ACAT 7: Body and Soul

Q: Of which must we take more care, our soul or our body?

A: We must take more care of our soul than our body.

Q: Why must we take more care of our soul than our body?

A: In losing our soul, we lose God and everlasting happiness.

For concrete, linear thinkers of the 21st century, these statements beg for argument.  We are conditioned to see body and soul as interconnected, if not equal in importance.  How many products and services assert their superiority by being “good for body and soul”?  Moreover, the principle of self-care has gained great support in recent years.  Few can argue with “you cannot pour from an empty cup” and “taking care of yourself shows self-respect,” and those of us on the spectrum know that anxiety and constant self-monitoring takes a hard toll on our physical health.

It is the phrasing of the Baltimore Catechism that is dated – but not the message.  The original writers would likely be just as confused by our contemporary notions of wellness and holistic perspective.  If we keep reading, we see the context in which the writers felt this was important enough to put this at the top of the hierarchy: “In losing our soul, we lose God and everlasting happiness.”

Losing our soul does sound frightening.  But… how did we get there in just one question?  And where is the accompanying information, such as:

  • How can we take care of our soul?
  • What happens if we neglect our soul’s care?
  • What courses of action are harmful to our soul, or place our soul at risk?
  • What can we do to correct lapses in soul care?
  • Is our soul’s care completely in our control, or is it affected by outside forces?
  • Does taking care of our body somehow interfere with taking care of our soul?
  • How can we take care of our body without compromising our soul?
  • How exactly is a soul lost?
  • If a soul is lost, can it be recovered?

As we progress on our journey into the Baltimore Catechism, it becomes more and more apparent that writers take a very parental tone.  This is not at all surprising, considering the structure of the Catholic Church is often seen as parental.  In the historical time periods when parental authority held high esteem, this analogy was coherent and harmonious with the prevailing culture.  In the past sixty years, however, Western culture has seen a huge shift in how parenting is viewed.  Individuality and personal choice is championed over obedience and the sense of being shepherded.  In part, this is why many of us feel such a disconnect with Catholic catechesis.  We are conditioned to question authority before deciding how we feel about something.  But aren’t there still matters where the voice of authority takes precedence over values clarification, particularly where danger is concerned?  It would not be useful to question the declaration of a state of emergency, for instance.  Doing so would put our lives in danger and unnecessarily deter others in their ability to seek safety.  If we give the writers the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they felt it more important to get our attention right to the point rather than lose us in a logical but lengthy buildup.

Our over-arching question here is whether or not those questions above are addressed anywhere later on, or if we are simply expected to take this by itself, without elaboration, as a warning given in our best interests.  The Baltimore Catechism does get into these things, but in a way that is widely distributed throughout the contents of the document, not as directly as we asked them.  Therefore, we will take these questions on in the coming weeks’ posts before going any further.

Keep in mind our purpose remains to create a Catholic catechetical commentary compatible with autistic thinking.  If anyone wishes to take a more direct route and, say, look at a more up to date catechism, the Vatican website offers the most contemporary catechism at: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM.  Another good resource is the Youth Catechism, YOUCAT, easily found by online search in print and electronic formats.  We assure readers that the Church is not hopelessly dated and out of touch; we simply chose to use a catechism in the public domain.  Bear in mind it is not the Church or its catechism which has changed over the years; it is the diversification of the ways people think.  Including autistically.

ACAT 6: Happy with God in the Next World

The Baltimore Catechism has told us that God exists, is the creator of all life, and desires to have us here to know him, love him and serve him… and then, to be happy with him forever in the next.

If we notice, our catechism takes quite a jump from “why are we here?” to “where do we go from here?” in that last clause of the sentence.  We go from knowing God, deciding we love him and choosing to follow his designs to then reaching bodily death, at which time the terms become: <we will be happy> / <with God> / <forever> / <in the next world>.

1) We will be happy

Keeping in mind the Baltimore Catechism was written with school-aged children in mind, this word “happy” should be taken at face value.  We can interpret this in the most simple way, a shortcut for the sum total of things that include contentment, peace, delight, freedom from anxiety and, generally, anything we’d tag with a smile emoji… only, on a much deeper, more fulfilling level than the things that we’re used to, that last only until they fade or the next good thing comes along.  This is an enduring happiness, a perpetual contentment, a rest of the soul that once was restless.

