Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (5)

Sorry about the delay in posting the fifth part of this series. This was due to a health issue (or which I may say more in a future blog). So, Hopko’s Fifth Maxim:

Repeat a Short Prayer When Your Mind Is Not Occupied

Repeating the Jesus Prayer or a short invocation like ‘Lord have mercy’ is a simple discipline  that anyone can adopt. However, for an autistic Christian, this maxim offers something profoundly helpful: a way to transform those ‘in-between’ moments – waiting, driving, washing dishes – into a channel for God’s presence without demanding the kind of real-time social attention or environmental adaptation that other spiritual practices might require. Rather than fighting your mind’s tendency to wander into rumination or intrusive thoughts, the short prayer becomes a gentle anchor, something to say when you have ‘spare’ cognitive bandwidth. Importantly, this practice aligns beautifully with how many autistic brains naturally work: through repetition, verbal stimming, and ritualized language. What neurotypical spirituality might call ‘discipline’, your neurology may experience as something closer to a calming rhythm – the verbal equivalent of the rocking or repetitive movements that help restore equilibrium when overwhelmed.

Executive dysfunction in autism often means that your attention does not naturally organize itself according to neurotypical priorities; instead, you may find your mind either hyperfocused on one interest or scattered across competing thoughts with no clear hierarchy. A short prayer – whether ‘Jesus’, ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy’, or ‘Lord have mercy’ – bypasses the need to consciously generate novel language or hold complex theological concepts in mind. The repetition becomes a structure that organizes your scattered attention, much like a prayer rope or a rhythm organizes body movement. For some autistic people, the Jesus Prayer can approach the quality of a verbal stim – something you repeat 50, 100, or more times in a single stretch. This is not laziness or vain repetition, but rather the prayer becoming ‘almost like breathing’, as monks have practised for centuries. At that threshold of pure repetition, you may notice something remarkable: the barrier between your thoughts and God dissolves; the prayer ceases to be something you perform and becomes something you are breathing.

​A short prayer works best when you establish it with deliberate simplicity and then trust that regularity will do the work. Choose one short form – not five variations that must be mentally rotated – and let that singularity become your anchor. The goal is not to achieve some rarefied state of contemplation during these moments, but rather to keep a thread of remembrance tethered to God while your hands and your rational mind attend to ordinary tasks. When your thoughts wander – and they will – rather than fighting yourself or feeling shame, simply notice where your mind has gone and gently return it to the prayer, as you would redirect a child’s attention without anger. Over time, this practice becomes less a struggle against your natural restlessness and more a sanctuary your mind returns to on its own, especially during moments of anxiety or sensory overload, when the repetition stabilizes your nervous system as surely as any formal liturgy.

Intentional camera movement: a note

Over the past few months (and thanks largely to Simon Ellingworth’s Mono Vision Challenges), I have begun to discover the potential of intentional camera movement (ICM) for creating really interesting photographs. By using a relatively slow shutter speed and carefully controlled camera movement, it is possible to turn an ordinary looking scene into something much more expressionistic or create a dreamlike or nightmarish image.

I have just started experimenting with ICM and it is not nearly as easy as it sounds (though I find it easier on my Fuji X70 than on my Nikon D5500). It may not be easy, but it certainly feels more spontaneous than the effort involved in creating yet another pin-sharp image of Buachaille Etive Mòr!

Here is one of my early efforts:

As Doug Chinnery, one of the masters of ICM, puts it ‘Let go. Enjoy not being encumbered by a tripod. Free yourself from the 'rules' of photography and see where the images take you.’

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (4)

Say the Lord’s Prayer several times each day.

This is a direct corollary of Hopko’s third maxim. For anyone putting together a simple (Orthodox) prayer rule, one non-negotiable element is the Lord’s Prayer. It encapsulates all the essential elements of a prayer rule.

The structure of this prayer directly addresses the executive function difficulties many neurodivergent individuals experience with spontaneous or open-ended prayer. Rather than facing the anxiety of ‘what should I pray about now,’ it offers a complete, theologically rich prayer that Christ himself taught and that can be prayed with confidence in its perfection. The familiarity of the words provide a stable framework that frees us from the anxiety of trying to formulate an extempore form of words and allows us to focus on the real purpose of prayer, which is communion with God.

The repetitive nature of this practice aligns well with autistic patterns of deep focus and comfort with ritual. Praying the Lord’s Prayer at consistent times – upon waking, before meals, when transitioning between activities, and before sleep – creates prayerful punctuation marks that structure your day with sacred rhythm. This isn’t mindless repetition but a disciplined returning to foundational truths: God’s fatherhood, the holiness of his name, the promise of his kingdom, daily provision, forgiveness, and deliverance.

