Christmas greetings

Early 18th-century Russian icon

This Christmas night bestowed peace on the whole world;
So let no one threaten;
This is the night of the Most Gentle One - Let no one be cruel;
This is the night of the Humble One - Let no one be proud.
Now is the day of joy - Let us not revenge;
Now is the day of Good Will - Let us not be mean.
In this Day of Peace - Let us not be conquered by anger.
Today the Bountiful impoverished Himself for our sake;
So, rich one, invite the poor to your table.
Today we receive a Gift for which we did not ask;
So let us give alms to those who implore and beg us. (St Isaac the Syrian)

Joy and peace this Christmastide.

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (1)

Be always with Christ and trust God in everything.

This maxim is, in effect, a summary of Hopko’s entire list.

It is a call to practise the presence of God or the sacrament of the present moment. It means believing that God is present right now, in this specific situation. God can and must be found and served here.

It implies embracing the specific reality God has given you, including your neurology. For the autistic Christian, this means trusting that your unique wiring is not a mistake rather the way God created you and through which he intends to save you. If your reality involves sensory processing sensitivities, hyperfocus, or social fatigue, then God is present in those experiences, not in spite of them. You do not need to become neurotypical to be ‘with Christ’. God relates to every person in their unrepeatable uniqueness. You do not need to abandon your essential self to find God. On the contrary, it requires you to offer him your true self, including your autistic traits.

Practically, trusting God ‘in everything’ means finding him in the very discomforts that plague the neurodivergent experience. When you are overwhelmed by sensory input and on the verge of a meltdown or shutdown, the temptation is to believe God has abandoned you because you do not feel ‘at peace’ or ‘spiritual’ in a conventional sense. However, we should not fight against our psychological states, but rather gently turn our gaze to Christ amidst the storm. If you are in a state of meltdown or burnout, ‘trusting God’ might simply mean acknowledging, ‘Lord, I am overwhelmed, and I can’t fix it right now, but I know you are here.’

And, this maxim frees us from the pressure to manufacture ‘religious emotions’. Many neurodivergent people experience alexithymia (difficulty identifying or expressing emotions) and may feel defective because they don’t experience the ‘warmth’ or emotional swells described in some pietistic literature. But the Orthodox tradition affirms that true union with God is found in the will and the intellect (the nous) rather than in transient emotions. ‘Being with Christ’ is an act of loyalty, not a mood. If you show up to Liturgy despite the noise or keep your prayer rule despite feeling ‘flat’ or distracted, you are fulfilling this maxim; you are trusting God’s objective presence rather than your subjective feelings.

Maxims for Christian living

Fr. Thomas Hopko was once asked to summarize in the shortest form the practical life of a believing Christian. His response was a list of 55 maxims, which now circulate on the Internet in the following form:

1. Be always with Christ and trust God in everything.
2. Pray as you can, not as you think you must.
3. Have a realistic rule of prayer done by discipline.
4. Say the Lord’s Prayer several times each day.
5. Repeat a short prayer when your mind is not occupied.
6. Make some prostrations when you pray.
7. Eat good foods in moderation and fast on fasting days.
8. Practise silence, inner and outer.
9. Sit in silence 20 to 30 minutes each day.
10. Do acts of mercy in secret.
11. Go to liturgical services regularly.
12. Go to confession and holy communion regularly.
13. Do not engage intrusive thoughts and feelings.
14. Reveal all your thoughts and feelings to a trusted person regularly.
15. Read the scriptures regularly.
16. Read good books, a little at a time.
17. Cultivate communion with the saints.
18. Be an ordinary person, one of the human race.
19. Be polite with everyone, first of all family members.
20. Maintain cleanliness and order in your home.
21. Have a healthy, wholesome hobby.
22. Exercise regularly.
23. Live a day, even a part of a day, at a time.
24. Be totally honest, first of all with yourself.
25. Be faithful in little things.
26. Do your work, then forget it.
27. Do the most difficult and painful things first.
28. Face reality.
29. Be grateful.
30. Be cheerful.
31. Be simple, hidden, quiet and small.
32. Never bring attention to yourself.
33. Listen when people talk to you.
34. Be awake and attentive, fully present where you are.
35. Think and talk about things no more than necessary.
36. Speak simply, clearly, firmly, directly.
37. Flee imagination, fantasy, analysis, figuring things out.
38. Flee carnal, sexual things at their first appearance.
39. Don’t complain, grumble, murmur, or whine.
40. Don’t seek or expect pity or praise.
41. Don’t compare yourself with anyone.
42. Don’t judge anyone for anything.
43. Don’t try to convince anyone of anything.
44. Don’t defend or justify yourself.
45. Be defined and bound by God, not people.
46. Accept criticism gracefully and test it carefully.
47. Give advice only when asked or when it is your duty.
48. Do nothing for people that they can and should do for themselves.
49. Have a daily schedule of activities, avoiding whim and caprice.
50. Be merciful with yourself and others.
51. Have no expectations except to be fiercely tempted to your last breath.
52. Focus exclusively on God and light, and never on darkness, temptation, and sin.
53. Endure the trial of yourself and your faults serenely, under God’s mercy.
54. When you fall, get up immediately and start over.
55. Get help when you need it, without fear or shame.

My reason for repeating the list here is that I have been wondering how these maxims might be adapted for Christians who are autistic, and over the next few weeks I plan to post the suggestions I have come up with.

Autism and sin

As I have been exploring the history of the concept of autism, my theological antennae have started quivering.