2) + with God

Does our bodily death free us from the spiritual signal-blocker that keeps us from seeing God face to face?  Does bodily death transport the soul from here where God is not, to there, where God is?  These things cannot be satisfactorily defined or studied, and so, the particulars of what physically constitutes the afterlife remains up for both scientific and theological discussion.   It is, however, a term of our faith that we believe, in some capacity, that our soul remains alive and is able to perceive God with the certainty and clarity which our bodily existence cannot permit.  We concede the “what,” knowing we do not have a definitive way to describe the “how.”

3) + forever

As theologians understand the reality of God’s creation, there is both linear, measured time here on earth and a transcendental, non-measurable state of “just being” that is so vast and deep as to defy linear tracking.  That word “forever” can evoke anxiety when it is something of an unknown quality.  Even though the terms already include being “happy,” there is a permanence to this “forever” that triggers a second-guessing in our human nature.  We are conditioned to know where our exits are, how the escape hatch works, and how to tolerate being stuck by anticipating that things will eventually change.  The key here is to remember that God’s “forever” is not static.  God’s reality is one of constant creation, perpetual beginning, perfect stability and all-encompassing security.   This “forever” is more like the state we find ourselves in when we finally hit our stride and want to keep going.

4) + in the next world

Ah, the afterlife.  So many connotations, so many explanations, so many words.  The term “heaven,” for instance, originated in the ancient belief that souls travel beyond the bonds of earth’s atmosphere, into the firmament, to join ranks with the stars.  We have modernized this concept to also mean “perfect bliss” or “supreme pleasure.”  But “heaven” is not the only way to refer to the afterlife.  Our catechetical writers refer to “the next world.”  What does this mean?  In the purest sense, “world” means a specified environment containing the sum total of interactions and experiences therein.  “The next world” can mean both the place itself and the way we experience it, just as in gaming there are many successive worlds in which the same player can interact in different and increasingly sophisticated ways.  The takeaway here is that, once our soul is separated from our body, our experiences and interactions do not cease; rather, they continue, in a manner which we can only access once we graduate to that level.

And so, there it is.  God created us, and offers us to live and use our life in this world to discover him, and consider offering our love and support of him in response.  Those of us who do will experience him here and then receive the happiness he offers us with him in the world to come.

We conclude with a brief parable attempting to explain the principle like so:

If this world is a forest, and we are each a tree, the forest is that which nurtures tree growth, and no tree diminishes another’s importance.  God imagines us, tree after tree, with great love, and places us in this forest to be both delightful as ourselves and to be delightful to the other trees.  Once we have grown to fullness, we can see what we, and each other tree is to become.  The trees who embrace being trees of the forest will thrive in the fulfillment of their design.  The trees who doubt can choose not to remain, but by this choice, they may still become something useful – but they can no longer fulfill what their creator imagined they would one day be.

ACAT 4: The Process of Relating to God

[Readers, please note: Ordinarily, the respect due to God is expressed by capitalizing the H in pronouns.  However, writing about familiarity in relationship requires a lot of these pronouns – and that capital H is becoming distracting.  God deserves respect, yes; but he does not demand it to the point of distraction.  We considered what it would mean to drop the capitalization in favor of increasing comfort and familiarity, and it feels right.  We mean no disrespect to God by using lowercase pronouns.  We offer it to God, in love, as a sign of our desire to grow closer in familiarity with him, intending no offense.]

Last week, we began looking at the Baltimore Catechism’s proposal that God created us to know him, love him, serve him and be happy with him in the life to come.

We suggested seeing this first as a task list given in order of importance, with each step intended to prepare us for the next, flowing with a natural logic.  We can’t love someone without knowing them.  We can’t serve someone without loving them (and, before any buzz starts, we already have Missionary Thoughts lined up to go more deeply into that word “serve,” especially wondering how it can lead to happiness when it sounds so contractual).

Yes, each step is a foundational block, and each successive step builds further on the previous one.

