November 18, 2005
Spectrum
On a recent Sunday after the celebration and when everyone else had gone out for coffee and cush, my five-year-old grandson Thomas, our family’s Autism Poster Child, walked over and stood behind the altar.
Apparently unaware that anyone might be watching and barely peering over the top, he raised both his arms as if in blessing. Then he moved quietly to the pulpit, stood, and raised only one arm as if to make some point known only to him. But that’s not all. When it is his turn to receive the bread at the Eucharist, he often “relays” a piece to each of the other four members of his family, only then taking one for himself.
In our blessed and necessary penchant for naming things (a hangover from an early Edenic privilege, I reckon), we call autism a “spectrum disorder.” I take that to mean that the way the world usually becomes for us is so disarrayed for a person with autism as often to approach sensual chaos. Such a constant and all-inclusive waking experience is surely beyond the imagination of any one of us whose senses are not so aligned.
So far as we know, we human beings may be the only creatures in our part of this vast and largely unknown universe — though we dare not presume it — who are commissioned and, I think, honored to be the occasions for the cosmos becoming conscious of itself. This might, I should think, give us the possibility and privilege of somehow knowing how intimately connected we are with the very elements which give us and all the rest of creation a life. I can only hope to mature into a more reverent stewardship before that reality and especially before those of us who through autism may have an even more acute participation in and appreciation for such mystery. Teach us, Thomas, teach us.