Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (21)

Hopko’s 21st maxim, ‘Have a healthy, wholesome hobby’, could be tailor‑made for autistic Orthodox Christians. For many autistic people, hobbies/special interests are an important way of engaging with the world. A wholesome hobby is something that lets your mind and body ‘play’ in a way that is genuinely life‑giving: it does not enslave you, drag you into shame, or isolate you from God and neighbour, but gives you joy, rest, and focus. Almost any hobby can fit this maxim provided it is received as a gift and offered back to Christ.

Unfortunately, autistic special interests can too easily tip over into burnout, compulsion, or escapism. So, it is vital to stress the ‘healthy’ part of the maxim. This may mean adding gentle structures and limits rather than trying to suppress the interest itself. One possibility is to give your hobby a defined block of time on certain days. You could agree on reasonable time boundaries with your confessor or a trusted friend, and you should certainly watch for early warning signs that it is becoming an avoidance strategy (neglecting sleep, food, prayer, relationships) rather than genuine refreshment.

If possible, it can also help to integrate your hobby into your spiritual and communal life, for example by sharing it with a few safe people or consciously thanking God before and after hobby time so that it becomes an occasion of gratitude rather than isolation. Lived this way, Hopko’s maxim baptizes autistic intensity, encouraging you to enjoy your interests in a way that strengthens your mind, honours your neurology, and quietly glorifies God.

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (20)

Hopko’s 20th maxim, ‘Maintain cleanliness and order in your home’, is about creating a small, liveable corner of God’s good creation, not about perfectionism or respectability. For autistic Orthodox Christians, ‘cleanliness and order’ must be read through the realities of sensory sensitivities and overload, executive dysfunction, fatigue, and special interests. A holy home is not necessarily a minimalist, Marie Kondo approved space; it is a place where you can realistically pray, rest, and work without being constantly ambushed by chaos, smells, or visual noise. Order might mean knowing where things are, having clear paths to move safely, and keeping some areas (for example, your bed, your prayer corner, the kitchen sink) reliably usable.

Because autistic people often struggle with getting started, ordering tasks, and overwhelm, this maxim might best be kept as a series of small, repeatable habits rather than a vague demand to ‘be tidier’. Perhaps choose one or two key tasks (washing dishes once a day, clearing one surface, taking rubbish out) and attach them to events you already do (after breakfast, after work, before evening prayers), using timers or checklists if helpful. Sensory needs can guide your priorities: if certain smells, textures, or piles make you shut down, then dealing with those triggers first is part of maintaining order for the sake of prayer and peace. When your energy is low, you can practise ‘two‑minute’ tidying, accepting that some clutter will remain; the maxim calls for basic, humane order, not scrupulous scrubbing of every corner.

Many autistic people feel shame about their living spaces, especially if they have been overwhelmed for a long time or live in shared housing where others do not understand their limits. In that context, this maxim should be heard together with Hopko’s later ones: be faithful in little things, have a daily schedule, be merciful with yourself, get help when you need it. ‘Maintaining cleanliness and order’ might include asking a friend, family member, or support worker to help you declutter properly, then setting up simple systems you can actually maintain using containers, labels, or colour‑coding. Or it might involve simply keeping your prayer corner tidy, even if other areas are still a work in progress. Lived this way, 20th‑maxim order is not a weapon against executive dysfunction, but a gradual, compassionate shaping of your environment so that your autistic nervous system and your heart both have room to breathe, to pray, and to welcome Christ.

Every age has its own fascism

Every age has its own Fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their free will. There are many ways of reaching this point, not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralysing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of the privileged few depends on the forced labour and the forced silence of the many.

Police intimidation, information control, judicial corruption, educational paralysis, and the cultivation of nostalgic order: One could be forgiven for thinking that the author of these words was thinking of Trump’s USA, or Putin’s Russia, or Netanyahu’s Israel, or Modi’s India. In fact, they were written by Primo Levi more than fifty years ago (in an article entitled ‘Un passato che credevamo non dovesse tornare più’ [A past we thought would never return] in Corriere della Serra, 8 May 1974).

The tragedy of autism

Some wise words from Claire Williams:

This lived life is peculiar, at odds with the world around us. Autistic lives appear in a different stream of humanity’s being-in-the-world, out of sync with the majority. This leads to situations where we feel that we are on the outside looking in, unsure of where or whether we will fit. In the worst instances of this we can be rejected body and soul by other people and by the church. This is the true tragedy of autism. (Peculiar Discipleship, p. 209)

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (19)

‘Be polite with everyone, first of all with family members.’

Autistic hyperfocus, bluntness, and literal-mindedness can often be misinterpreted as rudeness by neurotypicals. So, at first sight, Hopko’s 19th maxim appears to be something of a challenge. However, it should not be read as a demand that autistic people mask or conform to every social rule.  Rather, it is about learning to treat the people closest to you with consistent, practical kindness, For autistic people, politeness can be understood as simple, repeatable acts of respect: using basic greetings, saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, not deliberately shaming or mocking others, and apologizing when you realize you have hurt someone. This does not mean suppressing your needs; you can be polite and still say, ‘I need quiet now’, or ‘That light is hurting me’, or ‘I can’t talk about this today’. In fact, clear communication is often more genuinely courteous than pretending everything is fine until you melt down.