But it is not a flat, linear progression.  It is a dynamic process, a progression of modules leading one to the next and then building upward, constantly adding more layers for each completion of the cycle, day after day in our lifetime.  The four together are a constant, living process.

 

 

 

 

This process, in fact, describes building a relationship with anyone:

 

When an enduring relationship is forming, what we discover about someone (= getting to know them) eventually gives rise to a particular fondness.  We can feel this as we feel love toward our family members, or toward our friends, or in the general sense of the value and dignity we feel toward others.  But then, we begin to concretely “love” in the verb sense by showing affection, or speaking affirming words, or including people in our activities as we might invite a friend, a guest or someone on the sidelines without a partner to participate in what we are doing.  We love by giving gifts, making food and welcoming visitors.  Loving can be offering to drive somewhere, or answering the phone when we are already tired, or forgiving those who overstep their boundaries with us.  If we notice, knowing (taking in concrete, measurable data) gives way to loving (forming an abstract conclusion) which gives way to doing, or serving (concrete action motivated by abstract feeling).

Thus, loving forms the bridge between knowing and doing (or, serving), which leads to being happy with each other in the relationship.  As each module augments the other in the process, a foundation is formed.  The process repeats and repeats and repeats in the rhythm of the relationship, as though placing bricks one atop the other in an ever-growing structure.

 

So, how easily can we replicate this process when our someone (God) is not three-dimensional?

Knowing: Books, videos, homilies and Scripture are some of the many formal ways we can know God, but evidence and ideation of God occurs frequently and much less formally.  Imagination can be the best tool for us to encounter God interiorly and to make deeply personal and emotionally relevant observations that will help us know him better.

Loving: Can we yet sit back and reflect on what we are reading, what we are hearing about God, what we see in creation around us, through natural beauty and the love of animals, and feel a connection with – even a fondness for –  God?  Maybe so… or, maybe not yet.  Maybe it comes and goes.  If all we do is believe he is there, eventually, we’ll find him… but only if we pay him attention and remember to include him.  He is just like any one of us who are not easily seen or heard above the others in the room.  Silence does not mean he is not interested and not participating in our lives.

Serving: Moving from the abstract toward the concrete, how can we enact our love of God by responding to what we know about him?  How are we to know what delights him, what needs he has, or what he might ask as a favor?  We can’t give God rides to the store, or buy him gifts, or make him dinner.  We can’t listen to his hard day’s work stories or let him stay an hour past when we told him we had to go.  However, in Matthew 25:35, Jesus says, “When you do it for the least among you, you do it for ME.”  We can love God by loving his proxy, the person in front of us.  Service becomes a tool to discover and express our love, not a mandate – but more on that next week!

Being Happy With God:  Relationships take time.  Few of us are ever lovestruck instantaneously, but rather, we cultivate familiarity and comfort by giving our attention to knowing others here and there until they becomes part of our everyday and less an awkward silence in our lives.  The same is true of God.  Loving God means feeling the comfort of his being silent with us the way we welcome our friends to be silent with us… and to let us comfortably be silent with them.

ACAT 3: Why are we here?

Now there is a loaded question, and one asked in many senses.  Why are we “here” – right here, right now, in these circumstances?  Why are “we” here – why us?  And why does God wire some people to have autism?  Is it preplanned?  Is it a deliberate system hack embedding a hidden superpower?  Is it a functional design flaw?  Is it a variation?  Or is it out of God’s hands, the result of some consequence of the imperfections we must accept living in a fallen world?

“God does not make mistakes!” is often heard where such questions arise.  We could rightly spend pages and pages looking at the theology of variation, of suffering and healing; and just as rightly strive to characterize autism as a state of being that includes both strength and weakness.  Autism does not predict happiness or success any more than eye color or shoe size, nor does it suggest propensity toward or immunity from the suffering that comes with the human condition.  Life is hard.  Life with autism is hard.  But so is life with size ten shoes.  Perhaps it is good to look at why God created any of us, and then consider how our individual variations fulfill that purpose.

Question Six of Lesson One of the Baltimore Catechism may be the best known, most-memorized line of the entire book.  Why did God create people? To know Him, to love Him, to serve Him in this world, and to be happy forever with Him in the next.

