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.
