Fifteen years and a lifetime ago, I was completing two years of post-grad work to obtain a certificate of specialty in pediatric dentistry. Those two years were so awful they propelled me from Alabama to New York City, and they were awful for many reasons, but one thing I did right — or so I thought — was my major research paper. It focused on autism and dentistry and was, I believed, both well-researched and -written.
If I could find that paper now, I suspect I’d want to delete the entire file. Because about a decade after I submitted that paper, my older son was diagnosed as autistic — and that was when knowledge went from factual to personal.
James’s diagnosis kicked off about a year or two of denial from me. I shied away from the word autism because of the stigma I thought it carried, not aware that I was part of creating that stigma simply by distancing myself from his diagnosis. After a friend of a friend told me I’d been given a gift and that I could read all the books in the world but what I really needed was to read my child, things began to change. I watched the way James arranged his cars in perfect lines; how he made toys out of everyday objects; how he angled his head and squinted to see patterns of light I hadn’t noticed. I also started to embrace words like superpower. I wrote about him endlessly on my personal blog, and people responded to my singularly positive message. Meanwhile, I still didn’t understand James. I didn’t feel like I knew him.
As he got older, things changed more. For one thing, James began to speak — a blessing we’d prayed years for. We moved to Australia and he started school and made friends. He completed multiple years of behavioral therapy (something about which I’m still ambivalent). There were silver linings all around as I read books and him, but much of our efforts — much of my efforts — were on making him more “normal,” more like those around him. On creating a kid who was easier to raise rather than understanding the one I had. When he was in first grade, his therapist overheard another kid say how glad he was that he didn’t have autism. My heart shattered, then grew resolved: maybe it wasn’t James who needed to change. Maybe the world did.
I switched up my reading material and followed autistic people on Twitter instead of just paying attention to non-autistics who talked about autistics. I listened to voices I’d never heard before, maybe at one point had never even known existed or could speak like this. I became educated about the language autistic people prefer to be used to describe them, and how they experience the world. I dropped words like superpower, with its lack of nuance, and embraced words like disability, and I said them around my kids so that they would too, without shame. I talked to James’s class every year — not just about how great he is, but about how hard it can be to be him, and not just that he’s different, but about why he’s different.
There was a time when I decided that he would never know the word autism. Now he knows it, and says it, and identifies it, and sees both its positives and challenges. He embraces and rues it, and I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. It’s how I feel about … a lot of life. About my depression and anxiety — the creative gifts they provide and the joy they steal. About motherhood, depending on whether I’m cuddled with my kids on the couch or wiping their vomit from the wall. About marriage, depending on whether I’m bantering with my husband like we were made to do this, or seeing straight through to his nonsense as he directly views my own. As a family of four, we have spent untold moments shedding tears over what makes life hard, and utterly transcendent ones marveling over victories we never would have noticed otherwise. I am convinced his younger brother’s deep awareness and kindness are due in large part to James’s autism even as Will asks sometimes in frustration how we can fix it. We are in a real, and honest, place, and we’re waiting for the rest of the world to get there, too.
Which is why I was so shocked, and ultimately pleased, to see the creative choice Dallas Jenkins made in portraying the apostle Matthew as autistic in The Chosen. To be honest, I was a bit shocked to find myself watching the show at all after experiences with Christian entertainment in the past (I’ll never get back the 90 minutes I spent watching God’s Not Dead), but I’d heard enough to make me curious. And though there were definitely some moments that my kids might call cringe (Jesus jokingly saying, “Too soon?” is a linguistic anachronism I just can’t get behind), I was grateful for the way the series delves into each character’s story, particularly Matthew’s and its implications on his interactions with the rest of the group and, ultimately, Jesus himself.
In one moving scene, Jesus enlists Matthew to help him transcribe his Sermon on the Mount. Once the message takes shape, Jesus calls Matthew over and tells him he’s got it — a map for people to find him. He speaks the Beatitudes while a montage of his disciples and their personal struggles brings the words to life. He takes special care to look directly at Matthew as he speaks the last verse, the one for those who are reviled and persecuted. Once he finishes, Matthew asks how this is a map, and Jesus replies, “If someone wants to find me, those are the groups they should look for.”
The fullness of love — in fact, the presence of the very source of love — cannot be separated from the experiences of those we could so easily approach from a superior position, a “but for the grace of God go I” preceding a hand reaching downward to help someone up. But in the kingdom of heaven there is no them. Much research in the field of neurodiversity, and conversations among neurodivergent people, centers currently around changing the view of autistic people as having social deficits and focusing more on the ways both neurodivergent and neurotypical people can move to understand each other better; how behavior therapy to “fix” autistic behavior is actually kind of abhorrent; how society shouldn’t be gauged by default to neurotypical settings. In his Substack that should be required reading on the matter, Jordan Griesbeck writes, “we have traded Jesus’ call to love (John 13:34-35) for society’s call to include. And in doing so, we have also refused to receive love from those we are at such pains to include. We have not asked: what if I need them just as much as they need me?”
Jesus didn’t give disabled people his pity, but he sure as hell gave them his presence, as any cursory reading of the gospels reveals. He made a point of interacting with and touching and knowing them, and this knowing translated not to condescension or charity, but to love.
On a recent trip home from the psychologist (a place we might never have gone without James’s diagnosis, and a moment we never would have had), I listened to my boys in the backseat as Will told James he was starting to understand that James felt overwhelmed easily and how hard that must be. “Wow,” James whispered in reply. “I didn’t know you knew.” Two outstretched hands, not down but across.
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4 responses to “In the Kingdom of God There Is No Them”
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Stephanie,
Thank you for this article! I resonated very much with your words here. Excited to see more of your work and voice on autism and disability! Much needed
So incredibly good
Well, Stephanie, the tears are pouring down my cheeks. Your article and the clip from The Chosen – pure, pure grace. Thank you. – Jim (Munroe)
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