For those who tend to hyperfocus on special interests, the Lord’s Prayer said consistently throughout the day serves as an anchor to ground us in sacred reality when something threatens to consume our entire mental landscape. And being concise, the prayer is manageable even on days when sensory overload or mental fatigue make longer prayer feel impossible.

Remember that Hopko’s second maxim (‘Pray as you can, not as you think you must’) always applies. If you need to stim while saying the Lord’s Prayer, or to pray it silently rather than aloud, or while wearing noise-cancelling headphones, or written out rather than spoken, these adaptations honour rather than diminish the practice. The goal isn’t performance but communion, and the Lord’s Prayer provides a neurodivergent-friendly vessel for that communion precisely because its structure liberates us from the complexities of spontaneous prayer while opening a direct line to the God who created neurodivergent minds as good and capable of deep spiritual life.

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (3)

Have a keepable rule of prayer done by discipline.

Hopko's third maxim follows directly from the second: ‘pray as you can, not as you think you must’. While the second maxim frees the autistic Christian from the tyranny of unrealistic expectations, this one offers a practical pathway forward. It suggests that we establish a concrete, repeatable pattern of prayer that becomes woven into the fabric of our existing daily life.

When Hopko uses the word ‘discipline’ here, it carries its original meaning derived from the Greek askesis. It is (athletic) training rather than punishment. Athletes do not train when they feel like it, but according to a structured regimen that builds capability over time. Likewise, a rule of prayer is not a test that you either pass or fail, but a steady regimen that gradually forms the heart. Autistic people often naturally gravitate towards routine and systematic thinking, so this approach aligns with how the autistic neurological operating system actually functions. The need for predictability and sequential structure become precisely the tools through which disciplined prayer becomes sustainable.

​One practical adaptation for autistics is to attach prayer to an existing daily habit. This works because it exploits what neuroscience confirms about executive function and routine. Structured routines externalize executive function, creating environmental supports that compensate for areas of neurological difference rather than requiring constant willpower or decision-making. When you anchor a prayer practice to an existing fixed point in your day – ‘After I brush my teeth, I say the Trisagion’ or ‘When I pour my morning coffee, I pray the Jesus Prayer’ – you are not adding a separate, effortful task to your day. Instead, you are creating a linked chain of action, where the established habit triggers the prayer almost automatically. Ancient monastic tradition understood something similar: monks structured their days with the Divine Office at specific times, not because arbitrary timing mattered, but because regularity of structure supports the life of prayer. For an autistic Christian, recognizing this may actually clarify something important: your way of thinking is not a departure from Orthodox discipline but potentially a form that naturally aligns with how the tradition envisions prayer being sustained in daily life.

​Sooner or later, we will fail to keep our rule. The Coptic monk Matthew the Poor taught that ascetic discipline must never become a source of despair or self-condemnation. If it does, it has ceased to be a path towards God and become an ego-driven performance instead. So, instead of indulging in a spiral of guilt, we are called simply to reset our rule the next day (cf. St Benedict’s advice about always beginning again). For autistic Christians, who often struggle with perfectionism, literal rule-following, and difficulty with self-compassion when mistakes occur, this explicit permission to reset without guilt is not a minor pastoral aside. On the contrary, it is central to the spiritual health of the practice. You will sometimes forget. Your routine will be disrupted by schedule changes, sensory overwhelm, or the simple unpredictability of embodied life. The discipline is not in never missing the prayer; the discipline is in consistently returning to it. This is what the fourth-century Desert Fathers meant when they spoke of ascetic practice: not sinless achievement, but humble, repeated turning back to God. Missing your rule of prayer is not a failure of disciplined life; failure would lie in failing to begin again, day after day.

John of Kronstadt: saint and/or sinner?

The Russian Orthodox Church has recently celebrated the feast of St John of Kronstadt. I suspect that for many in the West, he must seem an unlikely saint. Yes, he was a shining example of great piety. He rejuvenated the Russian Orthodox Church’s attitude to communion. Arguably, he was a key factor in the late nineteenth-century revival of that Church. And he invested considerable time and energy over decades caring for the physical and spiritual needs of the people of Kronstadt. But he was also closely associated with the Black Hundreds – a network of reactionary Russian groups that instigated pogroms and carried out assassinations of their political opponents. He even went so far as to publicly bless the banners of the Union of the Russian People – an important part of the Black Hundreds – giving spiritual legitimacy to a group denounced as a terrorist organization by the then Metropolitan of St Petersburg. It is clear from his writings that he endorsed their ideology of ‘autocracy, Orthodoxy, and the Russian people’ (beliefs all too familiar from the contemporary Russkii Mir ideology used to justify the invasion of Ukraine). And, while not directly involved in its creation, he was associated with the circle of antisemitic intellectuals that gave rise to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

So, saint or sinner? To the Western mind, this is clearly an either/or issue. This either/or approach is seen clearly in Karl Barth’s reaction to the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three endorsing Germany’s stance in the First World War: seeing his teacher Adolf von Harnack’s signature on the manifesto led him to reject the liberal theology he had learned at university. For Barth, ‘by their fruits shall ye know them’: Harnack’s endorsement of German aggression completely vitiated the theology he had taught.

