As mentioned earlier the symposium on Autism and Religion will be taking place in Aberdeen mid December. The first draft of my paper has been sent out with the others so a lot of reading over the next week or two. Then two days of inter-disciplinary critique, insight, encouragement and collaborative discussion from a number of perspectives. It's clear from the comments section in this blog, and several personal emails, that there are a number of churches where there is a felt need to understand how people with autism can be welcomed and supported within churches which are by definition places of communal and relational activity.
As I have been reading and thinking about a Christian understanding of humanity and personal identity, the expereince of the person with autism, and the Christian church as the community of Jesus, I've become even more persuaded that the word 'community' can become dangerously unexamined as an assumption of what God calls us to be. That's why I call the church the 'community of Jesus', using the possessive case (it belongs to Jesus, indeed is the Body of Christ), and therefore also the community that seeks to embody the living presence and lived teaching of Jesus, incarnate, crucified, risen and exalted, and present as promised by the Spirit, at the gatherings in his name.
What defines the community of Jesus is not the ideal of community, or the working out of community, or the consolidation and promotion of a particular kind of community. What defines the community of Jesus is the presence, the living, active, guiding, enabling presence of Jesus. If community is the goal of Christian togetherness, the person with autism is likely to be marginalised, or socialised into certain activities and practices which express the communal life of the people of God rather than their own inner life. Such shared activities and practices are good, essential, in crucial ways definitive for the Church - but not everyone can participate in such a self-conscious, relationally interactive, communally fulfilling way. It is at this point I wonder if we are required, as the community of Jesus,and thus by the imperatives of Christ-like love and welcome, to ask whether there are other ways for the person with autism to be enabled to express who they are, ways that both accommodate their impairments and yet seek to discover with them, with imaginative, compassionate and resourceful welcome, how to encourage them to express who they are in relation to God. In the community of Jesus, such hospitality will inevitably be kenotic, self-emptying, surrendering the rights of the community for the sake of the one who is to be welcomed as Christ.
And therein lies the radical trajectory of my current thinking about community, self-fulfilment, and spirituality. The person with autism, by their incapacity to participate in the full range of communal interactive and relational practices, highlights one of the dangers of making 'community' an unexamined assumption of church life. When 'community' becomes an end in itself, it needs the disruptive corrective of the radically inclusive Kingdom of God. Church communities at best are a means to that great End, and Ending, when God will be all in all.
However, I'm still thinking.....pondering.....reflecting.....and I hope, learning.
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