Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (28)

Hopko’s 28th maxim, ‘Face reality’, is not a command to ‘toughen up’ or ignore your autistic limits; it is an invitation to acknowledge before God how things really are, not how you wish or fear they might be. For autistic Orthodox Christians, reality includes at least three layers: who God is (merciful, present, not your intrusive inner critic), who you are (an autistic human being with particular strengths and vulnerabilities), and what your concrete circumstances are today (your energy, sensory load, finances, relationships, sins, traumas, responsibilities). Facing reality means rejecting both denial (‘I can do everything; I’m fine’) and catastrophic fantasy (‘I will never cope; everything is ruined’), and instead saying, as precisely as you can, ‘This is my situation before God, here and now’. 

Because autistic minds lean easily into detailed imagination, analysis, and what‑if scenarios, ‘face reality’ will often mean gently distinguishing facts from stories. Helpful questions include: ‘What actually happened?’ ‘What do I know versus what I am guessing?’ ‘What is my nervous system doing right now?’ You might try writing a short, factual description of a conflict or problem before interpreting it, check your impressions with a trusted person, or ask your priest or therapist to help you separate sin from disability and trauma. Facing reality also includes recognizing when something is genuinely unjust or harmful. For example, if a church environment, job, or relationship consistently ignores your needs or exposes you to abuse, facing reality does not mean simply praying more or trying to be ‘less autistic’; rather, it means recognizing that this situation may need to change, and that getting help is part of living in truth.

Spiritually, this maxim pairs with Hopko’s later counsel to be totally honest with yourself, to be merciful with yourself, and to get help without shame. For autistic Christians, that means accepting that autism is a lifelong condition; that meltdowns, shutdowns, and executive‑function crashes may still happen even when you are doing everything ‘right’; but that God will meet you there, not in some imagined neurotypical version of yourself. It also means recognizing the real gifts – your focused attention, pattern‑sensitivity, sense of justice, etc. – that God has entrusted to you are to be used in his service, and not suppressed as shameful quirks. Lived this way, ‘Face reality’ becomes a deeply hopeful maxim: you step out of fantasy, self‑gaslighting, and impossible ideals into the place where Christ stands with you, so that your next small act of obedience can begin from solid ground.

The wisdom of Brother Cadfael

Sometimes, important theological and spiritual truths are found in quite unexpected places. Here, for example, is Ellis Peters’s character Brother Cadfael reflecting on the pleasure he gets from tending the monastery's herb garden:

The manifold gifts of God are there to be delighted in, to fall short of joy would be ingratitude. (From St Peter’s Fair, chapter 1)

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (27)

Hopko’s 27th maxim, ‘Do the most difficult and painful things first’, can be both freeing and dangerous language for autistic Orthodox Christians. The danger lies in interpreting it as ‘ignore your sensory limits and push yourself into meltdown’, or ‘start every day with the thing you dread most, no matter what’. Rather, autistics should read it as ‘give priority to the necessary tasks you are most tempted to avoid within your real energy, sensory, and executive‑function capacity for a given day. As far as you are able, you should focus those tasks that are tied to love, repentance, or responsibility, rather than endlessly doing only easy, stimulating, or interest‑based things. For you, the ‘difficult and painful’ thing might include making a phone call, answering one email, beginning a piece of writing, taking a shower, or initiating a hard but needed conversation, rather than anything dramatic.

Because autistic nervous systems fatigue quickly and crash hard, this maxim needs to be paired with awareness of your personal ‘window’ of best functioning. For many, that will mean tackling one or two priority tasks early in the day or after a predictable regulation routine (e.g. quiet, stimming, tea, brief prayer), when your social and cognitive battery is as full as it will be. You can make a very short list each day: one ‘hard’ task, one ‘medium’ task, and one ‘easy’ task; do the hard one first if your body and brain are reasonably regulated; if not, start by regulating, then attempt the hard thing for a set time (for example, ten minutes) and stop. Tools like timers, written scripts for phone calls or emails, and breaking tasks into tiny steps (‘open document’, ‘write three sentences’, ‘send’) are not cheating; they are how you follow the maxim without harming yourself.

