Autism, the Mystic, and Me

By Isaiah Lewis

/ Nonfiction /    

When I first read Simone Weil in seminary, I knew that she was autistic. Not in any formal diagnostic sense, of course—the term “autism” to describe a constellation of neurodevelopmental features was coined in 1943, the year Weil died. Nevertheless, the way she talks about attention as prayer, her fierce sense of justice, her hatred of being touched, her voice, her clumsiness, her fearless quests for purity and truth—I didn’t know that I was autistic when I read her essays, but I could tell that she was, and I loved her for it.

It's hard to summarize any life, let alone a complex one. Simone Weil was a philosopher, a leftist, and a mystic. Born in Paris in 1909, she was a sensitive child who got migraines, struggled to learn how to write, and felt overshadowed by her older brother, André, a math prodigy. Her parents were secular Jews and her father was a doctor. Throughout her writings, Weil would refer to her own mediocrity; nevertheless, in 1928 she placed first on the exam for the certificate of “General Philosophy and Logic” at the École Normale Supérieure. 

Weil was excruciatingly politically aware. As a young child, she stopped eating sugar in response to learning about the rations of the soldiers fighting along the Western Front in World War I. At ten, she called herself a Bolshevik. After a brief stint teaching at a girls’ secondary school, where she scandalized the small-town bourgeoisie by marching with workers in their picket lines and refusing to eat more than the unemployed, she decided to dive into the working class by finding a job on the assembly line of a car factory. 

Critics and admirers alike find this moment of her life, as well as her move toward anarchism and joining the Spanish Civil War afterward, hard to parse. Her comrades did not want her around because she was near-sighted and clumsy. She had to have known that her freedom to choose unenviable social positions was the essence of privilege, yet she chose them anyway. After Weil stepped into some boiling oil in the middle of the war, her parents rescued her and brought her to Assisi to convalesce. In the spring of 1937, she experienced a religious ecstasy at the same basilica where St. Francis had prayed. From that point onward, her writings were primarily religious. During World War II, she and her parents left France to go to New York, where she stayed only a few months before going to England to serve the French provisional government. She died in 1943 in Kent of tuberculosis and of the conviction that she was to eat only the rations that were allowed to people in the occupied zone. 

I came back to Weil in hopes of finding a friend, a comrade, when I was diagnosed with autism at the age of thirty-one. I’m not sure if I found either; in the process of reading about her, I have begun to think of her as a foil instead. I trace the parallels between us like a fortune teller reads a palm. Like if I study her works hard enough, I will finally understand who I am and where I fit. When I go to spiritual direction for the first time, I lay out her concerns to the priest who sits across from me. I imagine that I am her speaking with her beloved Fr. Perrin, the priest to whom she addresses the letters found in Waiting for God. 

In reference to queer Christians searching history for their saints, theologian Flora X. Tang writes, “Invention, coupled with mourning for what is irrecoverably absent, becomes a necessary spiritual practice for all those who cannot find their own ancestors in the canons of Church history.” To be able to find someone who resembles you in the cloud of witnesses makes being a Christian on the margins more survivable. The same is true for autistic saints. I see myself in Simone Weil even as I disagree with her profoundly. And it’s ironic that I’m even referring to her as a saint. For all her time thinking about the Church, Weil never became a Catholic. Perhaps it is an indication of how desperate I am for representation that I cling to her despite it all. I want to find a family resemblance. And I do, but I have to squint. 

At some point in every essay I write, I look for a structure to glom onto. On bad days, I see these structures as being exoskeletons for my writing. But most people crave structure, and autists doubly so. My favorite analogy is from a monk I once met. He talked about St. Benedict’s monastic rule of life as a trellis people use to grow practices that help them become who they hope to be. This idea comforts me. It suggests that what I’m doing—this writing, this discipline of growing—is natural, but that effort isn’t all that’s needed. Structure frees me the same way a trellis lets a tomato vine climb. In reading Simone Weil’s Waiting for God, I have found my structure. 

Much like the letters in Waiting for God, my six have no direct responses. This, again, is autistic: we don’t always use back-and-forth dialogue the way neurotypicals do. Consider this my decades-delayed echolalia, my use of Weil’s language and structure to mirror what her writing means to me. She has given me her trellis, even as I grow to a different point. 

