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Good morning. Last night equestrian rider Lee Pearson carried the flag for Great Britain at the opening ceremony of the Rio Paralympic Games. The Paralympics is a fabulous festival of human spirit, drive and talent. It’s awesome to see how people have overcome disadvantage, conquered obstacles and shown immense character. Every single athlete has a proud story to tell. But you could say it portrays just the image of disability the world wants to see. The wider community is fine with disability on these terms. But most disability isn’t like that. The danger is that all this stellar achievement makes the general public less tolerant of stories that don’t fit this shape. Many disabled people ask two overlapping but distinct questions. One is, ‘Do I have to be exceptional to be acceptable? Maybe true disability lies in the eye of the beholder. Could it be those who need everyone to be the same, to be more or less an image of themselves – could it be those people who are the truly disabled?’ The other question is, ‘Why can’t you see me? Why can you only see what you call my disability? Why insist on making this feature of my personality the main one? Beethoven was hearing-impaired but we don’t talk about that – we talk about his music. Stephen Hawking’s paralysed, but we don’t talk about his wheelchair – we talk about his theoretical physics.’ The biggest challenge for many people who have a disability is getting people to see who they really are. What became clear in the scrutiny of Britain’s remarkable Olympic medal tally was that behind every performer is a chorus of coaches, family members, friends, colleagues, dieticians, performance directors, sponsors and fans. So the body we’re celebrating in Rio isn’t the perfect individual with tight muscles and limitless power; it’s the body with many members, the body that needs a diversity of skill and identity – a body Christians call the body of Christ. True human flourishing isn’t primarily about individuals transcending limitations – spectacular and fulfilling as such transcendence may be. Instead it’s principally about creating new relationships, establishing interdependent community, celebrating our mutual reliance on one another. That’s not a picture of a perfect athletic body, or a courageous disabled body: it’s a vision of what Christians call the crucified and risen body of Christ. What the Paralympics demonstrate is that it takes a village to produce an athlete. Rio is, in the end, a celebration that it takes a huge team for any one of us to flourish. Sport isn’t the epitome of human independence; it’s the visible demonstration that life is fundamentally a team game, and the most precious things in life are one another.