This maxim is also a guard against the autistic avoidance that hides behind perfectionism or spirituality: ‘I can’t start until I know the perfect system / feel exactly calm / understand everything theologically’. For you, ‘doing the most difficult thing first’ may mean beginning while still imperfectly prepared, with a simple prayer such as, ‘Lord, I will take the first step; You carry me through the rest’. It also implies a limit: once you have done that priority hard thing, you are not required to keep seeking out more pain to prove your virtue; you can turn to easier tasks, rest, or wholesome hobbies without guilt, trusting that obedience in one concrete difficult step today is precious to God. Lived this way, Maxim 27 becomes a gentle nudge against paralysis and procrastination, not a command to self‑destruct: a way of honouring your autistic limits while still moving, one small step at a time, into the works of love and responsibility that you would otherwise postpone indefinitely.

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (26)

Hopko’s 26th maxim is ‘Do your work, then forget it’. For autistic Orthodox Christians, this speaks directly into the tendency to replay tasks, conversations, and projects in your head long after they are finished – editing them, catastrophizing about them, or trying to ‘perfect’ them in imagination. Doing your work means giving the task your honest attention and effort within your real limits; forgetting it means entrusting the result to Christ instead of endlessly analysing what you ‘should’ have done differently. You are called to faithfulness, not to total control of outcomes or other people’s reactions. 

Because autistic cognition often loops and replays, ‘forgetting it’ will usually need intentional rituals rather than just a mental command. You might mark the end of a task with a short prayer (‘Lord, I place this in Your hands’), physically put away the tools you used, tick the task off a list, and then shift to a clearly different activity so your brain has a cue that the work is over. If you notice yourself mentally re‑doing a completed email, report, or conversation, you can name the loop (‘I’ve left the present’), briefly check if any concrete follow‑is up actually needed and, if so, do it, then deliberately to the next small thing. Over time, this maxim can become a gentle protection against perfectionism and scrupulosity: you still care about doing good work, but you refuse to let completed tasks colonize your thoughts, so that your autistic attention can be present to God, to your body, and to the people in front of you now.

After a year of AI

I’ve been dabbling with Perplexity AI for nearly a year now and decision time is looming. Should I renew my subscription. Or should I look elsewhere (e.g. Halomate)? Or should I swear off AI altogether?

At the moment, I feel no need to look elsewhere. I try to be circumspect in my use of AI, so I have not attempted to exploit the full potential of Perplexity. Therefore, in spite of occasionally being tempted by the latest bells and whistles offered elsewhere, I see no point in starting again with something else.

The question of whether I should abandon AI is less straightforward to answer. There is a real case to be made against its use. As far as I can see, that case boils down to two arguments:

• AI encourages mental laziness. We are tempted to accept what it tells us as true without critical engagement. Often, the output is so polished (at least superficially) that we are tempted to submit it as our own work – hence the deluge of AI slop on the Internet.
• The environmental argument. AI data centres put extreme demands on power and water supplies. They run so hot that they raise temperatures in their locales measurably above what would be expected (at the same time, overheating rivers with waste cooling water). Some have massive backup diesel generators which produce great quantities of air pollution. And these ills are growing exponentially with the AI bubble. On top of this, there is the psychological harm to the humans who are employed (often on low wages in developing countries) to monitor and censor inappropriate outputs.

I’m not terribly bothered about the threat of mental laziness. The crucial point is always to treat the output of AI in the same way as you treat any other secondary source – always insist on references (and always check them) and never plagiarize. In any case, unlike many chatbots, Perplexity AI is essentially an AI-powered search engine and that is how I use it (as a Google search on crystal meth).

But I remain conflicted on the environmental and wider social issues. Yes, AI speeds up my research at a time of life when I may not have very much time left. But does the improved efficiency of my research justify my implicit support for the damage that AI is doing on a global scale? If I were a rugged individualist like so many tech bros, the answer would be an unequivocal ‘yes’. But I’m an Orthodox Christian, so I have to balance the goods of AI (not just my vanishingly small contribution to the sum of human knowledge buts its role in pushing forward the bounds of our knowledge in so many fields) against the environmental and social ills. I’m unable to come to a clear view on this, so I suspect that I will continue to use Perplexity for the time being.