LETTER I

About Autism

My Dear Simone, 

When the psychologist’s form asked why I was seeking an autism assessment, I wrote that I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. Perhaps I just meant that I couldn’t answer it succinctly: instead, I pasted a list of ninety-four reasons why I thought I might be autistic into the text box. I confess that I was aiming for ninety-five, which felt like the ninety-five theses Martin Luther posted to the church door. His list initiated a schism in the Church; mine articulated a schism I already saw between myself and the world. The psychologist said in our first session that the fact I had made such a list and the reasons on it were basically all she needed to diagnose me. When I got my letter of diagnosis, I felt vindicated, triumphant. I now had an empirical reason why I have felt like a stranger in every room I’ve entered. 

In a similar fashion, when reading about your life, I wrote out a list of qualities, experiences, and beliefs that you and I share, or at least I suspect that we do. This is what I’m like: I’m a list-maker. I make Venn diagrams, if necessary, and pros and cons charts. I like order and certainty and knowing what comes next. You, too, are known for appreciating order. You loved the Ancient Greeks, who in turn loved reason. The qualities we share feel more than coincidental, but this isn’t a syllogism. There is no ergo autism here. I know that, and yet I feel compelled to compare us. It draws you closer to me.

Applying a diagnosis to a dead person can be anachronistic. Conversely, arguing that everyone is neurotypical until proven otherwise reinforces the tyranny of the normal. So much of how autism has been defined has to do with how neurotypicals interpret the differences they see between themselves and autists. Autism is diagnosed from observing outward behaviors, not inward states of being and feeling. It’s part of the larger mystery of what another person’s experience of life might be like. But with your radical, all-or-nothing ideas and your reckless pursuit of the truth, I know you. Your brain and mine are kin. 

Maybe, Simone, my relationship with you is one of parallel play, an autistic expression of love. We don’t need to be doing the same thing or thinking the same way to be connected. I imagine you lecturing me on the Upanishads as you did among the grape-pickers. I imagine lecturing you back about the latest biblical studies book I’ve read. We can be absorbed in our own worlds, separately, yet together.

Affectionately,

Isaiah

LETTER II 

Spiritual Autobiography

My Dear Simone, 

The problem with a class on prayer is that it’s easy to bullshit. In my last semester of seminary, I enrolled in the course and proceeded to write insightful weekly reflections on practices I never attempted. Every student was required to give a presentation on the life of a saint and an accompanying type of prayer. I chose the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous monk writing in the fourteenth century about the incomprehensibility of God. I read the book but had nothing to describe. “That’s apophatic faith for you,” I said. For the practice, I instructed my classmates to sit still and try not to think. 

You would have hated me for that. For making a mockery of the educational process. For not even trying. Your essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” is probably the most influential of your writings, and the most accessible apart from your letters. In it, you argue that Christian students should view their educations as an opportunity to learn how to pay attention. You say that “prayer consists of attention” and that “warmth of heart cannot make up for it.” I tend to agree, which is perhaps why I have spent so much time being distracted. Even when I say I want to pray, I’m distracted. The ability to get quiet and pay attention to how I feel, then offer it to God is an acquired one, and it intimidates me. So often I feel like I’m failing. What if God thinks I’m ridiculous? What if God doesn’t care at all? What if God doesn’t exist and is an amalgamation of my fantasies and fears writ large against the backdrop of my brain? 

My spiritual director, Fr. William, has never heard of you. In our first session, he asks me what I do to try to connect with God. I say that I go to church, co-lead a Bible study, read books. When I try to bring up this or that theologian’s opinion on who Jesus is, he says that spiritual direction isn’t about figuring things out. That I had to ask Jesus directly to meet me and develop our own relationship, and that it wasn’t going to be clear. And suddenly I am afraid, though I can’t explain why. You write in one of your many letters to Fr. Perrin that God’s mercy is more fearful to you than God’s wrath. I didn’t realize that I agreed until that moment. Fr. William suggests that I tell God, “I don’t trust you,” and then wait for an answer. He calls it a little experiment. “Just see what happens,” he says. 

That night, I wake up just enough to pray and mean it. I don’t trust you, I think. I don’t trust you I don’t trust you I don’t trust you. It’s the spiritual equivalent of sticking out my tongue, but at three or so in the morning, I don’t care. And then a response comes, in my mind but not of it. You are safe, it says. Nothing more. Waves of relief flood my stomach. Suddenly I do feel safe, profoundly safe, in a way that I didn’t know I needed. Well, I think, you got me with my guard down. And I fall back asleep. 

