What’s it like to live with autism? What’s it like to feel
the panic of a mind losing control? What’s it like to interpret
every stimulus from outside oneself as threatening? These are realities
for the autistic and challenges for those who minister to them. It is
a disorder that seems to cut people off from ordinary communication
and shows itself in strange repetitive behaviors and sometimes in violent
outbursts. How to understand it? How to break through those barriers
to communication and connect? This was the question posed in a discussion
in which the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, participated
when he recalled watching a video showing the work of one of the most
experienced therapists in Great Britain and heard her talking about
what she is trying to do with her methods.
The
first thing we saw on the video was a young man, severely disturbed,
beating his head against a wall and then walking fast up and down
the room, twisting and flicking a piece of string. The therapists’
first response was strange: she began to twist and flick a piece of
string as well. When the young man made a noise, so did she; when
he began to do something different, like banging his hand on a table,
she did the same.
The
video showed what happened over two days. By the end of the two days,
the boy had begun to smile at her and to respond when touched. A relation
had been created. And what the therapist said about it was this:
“Autism
arises when the brain senses too much material coming in, too much
information. There’s a feeling of panic; the mind has to regain
control. And the best way of doing this is to close up on yourself
and repeat actions that are familiar; do nothing new, and don’t
acknowledge anything coming from outside. But when the therapist
gently echoes the actions and rhythms, the anxious and wounded mind
of the autistic person sees that there is after all a link with
the outside world that isn’t threatening. Here is someone
doing what I do; the world isn’t just an unfamiliar place
of terror and uncertainty, and when I do this, I can draw out an
answer, an echo; I’m not powerless. And so relationship begins.”
Archbishop
Williams concludes, “to see this sort of thing in action is intensely
moving. This is real mental and spiritual healing at work. But it gives
us a powerful image of what it is we remember at Christmas,” that
at Christmas God broke down the barriers between ourselves and God by
becoming one of us, one with us, one alongside us.
Of course,
all of us want to remember Christmas as a time of happiness and sharing
and peace on earth, a time of wonderful reunions and generosity, and
yet so often it’s not so. Christmas on its own can’t stop
families from cracking under stresses which can be either self-imposed
or simply the environment in which we live. Christmas can’t call
a moratorium on disease. And Christmas won’t make Iraq any safer.
There’s
a very poignant story about one Christmas Eve during World War I when
German and British soldiers laid down their arms and sang Christmas
carols together, but only to return the next day to the bloody slaughter
in the trenches that war had become. And so is the reality of every
Christmas—that we live in a world in desperate need of healing,
of peace, of connecting with God and connecting with one another.
That
reality was every bit as operative in the world into which Jesus was
born. Israel was part of the Roman Empire which exacted taxes from all
its subjects to pay, in part, for those armies which kept those people
subject. That’s what Joseph was doing in Bethlehem. He was being
enrolled in a census for the purposes of taxation. “In those days
a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be
taxed.”
The Romans
had help, however, from their Jewish puppet King Herod. Herod was a
paranoid megalomaniac who stopped at nothing to retain his power. Incredibly
suspicious and jealous, Herod executed members of his immediate family,
including his wife, Mariamne, and favorite son and heir, Antipater.
Herod was the one who tried to manipulate the Wise Men into identifying
this new king they had followed the star to Bethlehem to find. The Wise
Men were warned in a dream not to return to Herod and when Herod discovered
that he had been tricked flew into a furious rage and slaughtered all
of the male children in and around Bethlehem.
Meanwhile,
Joseph too had been warned in a dream and had taken Mary and Jesus to
Egypt as refugees. It all sounds so familiar. And we may well ask ourselves,
“Where is God to be found amid such a world as that and as this?”
When Jesus
was born, God was to be found in that very unlikely place, a manger
in Bethlehem. It was John’s ringing endorsement that the Word
had become flesh and dwelled among us. And God was to be found in that
child’s life described by Harriet Beecher Stowe in this way:
If
we should embody our idea of the son with whom Mary lived in secure
intimacy for thirty years, we should call him LOVE itself. He was
not merely lovely, but he was love. He had a warming, creative power
as to love. He gave birth to new conceptions of love; to a fervor,
a devotion, a tenderness of which before the human soul scarcely knew
its own capacity.
God was
to be found in the very ordinary life of Jesus before his extraordinary
ministry had begun. This was God’s way of saying, “You can
trust me. I am with you in your daily events, in your places of work,
in your homes, in your travel, and in your rest.” But it was assuredly
the extraordinary ministry of Jesus where God was to be found: in Jesus’
teaching, in his healing, in his identification with those at greatest
risk, and then by his willingness to suffer death as that one sacrifice
by which our relationship with God could be eternally secured.
St. Paul
says it so eloquently:
Have
this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though
he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing
to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,
being born in human likeness. And being found in human form he humbled
himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
Like Jesus,
you and I continue to find God in those moments of sacrifice and grace.
It is the therapist connecting with the autistic child mirroring his
uniqueness in order to gain his trust. It is Father Damien who in his
years of work with lepers became a leper himself and thanked God for
his identification with them, taking on their wounds as an act of love.
And God is to be found in the young husband disfiguring his mouth to
kiss and perfectly match the disfigured mouth of his wife in her hospital
room following a stroke.
These
aren’t the usual places we expect to find God, particularly at
this time of year when we tend to expect God to be in our churches and
in the Bible and in hymns of praise and Christmas cards which have scripture
verses on them. But if these are the only places we search for the Lord,
then we’re not looking in the stable at Bethlehem. Perhaps, then,
the Lord will be found at the Good News Soup Kitchen tomorrow where
a number of our parishioners have volunteered to feed 300 people. Perhaps
the Lord will be found in the world’s most dangerous places as
our soldiers are able to talk to their families back home and know how
much they are loved and supported by us. And perhaps the Lord will be
found with those we will soon pray for: “…those who labor
this night on behalf of others: doctors and nurses, police officers
and firefighters, gas station attendants, bus and taxi drivers, and
all those whose work or vocation prevents them from sharing this evening
or tomorrow with those they love.”
For these
are all people in places of serving others, perhaps conscious of how
it is that Jesus served others, giving himself for us, an offering and
sacrifice to god. These are people who show us who God is and what God
is like, because they are like Jesus who showed us who God is and what
God is like.
[Archbishop
Williams concludes]
That’s
what begins at Christmas. It is a baby who has to learn how to be
human by watching; only this baby is the eternal Word of God, who
is watching and learning so that when he speaks God’s transforming
Word we will be able to hear it in our own human language. He is God
so that he has the freedom to heal, to be our “therapist.”
He’s human so that he speaks in terms we can understand, in
the suffering and delight in the humanity that he shares completely
with us. Now we must let him touch us and tell us that there is a
world outside our minds—our pride and fear and guilt. It is
called the Kingdom of God.
Amen.
