Published on 12, July, 2020
Let me say from the start that I have a strong faith and although I’m willing to discuss it, I have not started this thread to try and evangelise anyone. Simply I’d like to discuss with other autistic Christians how they cope with church, other Christians and trying to resolve their head around everything.
My dad was agnostic and my mother nominally atheist, but the nuns at the convent had been abusive.
I approached the local vicar for confirmation at 15. To be honest, most of my religiosity was fuelled by a fear of death. Alas, there were no thunderclap of revelation at confirmation.
Just before 18 I had a sudden mental health crisis, after reading about the atrocities that the old testament Yahweh really got up to. I felt a massive terror that an evil and insane God had set humanity up so that we were all doomed to fail his unfair tests anyway. The RI teacher went beyond the call of duty to keep me sane! And I didn't appreciate how difficult it must have been for her, skirting round the big question of heresy.
I couldn't go back after that, but unfortunately had less-than happy run-in with other systems of belief.. I had no idea how much of a sense of power certain kinds of people can derive from messing with your head, or playing on certain kinds of fear.
At 15 I had a very religious cousin, who was also partly responsible for the confirmation. She once said that everyone had a church that was right for them I thought she meant a small gothic building somewhere, in Hungarian at least there is a separate word for the community rather than a building! Well, over the Covid time, one such community in California opened its doors, or rather Zoom to Zoomers. That's been an interesting step forward.
When my local parish in Rural Ireland had the first of the webcam Masses during lockdown, I jumped at the chance because the Irish Covid travel restrictions were much tougher and lasted for far longer than here in the U.K. - the Gardai (police) were stopping people from going outside of thier 5k and from going to Mass, which was very hard on the elderly Irish people in Rural Ireland, whose Catholic faith means everything to them, but the sight of the priest in an empty church saying Mass was heartbreaking
I find Zoom to be inherantly alienating too, there is no one-to-one interaction. But it was still the only way to be part of such an event. The individual running this I remember looked amused once as she saw my cat wriggling in my arms (they describe themselves as interspecies in the pamphlet), on another occasion she got stern when she thought I wasn't concentrating. But we had an 8 o'clock curfew for several months, and I think having the evenings truncated so early messed with my body clock. I was still getting drowzy in the early evenings when I met my partner for a brief holiday in Croatia.
There was no chat feature on the software they used either and the sight of the altar with the replacement for the crib was pitiful and heartbreaking to see - the present church was built in 1982 and had a lot of things that were taken out of an older church that had been converted into a library and museum with many of the original features that I remember as a child in the 1970’s in our village, when they had 3 working farms in the Main Street - now being less than 20 miles from Dublin it’s now practically a town, as one sees how built up it is when approaching on all the new roads from Dublin in the 20 years I’d been coming home from the U.K. via Holyhead on the ferries - yet I find the Traditional Latin Mass so much more respectful and comforting when in person, as I’m also friends for years with my late Dad’s former employers, who are (enclosed) Poor Clare Nuns in Dublin