ORDER, CHAOS, AND LITURGICAL AUTISM

For my whole life, I’ve been an autistic person (“autist” for short), but the pervasive unintelligibility of my autistic traits to myself and others long prevented me from recognizing and claiming this identity.

Here is how I describe autism.

Autism, frequently medicalized as “Autism Spectrum Disorder,” is an umbrella term for a range of partially understood neurological differences that impact things like attention, cognition, emotion, relationships, and the ability to make a living in a capitalist hell-scape.

Autists often have strong convictions or don't follow convention. They are often Queer. They may not know what to do with their hands, and therefore hold them like T-rex arms. They may collect and recite obscure facts. They may be hyperverbal, non-verbal, celibate, or polyamorous.

Non-autistic people sometimes experience autists as “unpleasant,” “self-absorbed,” “weird,” etc. This is the way autism is often described in society and in clinical literature, where it is considered above all a disability, rather than an identity. 

There are millions of autists, most of whom are undiagnosed. As they learn to function in the world, many autists subconsciously learn strategies to cover up (“mask”) their autistic traits and are never detected by the medical establishment, particularly if they are not white and male.

Barriers to medical diagnosis—such as high cost, long waiting lists, and a neuropsychology industry that relies too much on outdated understandings of how autism really presents in people—have led to many autists self-identifying without a medical diagnosis, often with the help of other autists who just seem to find each other.

We attempt to center autism in the public consciousness, first and foremost, as an identity, but it is an uphill battle, and not without stigma and distrust from many with institutionalist leanings—people who, for reasons of social station or educational attainment, are inclined to believe uncritically whatever the establishment teaches them.

We try to resist relying on unjust, ableist systems of gatekeeping that would have us define and prove our “disability” relative to capitalist notions of “productivity,” “usefulness,” and “respectability” that we do not agree with.

The best autism resources are created by individuals who identify as autistic (with or without a diagnosis), who are getting the word out about the diversity of autistic experiences and the breadth of possible autistic identities. Some people I follow—whom I find very edifying about autism and useful in helping me unpack my internalized ableism—are Neurodivergent Rebel; Tyla Grant; Angry, Asian, and Autistic; and Christian Swenson, among others.

I’ve fundamentally never felt “at home” anywhere.

Augustine of Hippo famously says to God, “[O]ur heart is restless until it rests in you” (I.i.1). But even working in God-adjacent industries (hospital chaplaincy and liturgical singing), I’m still restless. I’ve wandered from diocese to diocese, health system to health system—and in my practice as a musician, denomination to denomination. I’ve even enjoyed singing the occasional Jewish service as of late.

And yet, a constant that weaves everything together for me, between the clinical work and religious singing, is liturgy. I am either bringing liturgy to my patients in the form of prayer (in the words of a former spiritual director, at the “altar of the bedside”); or I am participating in liturgy as a singer, even if it’s not my native Anglican liturgy.

Looking at my life through the lens of autistic identity, I’m able to re-examine my relationship to the Christian worship I know and love—and why it is, really, that I keep coming back to liturgy.

Washed-up liturgy nut that I am, could it be that liturgy—in whatever form it takes—is my provisional home on earth?

Christian Swenson, one of my trusted autistic gurus who happens to be LDS (Mormon), recently posted a video on his YouTube channel, entitled “Why Autistic People Watch Stuff on a Loop” (January 13, 2022). His videos on “autism, autistic consciousness, and life on the autism spectrum” are gold.

I have written about my love of routine. It is a frequent topic of conversation in the autistic community. In this video, Christian unpacks it as a therapeutic practice uniquely suited to many autistic minds.

Drawing on common autistic and neurodiverse experiences—e.g., difficulty with interpreting social cues; finding visual and auditory stimuli overwhelming; a brain filled with disconnected, scattered thoughts; and resulting emotional meltdowns or shutdowns—Christian describes autism as “a fear of what we cannot predict and what we can’t order because it’s just too much.” Thus, overwhelmed in a sea of sensory overload, we “fight back” by grounding ourselves as often as possible in environments of “routine, ritual, predictability.”

In other words, the autistic individual finds themselves caught between “order and chaos, predictability and novelty, background and foreground”—the last dichotomy drawing on the dynamic from which “autism” gets its name: a disorder (“-ism”) whereby a person has trouble distinguishing their self (Greek autos) from other selves and from the environment they inhabit.

So listening to the same songs over and over again, watching the same TV shows, or eating the same foods every day, is ultimately “a defense against a world that is overwhelming, chaotic, and unpredictable.“ Repetition of all kinds creates an environment of safety for autistic people who otherwise would not be able to feel safe.

Liturgy—particularly in the parts of the Anglican world most familiar to me—feels to me like just such an environment. With its repetitions, cycles, and familiar contours, I know what to expect. I can rely on prayers, music, and Bible readings to recur, time after time, creating an environment where I will never be caught off guard.

Could it be this experience of safety in the liturgy that kept me coming back, even in the years when I did not believe in God? Is my love of routine the vector through which God lets me experience the safety, the peace, that only God can provide?

For me, maybe.

But liturgy isn’t for me alone. It’s meant to be for everybody. What makes it particularly accessible to me might make it feel less accessible to somebody else.

That’s why I like where Christian takes his argument next. He posits that the creation of safe environments through repetition should not be the be-all-and-end-all of autistic existence. It is a great strategy at fostering comfort when needed, but ultimately must help equip us to deal with the chaos of the world, not reject it at every turn.

This is consistent with an influential understanding of autism as espoused by Dr. Temple Grandin, who advocates for the importance of “stretching” autistic children beyond their comfort zones in order to maximize their ability to navigate, and prosper in, a world that is full of novel challenges.

Accordingly, the point, Christian says, is that autistic people—fortified by regular disciplines of order and predictability—can thereby be empowered to feel more comfortable letting chaos and novelty, little by little, into other parts of their lives.

Could it be that Christian liturgy—insofar as it contains various degrees of “order”—can help us all do something similar—to befriend chaos wherever we find it?

Could liturgy equip us to embrace, even love, the chaos of the world, to meet its needs no matter how unpredictable?

Could we love order and subordinate it to truth when needed, remembering that there are other ways of doing things? Might we even allow for some chaos in our liturgy?

We worship God as one who made order out of chaos. But is he not also the God who subverted the reigning world order by defeating death? That is a delightful chaos of its own.

One time, in a professional review as a chaplain, I stated my belief in God as a God of perfect order. A rabbi colleague gently challenged me:

“But what if God is in the chaos?”

Touché, I thought.

We believe in a God for whom nothing is too much—a God who sustains the world in all of its beauty and disorder. I may be overwhelmed, but God will never be. The truth is, God meets me in my overwhelm, right where I am, and has already said, “All shall be well.”

This is good news, not just for autists like me, but for everyone.