What does all that mean?  Why does that leave a lot of people feeling dissatisfied, unsettled, even angry?

Let’s be real.  If we read it with 21st century eyes, we are likely to think God is a narcissist who created us to admire Him and do His bidding.  And then, as we pull that thought out further, we consider all the things we are asked to do in the name of God and religion – like pray, go to Mass, and deny ourselves pleasures because God says they are sinful – and many of us want out before we even get started.  Add in the hard stuff, and it really starts to look like God has a cruel streak!

The answer to these, and all other such concerns, can be found by knowing God.  Like a list of ingredients, the item named first is done so to emphasize its importance: God made people, first and foremost, to know Him.  God fashioned our combination of body and soul so that we might consider who He is and what He is like.  No matter what issues or doubts we have, this is where we need to start.

How do we know God?  How do we KNOW anyone?  There are hundreds of ways, each with their own level of depth and detail.  The origin of the word “know” suggests it is an act of comparing and contrasting, matching up similarities and distinguishing between differences.   Knowledge can come through observation, pondering, reading, listening, discussing and doing.  For those of us on the spectrum, factual knowledge is usually our strength.  Knowing someone is a little more complicated: it requires proximity, social engagement and the ability to interpret the experience, whether through direct contact, observation or imagination.  It’s hard enough to do that with the people around us.  How can we engage with someone who is invisible, intangible and immeasurable?

Well, maybe it’s not THAT difficult.  Just last week, in spelling out attributes of the human soul, we said: “Each person has a unique, essential spirit… that is invisible, intangible and immeasurable – but is expressed through all that we feel and all that we do.”  Come to think of it, those invisible, intangible and immeasurable elements ARE how we know others!

AS WE CAN COME TO KNOW OTHERS, SO WE CAN COME TO KNOW GOD

Realistically, knowing others still relies on our five senses taking in data that is tangible and measurable.  By seeing the actions, hearing the words and participating in the actions of others, we come to know their character.  It takes significantly more detective work to know someone we cannot see, hear or physically engage with.

We really ought not to go any further in our assumptions or conclusions until we give this knowing a fair shot.  It may take us awhile.  What many people find helpful is not to look forward, but to look backward, back to a time when we might remember experiencing something that reminded us of God, or something someone said was what God is like.  Most of us have some kind of notion of “God” from our early childhood, either from what we are taught or what we pick up from what we’ve seen and heard along the way.  Many of us remember something that caused us to stop and feel a tremendous sense of awe, or wonder, or wish, that reached beyond ourselves and our senses into that unseen, unknown realm which we intuitively know is there but we just as intuitively know that nobody can see… yet.

If “knowing” is comparing and contrasting, we might do just as well to think of a time in our past when we felt like hiding, or shrinking away, or suddenly covering up something we love because we have a need to protect that love.  Those are the moments autistic people know best when someone else makes a comment or a statement (or worse) that pierces a moment of our most oblivious joy with the sharp pain of their ridicule or misunderstanding.

What is it that gets pierced?  What is it misunderstood, or ridiculed?  Is it us, our very selves?  Or is it that sense of joy, or insulation, or innocence, or immersion in something we love to the point of losing ourselves into it?  Most of us would agree it is not us, per se, but the love we feel which is ridiculed.

Maybe we cannot sense God when things are running smoothly and people are treating us well.  But when we are hurt, what is it that hurts?  What is it that we seek after when we hurt, in our earliest childhood? It is an invisible, intangible, immeasurable something.  Maybe we can’t define it, but boy, do we feel the pain when it gets injured.  That innocent wonder which is wounded when love is ridiculed – it certainly fits the description we’re going for.  Could that be God, or God’s likeness, or God’s echo?

Our closing point before we keep going next week: The progression of “why are we here?” goes from knowing God to loving God.  “LOVE” is not something that can be forced, faked or coerced.  The writers of the Catechism know that.  It follows that we cannot love anyone we do not know.  Before we get wrapped up in conclusions, let us stay where we need to be in the progression: let us strive to KNOW God, and trust that the rest will flow from there.  If we are facing an obstacle to engaging with our faith, go back to the beginning.  Worry about nothing else until we can say, confidently, that we KNOW God.  Nothing else will work until that connection is working.

