Last week I promised I’d explain why Gxd is autistic (for why it’s Gxd instead of God, see last week’s blog! https://truthless.blog/2024/12/26/merry-x-mass/) It’s actually been a bit more than a week but time does speed up as I get older – that’s my excuse and here I stand, I can slither no other.
The short answer is that I discovered Gxd’s autism when I came to reckon with my own, some twenty years ago now. My friends from childhood describe me as eccentric, a little gauche … the psychologist described me in my 40s as a high functioning autistic woman. And so I began to scan theologies which resonate with me for traces of autism (theologies, not theologians). The results, even if they only scratch the surface, amazed me.
The Beatitudes, where Jesus called blessed those whom the world calls most wretched, have a topsy-turvy feel where my autistic heart feels safe to be as upside-down and different as I want to be.
I turned to a perhaps lesser-known work by the now less flavour-of-the-month researcher, Simon Baron Cohen for inspiration. In Zero Degrees of Empathy: a New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness (2011), Baron Cohen argues that there is a two-dimensional spectrum of human empathy. The variables are two contrasting types of empathy, namely cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Let’s say a friend is crying. With cognitive empathy, I understand why you are crying. With affective empathy, I care that you are crying.
Where this gets interesting is when Baron Cohen sees two opposing extremes in empathy possession. First, the psychopath, who has excellent cognitive empathy but little affective empathy – in other words, they understand why your friend is crying, but they don’t very much care. Second, however, is the autist – with scarce cognitive empathy they don’t understand why your friend is crying, but with abundant affective empathy, they certainly care.
Now I certainly recognise myself and other autists in that description. But Gxd? Surely, God is omniscient! God should have the ultimate cognitive empathy!
Well, I can only speak for myself. I am a huge fan of the Footprints story where Gxd tells the suffering and apparently abandoned traveler that “where you saw only one set of footprints in the sand, it was there that I carried you.” My own spiritual life with its share of both autism and trauma very often discerns only one set of footprints. It doesn’t feel as if Gxd was there at all. And yet I look back and see that I have, indeed, been carried – by what theologians like Tom Altizer would call an absent presence. So my Gxd, radically, is absent – to the point of impaired cognitive empathy.
My mother, Marnie Jack, ran a licensed grocer’s shop in a poorer part of town and gave the alcoholics a morning nip of sherry to stop the shakes, and who then went on to manage our town’s first ever Women’s Refuge. Mum had left the Church for her own reasons, but believed one thing passionately: “Gcd is love.” And those words are written on her gravestone, in fact.
My Gxd is total affective empathy – love itself. But Gxd’s absence feels a lot like Gxd has forgotten me in an act of impaired cognitive empathy. If this makes me a heretic, I’m in good company – Saint Teresa of Àvila and Saint John of the Cross were the two most famous examples of the spiritual experience of desolation and abandonment. John called it the Dark Night of the Soul. Without This strange strand of what is known as apophatic theology, “ordinary” or cataphatic theology on its own lacks the depth to face life’s tragedies and challenges, in my experience. I am glad Jeremiah wrote Lamentations and I am very glad we have the book of Job. I would have been crushed long ago without them.
In “The Autism of Gxd” I did my best to set out the case – maybe this blog explains a little of the why.
