Asperger’s and Spirituality

I can still clearly remember the day my father baptized me.  We stood in a real river, with my father’s parishioners lined up on the shore to watch.  I don’t remember exactly how old I was at the time, but I know I couldn’t have been older than seven or eight.  Still, I understood the significance of what I was doing because my dad had explained it to me so explicitly.  He then asked me to proclaim my faith out loud, to our audience on the shore.  I was nervous, so I mumbled my beliefs under my breath.  My father gently corrected me.  “You need to tell them Kristine,” he said as he motioned to the shoreline.  I looked up and bravely proclaimed my faith in Jesus.  And then my father fully submerged me under the water and lifted me back to my feet.

My father was a brilliant social misfit, an “autistic savant”.  (See Autism in Family History.)  He once had his IQ measured in the 150 range.  He taught himself Greek and Hebrew, and could translate the Bible from its original language.  He was an absolutely amazing Bible teacher, and he had the pure faith of a child.

Years later, after my dad had been misdiagnosed with a mental illness and my parents had divorced, I questioned God’s existence.  My father had more reasons to denounce God than most people do.  His life was hard, and he never found the help he needed.  Yet his faith was solid, and he dismissed my unbelief with the wave of his hand. He always knew the correct scripture to soothe my doubt.

My father grew ill during my college years, and I was there with him when he went from this world to the next.  He faced death like he faced life, with faith.  There was all the proof of an omnipotent God I could ever ask for.

Just as I was once impressed with the childlike faith that I saw in my father, I am impressed with the spiritual maturity I see now in my son.  He asks questions and understands spiritual theology well beyond his years.  I am unsure exactly what causes this spiritual insight in people with Asperger’s syndrome.  It could be the tendency to take things literally or to think of life in black and white terms.  It could be that faith is refined through hardship and suffering.  I am uncertain of its cause, but grateful to have been blessed twice now with a true interpretation of God and of life.