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.

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.