What determines your worth?

Society has attempted to answer this question in a variety of ways, defining a person’s worth by wealth, social class, language, skin color, education, intelligence, strength, bravery, wisdom, kindness….

Although such attributes can describe a person’s experience, descriptions do not define worth.

You are much more than your attributes and your experiences.

Two seemingly similar people, one with a higher IQ than the other, are both equally valuable lives—that is, they have equal dignity.  An infant with severe developmental disabilities is as dignified as a professor at Yale.  Likewise, a kind and gentle person is as dignified as someone who is habitually rude and selfish.  Being right or wrong about particular beliefs does not define someone’s dignity.  A person’s disability status, or immigration status, or political affiliation, or gender, or relationship status, or fertility status, or their age, the number of cells in their body, their wisdom, their virtue, their understanding of their own humanity, or even their ability to listen to and understand the humanity of others—these attributes do not define someone’s dignity either.

You are a human person.  It is your humanity, a gift, that defines your dignity.  You have been created.  You are loved by the One who made you and lives within you.  That is what determines your dignity.  Nothing can change that.  No one can harm your dignity.  Not even you.

Dignity doesn’t change with a spinal cord injury that leaves someone paralyzed.

Dignity doesn’t change with a college education.

Dignity doesn’t change with unemployment.

Dignity doesn’t change with great virtue.

Dignity doesn’t change with great moral depravity.

Dignity doesn’t change with chromosomal abnormality.

Dignity doesn’t change with popularity and accolade.

Dignity doesn’t change with a brain injury.

Dignity doesn’t change with dementia.

Dignity doesn’t change with great accomplishments.

Dignity doesn’t change with great failure.

Dignity doesn’t change.