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.