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.
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