Theology in Recovery from Meltdown

Revd Dr Thomas Sharp TSSF SCP is Tutor in Pastoral Theology at St Augustine’s College of Theology. He is a Third Order Franciscan and the Provincial Secretary of the Society of Catholic Priests. He lives in Kensington where his partner Evan is a parish priest.

I write this in recovery from a meltdown.

I spent long hours last week doing work that was emotional, important, and very tiring. I am autistic, and my nervous system had had enough by the end of week. On Saturday, my body shut me down. It put me in bed until I was ready to go again.

I am learning to listen to my body, for it is wise, or at least because it is me and there is no point fighting against myself. I am also annoyed with my body, with myself, because the meltdown hurt – it hurt a lot – and I wanted to do other things with this time I won’t get back. All these things are true.

I have worked in cathedrals, in parish churches, and now in a college training clergy and lay ministers for the South and East of England. In each of these jobs, people have come up to me with what they thought were words of encouragement. These words are meant with love, but reveal the ableism that is chronic in society and the church. My favourite for this job: “It’s so good that they found a job for you where you won’t have to deal with people.”

This last one I find particularly funny, as I now spend my time not only dealing with other people, but teaching them how to deal with other people too! An autistic priest teaching other people how to do pastoral care, how to be a pastor to people who need a listening ear and an open heart to heal them.

I have a reputation as a preacher, and I teach people to preach and to lead worship, to soar in the Word and lift people up with their words. But if I preach too long, I find I cannot speak. Like Zechariah, whose mouth was closed when he named his son John, perhaps one day the most important speech of my life will be done with a pen, on a day when my lips are closed.

For years I struggled, not realising who I was. People simply thought I was a high achiever who struggled to be what the church calls “resilient” when I crashed. Or who was “over-invested” or “self-centred” when I struggled to navigate injustice and decisions by authority figures I did not understand.

The discovery that I am autistic came almost as a second conversion. I discovered who I am for a second time, discovered where flourishing and fullness of life might lie. And I was called once more to a witness against the world for life and hope and peace for all.

This is a maximalist way to describe my being autistic, as vocation and witness. I know that not all people who are disabled experience their disability in this way. But I do. It remains true that when you meet one autistic person, you have met one autistic person. Every disability, every person is different.

For years I had tried to be productive, to be efficient, to be maximally profitable in a way that would make me employable and get me the things I want in life. But I have come to learn that my body will not allow me to subject myself utterly to efficiency, to profit and productivity. My body protests if I try to meet the world’s demands.

Sometimes I can. And sometimes I cannot. My world is, in this sense, unstable, uncertain. My world is not something I can completely control, as many weighted blankets and soothing bags of crisps I deploy. My world is not something over which I can ever be god. And that is a good thing. That we are not gods in the world or the church is a gospel the church and the world desperately need to hear.

Sometimes I am able. And sometimes I am not. But always I am autistic, and always aware that one bright light or loud noise is all it takes to push me into not-able. This is the nature of my disability.

That I am disabled is not good or bad. It simply is. It simply is me, as God calls me to live. And I have confidence in God’s good promise that I and those like me are good, at least, as much as anyone else is good.

Many in the world believe I am sad, or that it would be better had I never been born. But they do not know my joy, when I am allowed to know joy. I am a person whose life is effulgent with joy, and hope, and also peace. Often those things don’t look the way they do in other people’s lives. Or I don’t communicate them in the same way. But they are most certainly in me.

I write this in recovery from meltdown. And so my sentences are shorter. My words are simpler. My sermons quieter. But still I burn with the hope that is in me. And I hope that hope is infectious.