Dear John,
So is autism your fault?
There’s an old prayer of confession that goes as follows:
Almighty God, our heavenly Father,
we have sinned against you
and against our neighbour
in thought and word and deed,
through negligence, through weakness,
through our own deliberate fault.
The prayer gives lots of different types of sin. We tend to think of sins as deeds that we commit against others by our own deliberate fault (I hit you deliberately), but according to this prayer, sins include things we should have thought towards God but didn’t through weakness. (I should have thought to say thank you for the nice weather but didn’t because I had a headache.) The category of “sin” is a lot broader than we usually think.
And the Old Testament recognises that too. It’s still sin if we didn’t mean to do it (Lev 5:15). It’s still sin if we don’t know that it’s wrong (Lev 5:17). And strikingly, although disability was never identified as sin, the disabled were still excluded from serving as priests (Lev 21:17-21). Some of that was doubtless because being a priest was hard physical work – there were lots of dead animals to move around. But that doesn’t explain the full list of disabilities excluded from the priesthood.
I think it’s more that it’s all to do with broken-ness. Since the Fall, all the world is damaged by the graffiti we have drawn. Some of it is stuff we do deliberately wrong. Some of it is things we forget to do. Even the law of the land still recognises criminal negligence, for example.
But some of it is also to do with things we “should” be able to do and just can’t. All of it is a consequence of us no longer being in God’s image. All of it is fallen. All of it is broken.
All of it is my fault. Maybe not in the sense of being to blame for it, but the word “fault” is much broader than that. If the wiring in something is faulty – that doesn’t mean the copper and plastic wires are morally culpable, but they still have a fault.
I’m not as good relationally or with sensory stuff as I would be if I was properly in God’s image. And that’s my fault, even though I’m not to blame for it.
The same is of course also true of people who aren’t autistic, with all the ways that they are broken. They aren’t as good at using words precisely, or at doing maths as they would be if they were properly in God’s image. And that’s their fault.
All the best,
Future John
Fearfully & Wonderfully Broken is a series of letters from an autistic pastor to his teenage self, covering topics like faith, autism, disability and how to cope with life.
Most of the titles are deliberately wrong, and/or provocative (see letter 2).
John Allister is the vicar of St Jude’s Church in Nottingham, England.
At age 18, he was a maths/science geek who didn’t realise he was autistic.