Because autistic traits can include monotone voice, blunt phrasing, difficulty reading cues, or going non-verbal under stress, ‘being polite’ needs to be grounded in intention and agreed signals rather than in neurotypical performance. Simple scripts can help (‘I’m overloaded, I’m going to my room for 20 minutes’; ‘I’m not angry; my face just looks like this’), so your family and close friends learn not to misinterpret your tone, and you have reliable words to reach for when your brain is tired. You might also set shared household expectations that respect everyone: for example, agreeing quiet hours, warning before starting noisy tasks, or checking in before launching into an infodump. When you do snap or speak harshly in overload, politeness looks like returning later, naming what happened without self-hatred (‘I yelled because I was overwhelmed, and that was wrong’), and asking forgiveness.

Many autistic people have been told all their lives that they are ‘rude’ simply for existing differently, which can lead either to despair or to giving up on kindness altogether. This maxim offers a different way: you don’t have to become a social chameleon; rather, you can let Christ teach you small, concrete habits of respect that fit your actual nervous system. That may mean choosing one or two polite practices to focus on at a time (e.g., saying ‘good morning’ to those you live with, or sending one brief check-in message a week), and letting the virtue grow slowly from there. Thus, ‘be polite with everyone, first of all with family members’ becomes a way of honouring the image of God in those who share your daily life, while also honouring the truth of who you are and what you can bear.

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (18)

Hopko’s 18th maxim, ‘Be an ordinary person, one of the human race’, pushes back against the temptation to see yourself as either above or beneath other people. For autistic Orthodox Christians, this means refusing two lies at once: the lie that you must become indistinguishable from neurotypicals to be truly human, and the lie that your difference makes you some kind of alien, mistake, or spiritual exception. To be ‘ordinary’ is to stand alongside everyone else – baptized into the same Christ, sharing the same fallen and glorious human nature – and to let your autistic way of sensing, thinking, and relating be one real variation within that shared humanity, not a disqualifying glitch.

Living this maxim will often be countercultural in church spaces where you may have been treated as either a problem to fix or a theological curiosity. Practically, it can mean using simple human language about yourself (‘I’m tired’, ‘This noise hurts’, ‘I like this’) rather than clinical labels; allowing yourself ordinary joys like hobbies, friendships, and rest without feeling you must be ‘more spiritual’ than everyone else to compensate; or declining both pedestal and pity when people react to your gifts or struggles. It may also mean consciously resisting the autistic tendency (often trauma-shaped) to narrate yourself as permanently outside the human circle, replacing scripts like ‘I’m not like other people’ with ‘I am one of the human race in Christ, with my own particular needs and gifts’. Over time, this maxim becomes a gentle safeguard: it keeps you from self-hatred and from spiritual elitism, and it invites you to inhabit your baptismal identity as simply, solidly, and peacefully human.

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (17)

Hopko’s 17th maxim, ‘Cultivate communion with the saints’, is a reminder of the catholicity and unity of the Church not just across space but across time as well. Those who have gone before us in the faith are as much a part of the Church today as any living Christian. For Orthodoxy, this means that we can enter into a real relationship with the saints, and this is not just a vague memory and admiration of spiritual ‘superheroes’. On the contrary, this relationship can be wonderfully concrete and structured: learning the stories of one or two saints at a time; keeping their icons in your prayer corner; celebrating their feast days; and speaking to them in simple, direct words about your life, your sensory world, and your special interests. You do not have to feel strong emotions or have ‘mystical’ experiences for this to be real; choosing to say, ‘Saint N., pray for me’, with attention, again and again, is already a genuine act of friendship in Christ (just as it would be if we were to ask the same of a friend at Church).

Autistic perception often attends to detail and pattern, which can be beneficial in following this maxim. You might build a small ‘map’ of saints who speak to different parts of your life: one you ask for help with anxiety or overload, one for work or study, one for your parish, one or more for your special interests, and perhaps one or two explicitly connected to disability, illness, or marginalization. You can track their feast days in a calendar; read and re-read their lives; collect short sayings from them to revisit when your mind is looping in shame or fear. If social interaction is hard, you can even think of the saints as your first safe ‘community’: people who will not misread your tone, talk over you, or demand that you mask, but who already see your autistic way of being in the light of the Kingdom.

Many autistic people have painful histories with ‘role models’ and pressure to imitate others. However, in one of his podcasts, Hopko expanded on this maxim, quoting St John Climacus to the effect that we should emulate the saints but not imitate them. We are not called to pretend that we have their temperament, body, culture, or neurology; communion means learning their faith, hope, love, and courage, and then letting those virtues take an autistic shape in you. That might look like persevering through sensory stress in church as much as you reasonably can, patiently bearing misunderstanding, using your focused interests to serve your neighbours, or holding fast to Christ when routines collapse. Over time, this steady, realistic friendship with the saints helps you experience that you are not a stranger on the margins of the Church, but fully part of the living, interwoven body of Christ that stretches from your own overstimulated nervous system all the way to the quiet, healed joy of heaven.