Reviewed by Eileen Quinn Knight, Ph.D.
The goal of this book is to help my fellow autistic Christian and their families pray better. I think this is the first book that explains autistic prayer and offers devotions to autistics from the inside. Other books I have seen on the topic were written from the outside, whether by parent or by a researcher. Prayer is always an adventure. Autistic prayer is no difference: it is just a different type of adventure. It’s as if everyone else is watching Star Wars while we’re watching Star Trek. Both are space adventures with interstellar travel, warp speed, and later weapons, but the rules for how things work are a little different. Each person must go on his or her own adventure seeking out God in prayer. This book provides something of a roadmap or interstellar guide for the autistic seeking Jesus, but it cannot replace your own effort.
One of the difficulties with autism is that autistic brains are quite diverse. Neurotypical individuals have a standard system of connectivity. Scientist can see this in an MRI. However,, when they looked at autistic brains in the same scans, they were all different from the neurotypical brains, but also from each other, such that researchers couldn’t even figure out a good way to group them. This reminds us of the adage, ”If you’ve seen one autistic, you’ve seen one autistic. ”For the purpose of this book, I will have to admit that this means most autistics will not identify with evert point. I don’t even experience every point I measure. I have studied numerous testimonies from autistic teens, men and women to try to understand some of the diversity we have experienced with different realities or aspects of prayer. Thus, don’t worry if one if one section of the book does not correspond to your experience of prayer, just use the parts that help you.
The book is divided into two parts: Part One is an autistic guide to prayer in a more systematic way, and will cover types of prayer, how prayer deepens and a few prayer rhythms. Part Two consists of individual devotions for prayer or meditation. Before going on, I want to make two notes in this introduction that will give a bit of perspective to what follows: a brief autobiography and a note about language. If you are not familiar with autism read the Appendix on what is autism. The book delves into the stages along the path to his priesthood. Being autistic gave the author some advantages long-term memory of facts, pattern recognition, and concentration are the most evident. The authors long-term memory is so good that his nickname in seminary was Schneider-pedia, or they would joke that Wikipedia checks with the author first! The author uses a lot of Catholic vocabulary, but he tries to explain terms he suspects some might not understand. People come to this at different levels of suck knowledge, and he has tried to accommodate more. This is a very powerful book as it realizes many of the thoughts about autistic people are far from who they are. I would encourage the reading of this book to understand not only the priests who work with them but also the diversity of autistic people themselves.