 

ACAT 2: The Schematic Diagram

Here we are, Baltimore Catechism in hand, ready to start unpacking the components of the Catholic faith as they were laid out for the people in America in 1885.  The book reflects nearly sixty years of prior scholarly discussion aimed at creating a summary and explanation of Catholic doctrine easy enough to present to children and detailed enough to enliven the faith in those teaching it.  The resulting work remains a timeless starting point for those seeking to conceptualize what choosing to be Catholic is all about.

The twelve questions which comprise Lesson One act as our schematic, like the beginning of any good User’s Manual of today: What are we looking at?  What are the functions of the main components, and what is the overall purpose of having a Catholic faith?

First, we see the main characters of this faith: God, the Creator; and us, the people whom He created.  The rest of the manual will elaborate on several of the combinations and resulting functions of this relationship between God and us.  If we believe there actually is a God, or want to believe, or are in any way open to that possibility, then we’re good to start.

God is presented as the Creator of all things: the physical world and the laws of physics; the spiritual nature of beings and the spirit dwelling within each living creature; and every variation of species therein, of both things we see and invisible essences we experience.

People are a subset of God’s creatures who have both physical (body) and spiritual (soul) natures, made especially for the purpose of knowing God and experiencing Him in a direct and specific relationship.

  • Each person has a unique, essential spirit, characteristic of their “self,” that is invisible, intangible and immeasurable – but is expressed through all that we feel and all that we do.
  • This particular spirit is not simply an animating force, but also contains the person’s core identity, their soul, which, as the Catechism states, “will last as long as God Himself.” In other words, each person’s essence lives forever.
  • The soul is more than the energy enlivening the body; it has awareness of itself in relationship to God and the ability to make rational choices rather than encoding patterns purely on instinct or conditioned responses.
  • The soul is designed to seek after higher things, better understanding, ever greater knowledge; but the soul cannot know everything by its own power alone. The soul requires God to lead, guide, teach and nurture these yearnings in the relationship for which it was designed.
  • Every soul may freely choose to follow God’s order, or to go off on its own, risking the kind of harm that comes from disorder.

The main functional parts, then, are God, the Creator; and people, the creatures seeking knowledge through relationship with Him.  We’ve got the who, and the what.  So far, so good!

We need to pause here and reflect just a bit on the schematic as it relates to people on the autism spectrum.  No two people are exactly the same, but within those infinite variations of body and personal essence remains the same purpose, which is growing in knowledge of and relationship with God.  (We will get to that next week.)  Autistic thinkers tend to approach both knowledge and relationships in our own autistic way, sometimes finding our particular wiring helpful (for instance, in the ways we reflect on and record information) and sometimes needing a little more engineering to understand things as easily as nonautistic thinkers do (such as when our linear, wired-in-series thinking struggles to comprehend the infinite, abundant and parallel functioning of God).  Autistic wiring also seems to have unpredictably distributed areas of resistance, capacitance and conductivity, compared to the schematics of more typically wired thinkers.  Our energy flow may seem to diminish faster than others, especially when we are functioning in social (parallel-wired) situations.  The important point is to be aware of our own, individual wiring and to trust that it was designed that way by God – who did so deliberately, in hopes we would discover Him through that very way he wired us.  Comparing ourselves and our wiring to that of anyone else is futile and pointless.  If God had wanted us to think like someone else, He would have wired us that way.

There we go: the schematic diagram, the main players.  The WHO and the WHAT.  Next week, we continue Lesson One, looking next at WHY God created us in the first place.

(Here’s a tip: Any version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church can be thought of as the book proposal for God’s manuscript of the fatherly love story He intends to be told by and within each of our lives.)

The way God created each one of us reflects the delight He takes in each one of us.

ACAT 1: Basic Catholic Prayers

The Baltimore Catechism begins not with instruction but with the most frequently heard prayers in the Catholic faith.  Why start here?  What motivated the Catholic scholars to start with prayers before we even get into the premise of our faith?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to start by explaining God and what we know about Him before we dive straight into how to invoke Him and converse with Him?