In 1910–11, Eugen Bleuler coined the word autismus (autism) to describe a symptom he observed among adult psychiatric patients, namely a pathological withdrawal from reality into an inner world of fantasy. The Greek root of the term (autos) points to self-absorption and detachment from external reality as the defining feature of autism. Later, in the early 1940s, Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner described autistic patterns in children, which Kanner termed ‘early infantile autism’ (more recently known as classic autism). Their work led to autism being thought of as a neurodevelopmental issue rather than a symptom of an adult psychopathology. But the core defining feature – self-absorption and detachment from reality – remained unchanged.

The reason for my quivering theological antennae is that the defining feature of autism as originally introduced to psychiatry bears an disturbing resemblance to Protestant and Catholic understandings of sin. In fact, Martin Luther’s classic definition of sin as a state of being incurvatus in se – of being ‘curved in upon oneself’. In other words, sin is a condition in which the heart turns away from God and neighbour to rely on its own resources and satisfy its own desires. There is a clear structural parallel between autism as originally understood and Western theology’s understanding of sin. In both frameworks, the fundamental error/pathology is the rejection of the external (Reality/God) in favour of the internal (Self).

We can push this a bit further because Bleuler did not restrict his use of ‘autism’ to his patients. He also wrote about ‘autistic thinking’ in normal people, namely his fellow doctors (see his Autistic and Undisciplined Thinking in Medicine, and How to Overcome It [1919]), describing it as logic driven by wishes, desires, and fantasies rather than hard reality. In this usage, ‘autism’ functions similarly to the theological concept of idolatry or concupiscence: it is a defect of the will where the subject prefers a comfortable lie (inner wish) over a demanding truth (external reality). By framing ‘wishful thinking’ as a primitive or pathological trait, he was effectively medicalizing the old religious warning against following the ‘desires of the flesh’ and the ‘imaginations of the heart’.

An unfortunate coincidence? I think not. Bleuler was not personally religious, but he grew up in Zurich where the ‘grammar’ of human interiority was written by the Reformation. Sin was understood as social withdrawal and self-obsession. While health/salvation was understood as turning outward toward the community and objective truth. When he sought to describe the ultimate pathology of the mind, he reached for a concept that looked just like the ultimate pathology of the soul he would have heard about in the catechism of his youth.

In view of all this, I don’t think it is unreasonable to see the classic understanding of autism as a secularization of the Western Christian view of sin: it has simply taken the structure of the sinner curved inward and transformed it into the patient withdrawn inward.

Flickr update

Another 23 photos added to my photostream at Flickr (about half from near home and the rest from Arduaine).

St Philaret of Moscow

Today, we commemorate St Philaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow.

Two centuries on, he is mainly remembered outside Russia for the morning prayer that has been ascribed to him:

O Lord, grant me to greet the coming day in peace, help me in all things to rely upon your holy will.
In every hour of the day reveal your will to me.
Bless my dealings with all who surround me.
Teach me to treat all that comes to throughout the day with peace of soul and with firm conviction that your will governs all.
In all my deeds and words, guide my thoughts and feelings.
In unforeseen events, let me not forget that all are sent by you.
Teach me to act firmly and wisely, without embittering and embarrassing others.
Give me strength to bear the fatigue of the coming day with all that it shall bring.
Direct my will, teach me to pray.
And you, yourself, pray in me.
Amen.

In fact, this prayer originally came from a French Catholic spiritual writer, François Fénelon (1651–1715). However, Philaret popularized its use within the Orthodox Church.

As Metropolitan of Moscow, he played an important role in the revival of Russian Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. He was a staunch defender of the Elders of Optina against widespread criticism. It was under his leadership that a modern translation of the Bible into Russian came into being (another initiative that was widely criticized by conservative forces). He pushed for reform of the Church’s subordination to the Russian state and as a result made a number of influential enemies (not least Tsar Nicholas I who had him confined to his diocese for several years). In addition, he was a prolific author and his Catechism is still in use today.

Troparion

Having acquired the grace of the Holy Spirit
O divinely wise and holy hierarch Philaret,
you preached truth and righteousness to the people with enlightened understanding;
with a contrite heart you showed peace and mercy to the suffering;
and as a teacher and tireless guardian of the Faith 
with the staff of uprightness you preserved the Russian flock.
Therefore, as you have boldness before Christ our God,
pray that He preserve the Church, and grant salvation to the people, and to our souls.

Kontakion

As a true imitator of the venerable Sergius;
you loved virtue from childhood, O divinely blessed Philaret.
As a righteous pastor and blameless confessor, you were subject to mockery and abuse by the ungodly after your holy repose,
but God has glorified you with signs and miracles
and shown you to be the helper of our Church.

Beth Taylor at Glasgow Art Club

I spent lunch-time yesterday at the Glasgow Art Club attending a really superb concert organized by Westbourne Music. The soloist was the Glaswegian mezzo Beth Taylor, and she was performing a programme of songs by female composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There was a lot to like in the programme, including three songs by Clara Schumann (which left me thinking that Brahms had learned a lot from her), five songs by Alma Mahler, plus pieces by Lili and Nadia Boulanger, Ethel Smyth, Hedwige Chrétien, Germaine Tailleferre, and Augusta Holmès. I think my favourites were the pieces by Tailleferre, Holmès, and Nadia Boulanger.

All the music was very strong, but what made the concert stand out for me was Beth’s performance. She throws herself into the music with absolute confidence and communicates it as much by her gestures and expressions as by her amazing voice.