Dear John,

Back to the Bible story.

In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve rebelled against God, and so were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Because of that, they lost their access to one of the best things in the Garden – the Tree of Life. In fact, the way back was guarded by cherubim with a flaming sword!

The Tree of Life is one of those incredibly powerful images that has resonated right through history, even though. Genesis doesn’t tell us much detail about what this Tree of Life was or did. It seems that eating the fruit would have made Adam and Eve immortal, and being banned from reaching it led eventually to their deaths (Gen 3:22). It was probably an inspiration for myths like the Fountain of Youth.

Having access to the Tree of Life is seen as a perfect idyllic life – with things as they were before everything went wrong. When the Tree of Life appears in a vision at the end of the Bible, we’re told that it’s leaves will lead to the healing of the nations (Rev 22:2).

And there’s a clear trajectory in the Bible for how to get there. In the Tabernacle and the Temple, there’s a room called the Holy Place which is decorated to look like the Garden of Eden, complete with trees, and a curtain decorated with cherubim. And the only way to reach that room is by doing sacrifices where animals die in your place to take away your sins, and symbolic washing and purification. All of that points to Jesus and the cross and baptism. That is the way to the final Tree of life in Revelation 22, where Eden symbolism and Temple symbolism abound. Jesus also promises those who keep holding onto him through persecution and suffering will receive the right to eat from the Tree of Life (Rev 2:7).

But there’s also another strand in the Bible around the Tree of Life, which isn’t as clearly developed, but is still there. In Proverbs 3:18 it says that “Wisdom is a tree of life to those who embrace her.” Wisdom in Proverbs is the process of making sense of the world by using God’s word and also practical experience, both our own and that of others. Elsewhere in Proverbs, several good things are described as “a tree of life” – the consequence of righteous living, fulfilled desire and words that heal.

What does the “Tree of Life” mean for autistic people like us? It means healing – something that can undo the negative physical, psychological and social effects of autism without undoing the positives.

In other words, although we still have to live with the consequences of the Fall for now, there is a future way to the full restoration of what was lost, and even better, because of what Jesus has done. But there is also a way to have something of a partial undoing of the effects of the Fall before the distant future. In this present life, there isn’t an immediate way back to the Tree of Life, but there are ways to get to a tree of life, by using wisdom.

A simple example of that – one of the consequences of the Fall that is directly mentioned in Genesis 3 is women experiencing pain in childbirth. And science gives us ways to reduce the pain and make it safer. Science is part of wisdom – making sense of the world around us from experience. It gives us back some of the good stuff that we lost as a result of the Fall.

The same applies to autism. The bad bits of autism are a consequence of the Fall, and we can use science and other types of wisdom to reduce them, as well as looking forwards to future healing where it is needed.

All the best,

Future John