Jeff and Alex

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism.

The Catholic Review of the Archdiocese of Baltimore has run an interesting story on how the church is beginning to deal with parishioner families living with autism. (I tried to show the story to Alex, but he just kept running to the TV to watch “Elmo” and line up his plastic animals.)

This story relates how a Maryland family eventually had to splinter at Sunday services and at Mass when their little boy Donald would, rather than commune with his God, “ball himself up in a pew” or “bark like a dog.” “Throughout Mass, Donald held a video game controller, even in the line for the Holy Eucharist,” the story says, adding the mom’s entry for Understatement of the Year: “Some parishioners … were surprised.”

I bet. Alex has been, well, Alex in venues as varied as movies, parties and hotels: bolting, obsessively flipping light switches, yanking every door handle until he found one unlocked. Once he ran into a Marriott lobby in his underwear. Once he recited the alphabet at full voice in the middle of Shrek 3. Some people understand; most don’t. As recently as last weekend he screeched and bolted at a family party – “recently” being a key word here, as Alex is pushing five feet tall now and even has Matt Dillon-like line of fine brown fuzz along his upper lip. People look differently at a young man behaving like this than they do at a little boy.

The Catholic Church around Baltimore has embraced and accommodated Donald’s family in worshipping separately, though the parents claim that autism still breaks up the family at one of the moments when it most wants to be together. The Church also aims to form a committee to look at autism among its families, and high time.

In a story that made headlines coast to coast a few years ago, a Midwestern church out-and-out booted a teen with autism for disrupting services. One got the clear impression that it was the rule in religion then, rather than the exception. One big shame of the situation is that places of worship had little choice: All people are entitled to worship in their individual, conventional peace, undistracted by dogs or Elmo or Jack Nicholson snoring in the back row like in The Witches of Eastwick.

All I can say is that we’ve found tools to help Alex through such moments: chocolate, saltines, a favorite toy, tons of whispered patience. Now he’ll sit through a movie or a circus. We still leave him home for some formal get-togethers, however, telling ourselves that he just wouldn’t be comfortable anyway. And no way I’d bring him to a wedding or a funeral yet. Maybe someday we’ll find the tools to get through things like that. Maybe one of those tools will be prayer.