Meet Me in the Garden

The garden is drying up for the year.

I’ve thrown so much work into it, it’s hard to see it die, but this is all part of the process. Pretty soon I’ll shovel compost over the vegetable patch and cover it in cardboard, to swelter and fertilize during the winter months. I’m already plotting how to have an even better garden next year. I’m making diagrams. I’ve saved some seeds from my very biggest Mammoth Gray Stripe sunflower. I’m going to set up a warm room in the basement and plant my own heirloom squash and tomato seedlings come March. I’m going to defeat the squash borers AND the droughts next year and finally have a bumper crop of zucchini. I have an autistic obsession with my garden, and that’s as it should be.

Right now, though, I’m keeping the sunflowers blooming as long as possible. Every so often I go out to the garden with my scissors, and cut off every dead blossom from the Autumn Beauties and the Lemon Queens. This encourages them to blossom a little longer. The branches that were pruned create more flowers, sometimes at odd angles. They pop open in the middle of the branch in a way that looks surreal, more like something Dr. Seuss would draw than like real life. But all those blossoms welcome the insects and the birds.

Today I’ve been pruning, angrily, standing on my toes because I’m so short, huffing and puffing because I am fat, getting out my anger on the flowers.

Last night on X/Twitter, I mentioned something about being autistic, and a follower assured me that “autism is demonic oppression. The answer is always exorcism.”

I’ve been angry ever since.

I’ve been pretty up front about how I feel about “demonic oppression” and the scam known as “deliverance prayer,” to say nothing of full blown exorcism. But to apply it to autism– well, that hits far too close to home.

If an exorcist could take away my autism, they’d take away everything that’s made my life worth living. My attention to detail. My great love for swimming and for the sound of running water. My single-minded obsession with putting seeds in the ground and nurturing them until they pop out like a slow-motion jack-in-the-box. My remembering lots of random facts that are fun to bring up at awkward times.  My dogged tenacity when I know I’m right, where others would give up and go along with the crowd.  My fascination with beautiful words. My strange and offbeat imagination that makes it so easy to play pretend with children.

If you like my writing at all, if anything I’ve ever said has blessed you: it’s only the autism. My autism means that as a teenager and a young adult I read Dickens and Shakespeare and James Thurber over and over again to stim until I memorized giant walls of text and started talking like a person from another century– so when I go to write, I don’t write like a Millennial. Further, my autism means that I’m obsessed with texture. A bad texture torments me. Everything has to feel just right, and that’s how I write the way that I do. I annoy Adrienne by pacing back and forth in the hall, talking to myself, pretending to be an expert orator giving a speech to Tom Hiddleston and Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judy Dench, working out the texture of my words over and over and over again. When I finally get my essay absolutely smooth with no grit in the texture, I write it out and read it over again to double check. I couldn’t do that if I wasn’t autistic. If I wasn’t autistic, I wouldn’t even know that words had a texture in the first place.

Discovering, in recent years, that the name of my eccentricities is “autism” has let me learn to cope with all the difficult parts of me, while embracing the good parts. If you prayed the autism out of me, there’d be nothing left. If you name the autism and teach me what it means, I can be happy.

And now I think back to the Charismatic Renewal, getting prayed over by the Dominican sister I’ve referred to as Sister Angeline. And then coming to Steubenville and ending up prayed over by Father Scanlan, a cult leader. And the even worse cult leader he sent me to for confessions. And everything that happened, and everything I know about the religious movement I once thought was my only link to Christ.

I think about how sick I’ve been at the thought of going to Mass and how I don’t know where to go from here.

It’s not Christ I hate. It’s the people I thought were conduits to Christ.

I wonder if, maybe, the beginning of this avalanche of religious trauma was just the fact that all of these people were trying to exorcize me, from me. To take everything that was really myself from me and make me a good little Charismatic cultist instead of myself. Seeing myself as the disease, and the Charismatic Renewal as the cure.

The only God worth my time is the one outside the cult– the one who created me, to be me, autism and all. The One who would meet me here in the garden, angrily pruning my sunflowers, and not be angry that I couldn’t make eye contact or pay the appropriate homage. The One who would say “I made these for you because I love you just the way you are, and I wanted to make you happy. I’m sorry it all went so horribly wrong. All I wanted was for you to be happy, because my Father made you good, and because I love you.” The One who is, Himself, so obsessed with sunflowers that He wills the seasons turn every year, so that the earth can freeze and warm up and new sunflowers can come out of them again and again and again. The One Who is so obsessed with sunflowers that He made people like me in His image, to be obsessed with sunflowers, and sustains us in being day after day, whether we’re able to pray to Him or not.

When you put it that way, God sounds autistic.

I would like to know that God.