You think prayer is dangerous because it has in it the power of suggestion. You wanted to stay away. But once a poem you were reciting to help you endure a migraine became for you a prayer, and Jesus “came down and took possession” of you. You say you’re glad you never read the mystics because that made it clear to you that you hadn’t imagined this divine contact. That your imagination and senses had nothing to do with it, but instead you “felt in the midst of [your] suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.” It’s so hard to explain what God’s love feels like that even mentioning it seems trite and fraught. But I, like you, feel it nonetheless.

Affectionately,

Isaiah

LETTER III

On Intellectual Vocation

My Dear Simone,

It’s so much easier to see your flaws than it is mine. Just like you look back in judgment at the saints who approved of the Inquisition and the Crusades, I’m appalled by the twentieth-century prejudices you failed to notice in your own self. You are anti-Semitic despite being Jewish. You’re no Nazi—you want to personally parachute back into France to fight the Nazis—but you still have horrible things to say about Judaism despite knowing next to nothing about it. You are in favor of the suppression of free speech. You think the law, by virtue of being the law and regardless of its content, has a godly character. You argue that giving a hungry person bread and punishing him for a crime are basically the same thing if done correctly. I’ve written more obscenities in the margins of your pages than in any other books I’ve ever read. 

The irony is that you think you are objective. In your brief letter on intellectual vocation, you state that your integrity is predicated on the ability to hold all ideas indifferently so that they could “weigh themselves” in your mind. Being inside the Church would make it impossible for you to analyze ideas indifferently, you argue, though loving God would not.

Here's more absurdity, this time in a religious key. You say that Jesus himself is depriving you of being baptized. You say that if the salvation of the world depended on your disobedience to God, you would still obey God. You say that everything—everything—comes from God, such that “all the blows, the wounds, and the mutilations are like a stone thrown at us by the hand of Christ.” You love Jesus’s crucifixion more than his resurrection. You fetishize suffering and are obsessed with obedience. When I talk to my father about all of this, he tells me that you’re a mystic and that therefore some of what you’re saying just isn’t going to make sense. 

If I had someone else to look to, I probably would. There is no official patron saint of autism; the other options are twelfth century saints Thorlak and Christina the Astonishing, and since I hate fasting and can’t fly, I’m stuck with you. To be clear, it’s not even about you. It’s about God. I’m looking for a pattern of relating to God by identifying with you, and by trying to see if I’m enough like you that I can meet God the way you did. But I can’t, because I’m not you. Every relationship, human or otherwise, is non-transferable. And while I can always say an Our Father or some Hail Marys, there is fundamentally no script when talking to God. If anything, reading you has reinforced what I know about God, even though it’s nearly the opposite of what you experienced. 

Affectionately,

Isaiah

LETTER IV

Hesitations Concerning Conversion 

My Dear Simone,

I never expected to need to confide in you. It’s nerve-wracking to do so, even though you’ve been dead for eighty-two years. I don’t like being judged, and there’s little in my life that would meet your standards. But sometimes it’s helpful to just state the facts of things, so here it is: I want to convert to Catholicism. Yet it’s easier for me to write out all the reasons I think becoming a Catholic is a bad idea than to admit to what’s pulling me in that direction to begin with. If there’s one thing you’d understand about me, it’s that. 

You tell Fr. Perrin in your first letter about baptism that you’ve been wondering about the will of God. I think about that a lot, too. I, like you, have spent hours thinking about the cosmic cause and significance of suffering. I wonder about the ways in which Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular have been on the oppressive side of the equation. You talk about the Inquisition and the Crusades, about Church patriotism and most of all about the fearfulness of social structures. I would add to the list residential schools and the Magdalene laundries and decades of covered-up child sexual abuse. An atheist friend who grew up Catholic tells me that if I convert, I will be going against my values. I worry that he’s right. History aside (and can history ever be an aside?), some of my most significant social beliefs contradict official church teaching. 

This is the part of the letter where I defend the Catholic Church. I need a three- or four-point rationale for why I’m even beginning to entertain the notion of conversion. Except I don’t have one, Simone, and neither did you. You died without ever being baptized; you stuck to your principles and kept yourself pure, at least in this regard, but still you hovered. The Catholic Church is anything but pure, yet still I’m hovering. What do I make of that?