Over the past century, this either/or approach has only become more extreme in Western culture. Today, it seems that we are either saints or sinners. An intemperate email from their youth is enough to destroy the career of a senior politician. And the discovery of criminal behaviour or an association with criminals will effectively cancel anything good that a person might have achieved in their life. In short, in its treatment of good and evil, Western culture has become dualistic, if not Manichaean.

So, how can the Orthodox Church continue to venerate John of Kronstadt? And he is by no means the only sinful saint in the Orthodox calendar. Think of St Constantine the Great (who had several family members murdered), or St Olga of Kiev (who instigated the genocide of the Drevlians), or the recently canonized St Dumitru Stăniloae (who was associated with the Nazi Iron Guard of Romania). It is a given of Orthodox anthropology that even the holiest of individuals remains a sinner. This is why in all our worship we approach God as repentant sinners. It is a patristic principle that holiness does not imply infallibility; even the greatest saints remain vulnerable to the passions and ideological delusions of their historical context. Thus, the Church venerates saints for their authentic struggle toward theosis, not for their perfection of judgement in temporal affairs. But this implies that we can only continue to venerate such men and women if we adopt what John Meyendorff called a ‘critical traditionalism’, remaining rooted in patristic faith while honestly confronting historical failures. This means:

• Recognizing that sanctity is found in the struggle for theosis, not in political judgements.
• Explicitly repudiating their sins, critically examining ourselves for similar tendencies, and repenting whenever they are venerated.
• Studying their spiritual and theological writings critically in light of the Church’s living tradition.

Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (2)

Pray as you can, not as you think you must.

This is Fr Thomas Hopko’s adaptation of advice from Dom John Chapman: ‘Pray as you can, not as you can’t.’ Personally, I prefer Chapman’s more concise version.

Neurotypical Christians often seem quite dogmatic about the ‘right’ way to pray. Orthodox and Catholic spiritual advisers offer those who come to them more or less complex rules of prayer. While Protestant pastors commend things like the ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication) formula or encourage their flocks to spend time every day interceding for family, friends, community, nation, and world. And in charismatic circles there is an expectation that glossolalia will be an essential part of true Christian prayer. In some cases, these are effectively presented as commands. More often, they are offered as recommendations for those wishing to live a ‘normal’ Christian life. But, for neurodivergent Christians, this advice comes across as pressure to conform to a neurotypical ‘ideal’.

This maxim sets us free from all that. What matters is that we pray as we can and not strive and fail to achieve what is for us an impossible ‘ideal’. If executive dysfunction makes a long prayer rule seem impossible, simply saying the Jesus Prayer or venerating an icon is not a failure; it is a victory over inertia.

For those facing sensory overload or autistic shutdown, this maxim validates non-verbal prayer. There is no reason that our prayers should be verbalized. St. Isaac the Syrian speaks of a state of prayer where ‘movements of the tongue and the heart cease’, and the soul prays through presence and silence. When an autistic Christian is in a state of shutdown and loses the ability to speak, standing silently before an icon or holding a prayer rope is enough. God does not need words to understand the heart: ‘You understand my thoughts from afar’ (Ps 138:2). In such moments, the mere act of remaining in God’s presence is true prayer.

The second part of the maxim allows us to see the limited energy that often accompanies neurodivergence in a new light. It is not ‘laziness’ (acedia) but rather the ‘widow’s mite’ (see Luke 21:1–4). Just as Christ praised the widow who gave all she had, so he accepts the prayer capacity available to us in the present moment. If your social and sensory battery is drained by the demands of navigating a neurotypical world, a five-minute prayer rule might cost you as much effort as an hour-long rule costs someone else.

As Fr. Thomas Hopko often pointed out, God is not a ‘legalist’ checking boxes, but a physician looking for a contrite heart. He wants you to come to him as you are, not hiding behind a neurotypical performance. So, adapting your prayer to your needs – using short prayers, pacing or rocking or otherwise stimming, using noise-cancelling headphones to create a quiet sanctuary – is not ‘cheating’; it is the wise application of economy to your specific situation.

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.