When the Baltimore Catechism was first published in 1891, then again in 1921, the concept of a user’s manual did not exist yet in the common American vernacular.  Nowadays, manuals are passé.   Most consumer products are designed to be user-friendly, plug-and-play, unbox and go.  What we see more and more is a “Quick Start Guide” or reference card as an alternative to a more lengthy instruction book.

The choice to begin with prayer instead of doctrine is very much like a Quick Start Guide to the Catholic Faith.  One could see simply the words to be memorized in order to fit in and participate right off the bat, or one could see what these words represent and glean the fundamental summary of our faith right here.  In a sense, this echoes the experience of social skills instruction: we are taught basic stock phrases to use in certain situations and can skate by nicely if we learn to use each at the proper time, or we can more deeply consider what each means and why each evokes the response it does from those around us.

And so, the Baltimore Catechism introduces the prayers most frequently heard in the Catholic faith which also act to summarize the scope of our beliefs.  We have the Our Father, Hail Mary, Apostles’ Creed, Confiteor, and the Acts of Faith, Hope and Love as our Quick Start Guide.  No time to unpack the finer elements comprising our faith?  Then, become familiar with these prayers and recite them with sincerity to experience what being Catholic is all about.

It is greatly tempting to take any of these prayers and expound on their meaning; likewise, to write at great lengths about prayer itself, since that alone is a concept which confounds and has confounded people of all neurotypes from the beginning of time.  Some people find prayer natural, and others find it impossible.  Some pray primarily with words; others with actions; others with song; others by experience.  It is said there is no wrong way to pray.  Within the Mission of Saint Thorlak, we simplify prayer to mean: deliberate relationship with God.  For those of us on the spectrum, this makes a bold clarification, as everything with us seems to come down to “relationship” and “relationship deficit.”

“How do I know I am praying?”  If we are engaging, or sincerely intending to engage, our thoughts and emotions with God, we are praying.

“How do I know I am praying well?” If our attention is on God, or wanting to know God, or wanting to share ourselves with God, we are praying well.

“How do I know I am praying right?”  If we are showing honesty, sincerity, commitment of our attention and desire to increase the trust we feel that God is real, we are praying right.

In contrast, the following factors have nothing whatsoever to do with gauging the quality of our prayer:

  • How we feel before, during or after
  • How we compare to others
  • How loudly we pray
  • How long we pray

Here is where many autistics run into difficulty: Prayer is meant to be a mutual conversation between ourselves and God.  Sounds easy… if conversation is something that comes easy.  The advantage of having “prayers” (plural noun) is that they can assist our “prayer” (intentional action) in the same way reading scripted dialogue can help familiarize us with conversational skills, gradually leading us to where we can become more comfortable and more spontaneous.  Furthermore, scripted prayers make excellent study guides so that we can know more about God before we jump into spontaneous conversation.

The downside is that the literal words might become distracting.  For example:

Our Father – calls to mind our actual father and all the attributes we associate with him.  It can be hard to think of God in any other terms than the image we associate with “father.”

Who Art in Heaven – means we can’t see him, and can feel like God lives in an invisible castle somewhere.

Hallowed Be Thy Name – what does that mean?  (That the name of God itself stirs respect).

Thy Kingdom Come – is confusing to anyone not familiar with monarchy.  Again, it calls to mind imaginary castles from storybooks.

In their fuller context, these words mean:

God, who loves us as His own children, who exists in a realm beyond what we can see: may you be loved every time we say your name!  May your ways of love and mercy be known right here, right now!

If that is still not clear, one of the shortest, valid prayers we can say is: JESUS.

How is this so?

  • It calls Jesus to mind, which begins building a relationship.
  • It literally means “He will save us.” Saying his name, therefore, is a declaration of faith.
  • It brings Him present to us, the same way calling anyone else’s name gets their attention.

Still finding it confusing?  Don’t despair.  The fuller manual is still ahead. Not everyone can jump in with just the Quick Start Guide, especially if it’s something completely unfamiliar. By the time we’re done, it might make more sense.  Faith in God is something that will always leave people with more questions than answers, and that is, in many ways, reassuring.  After all, a quest we never fully complete can never become stale or stagnant.