When I ask Fr. William how a person is supposed to know if the Jesus they’re imagining is the real Jesus or not, he says to remember the parable of the weeds and the wheat in Matthew 13. An enemy scatters the seeds of weeds through a farmer’s wheat field. When the farmer’s servants discover the problem and ask if they should try to uproot the weeds, the farmer says no. Let them grow, he says. When they’re mature, then it will be easy to tell them apart. Fr. William says that discernment is learning to notice what’s growing inside you and sorting out the things that bring joy and courage from the things that sap you of your strength. When I go to Mass and watch people receive the Eucharist, I almost tear up every time. In those moments, I do, in fact, feel the real presence of Christ. Going to Bible study is one of the highlights of my week. And I feel my heart swell when I think about being confirmed in the Catholic Church, even as I’m puzzled by the feeling. 

In “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann,” Flannery O’Connor says that writing about goodness is too hard because it doesn’t seem real. You argue that this is for the most part true, and for this reason, “‘imaginative literature’ is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both).” The irony, you think, is that “imaginary good is boring” while “real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” The new, real good I feel when I pray in the adoration chapel is difficult to articulate because it feels too flimsy to hold up in the face of all the hypocrisies and tragedies I see in the Church. The new, real good feels tender and small in comparison to the ecclesial structures that seem to be ambivalent at best about my existence. But the new, real good I feel in that chapel is, as you say, marvelous, and I have reason to believe it’s from God. I have no apologetic for wanting to belong to the Church. Yet here I am. 

Affectionately,

Isaiah

LETTER V 

Same Subject

My Dear Simone,

Sometimes I wonder if I’m a robot and whether I really have a soul. My only defense against this thought spiral is that I don’t think robots get existentially anxious. There weren’t many robots back in the thirties and forties, so I guess you wouldn’t know. But many autistic people have the same fear. From robots to aliens to faerie changelings, lots of autists feel so estranged from the rest of society that they feel there’s something teleologically different about them. It doesn’t seem like you have any doubts about your humanity, though. You were never concerned about your soul. You were always more worried about being pure than being saved. You say, “The mere thought that, supposing I were baptized with any sentiments other than those that are fitting, I should ever come to have even a single instant or a single inward movement of regret, such a thought fills me with horror. Even if I were certain that baptism was the absolute condition of salvation, I would not run this risk, even to save my soul.” 

There is a touch of defiance in your insistence on God’s direct intervention into your life. You don’t want to do anything spiritual unless it is done flawlessly, not even reciting the Our Father. You have this intense sense of the beauty of the world while at the same time finding almost everything lacking because it is not the pure perfection of God. You are certain that unless God personally invites you to join the Church, you must refuse. The problem is that your conception of how God engages with humanity is so narrow that it precludes nearly any experience apart from a mystical encounter. It never occurs to you that this beauty or Fr. Perrin or the Catholic community around you or your studies or even your own desire could be drawing you to experience the sacraments. What would have been enough for you? 

And what is enough for me? I realize that this letter is to myself, Simone, though it has taken me a while to recognize it. Perhaps this is yet another time when our paths diverge. If beauty and Fr. William and my community and my studies and even my own desire are all trying to tell me something, perhaps I should listen. 

Affectionately,

Isaiah

LETTER VI

Last Thoughts 

My Dear Simone, 

In your last letter published in Waiting for God, you list out the ways you find Fr. Perrin to be mistaken in his faith. Chief among them is his attachment to the Catholic Church, which you say is like allegiance to a country. You think this is a problem because “the children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself.” You write this from Casablanca; it’s a provocative statement during a time when allegiance means everything. After all, it is May of 1942 and you are fleeing the Nazis. Perhaps this inauspicious time and place proves your point. The Year of Our Lord 2026 is also not the best time to be distinguishing between nationalism and religion. But it occurs to me, as it did to you, that the word “Catholic” means universal. I take this to suggest that the faith well-lived is where one finds oneself at home in the universe. You seem to think otherwise—that the children of God are alienated from the universe by being a part of a religion. You view belonging as zero-sum, where if some are included, there must invariably be outsiders as a result. 

At first, I was stunned that your last letter to your spiritual mentor, written as a goodbye from a faraway place and on the way to someplace further, was so critical of the fundamental facts of his belief. Did you really expect to convince Fr. Perrin, a Dominican priest, to abandon his faith and join you on your quest for purity? But the truth is that I’ve set you up the same way. I can’t change your mind, can’t even have a conversation with you, because you died forty-eight years before I was born. You have changed me, though, and I feel a little less lonely because of you. Your ideas have kept me company. Perhaps there are no outsiders after all among the children of God. Not even us.

Affectionately,

Isaiah