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (25)

Hopko’s 25th maxim, ‘Be faithful in little things’, is especially kind to autistic Orthodox Christians, because so much of your effort is already spent on ‘small’ tasks that others do without thinking. Faithfulness here does not mean achieving spectacular projects or dramatic spiritual experiences; it means quietly doing the next right, keepable thing in front of you, repeatedly. Answering one email, washing a few dishes, saying a short prayer, going to bed at a reasonable hour – these can all be genuine acts of faithfulness when they are done with Christ in mind. Our Lord praised the servant who was faithful over a ‘few things’, and he also sees how much energy apparently ‘little’ acts can cost an autistic nervous system, even when no one else notices.

Because autistic life is often marked by executive dysfunction, fatigue, and an uneven skill profile, this maxim calls for realism and gentleness rather than comparison. You might choose a very small set of daily ‘little things’ as your base rule – praying one psalm or the Lord’s Prayer, doing one piece of housework, stepping outside once – and treat their repetition as more important than their size. Tools like checklists, timers, and visual schedules are not signs of weak faith; they are part of how you can be faithful in the tasks God has given you. When you inevitably drop some of these little things on hard days, the maxim does not invite despair; it pairs with Hopko’s later maxim, ‘When you fall, get up immediately and start over’, so that you can simply resume the small practices tomorrow without dramatic self‑judgement. In this way, being ‘faithful in little things’ becomes a path where your limited energy, your love of routine, and your attention to detail are transfigured into steady, hidden fidelity before God, rather than constant evidence that you are not doing enough.

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (24)

Hopko’s 24th maxim, ‘Be totally honest, first of all with yourself’, implies that we reject lies about God and lies about who you are before him. For autistic Christians, this will mean refusing the false stories that say ‘I am less human, less capable of holiness because I am autistic’ and also the spiritualized denial that pretends your sensory limits, executive dysfunction, meltdowns, and special interests are irrelevant to your life with God. To be honest with yourself is to say plainly, ‘This is what I can do; this is what I cannot do today. This is sin. This is weakness. This is trauma. This is simply how my brain is wired.’ Such honesty is not self‑hatred but alignment with the truth in which God already holds you.

Autistic people are often labelled – ’lazy’, ‘rude’, ‘too intense’, ‘too sensitive’, and so on – and may internalize those judgements or, conversely, retreat into a protective story that rejects criticism. Living this maxim means carefully sifting both your own self‑understanding and others’ words in the light of Christ. You might ask, ‘Where am I excusing real sin by blaming autism? Where am I condemning my God‑given neurology as if it were sin?’; you might keep a journal where you describe your actions in simple, factual terms before adding any interpretation, perhaps checking your conclusions with a trusted person who understands autism. Honesty here includes naming when you are masking, when you are overloaded, when you are dissociating, and when you are choosing selfishness or cruelty in order to make repentance specific and merciful rather than vague, global self‑hatred.

Because many autistic people struggle with alexithymia (difficulty identifying feelings) and with black‑and‑white thinking, ‘being totally honest’ can also mean admitting, ‘I don’t actually know what I feel’, or ‘I see only one interpretation; there may be others.’ This maxim then leans into Hopko’s later counsel to ‘face reality’ and ‘endure the trial of yourself peacefully’: you can bring your confusion, your misperceptions, and your rigid thoughts into the light without pretending to understand more than you do. Practically, that might look like checking your view of a situation with someone you trust (‘Did I come across as angry?’), reviewing your day once in the evening without catastrophizing, or asking God simply: ‘Show me where I am lying to myself’. Over time, this kind of honesty becomes a place of deep safety: you no longer have to maintain a mask before God or yourself, and you discover that the One who sees you most clearly – autistic traits, sins, virtues, and all – is also the One who loves you most.