help us with the graciousness of Christ. Who did not bruise the reed and quench the flax for often we need help we cannot ask for.
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