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In this CATChat episode, Zoe, Krysia, and Ian discuss lent and neurodiversity.
The transcript of the episode is available here: https://share.transistor.fm/s/08013989/transcript.txt
Register for the webinar on the 20th February here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=rRkrjJxf1EmQdz7Dz8UrPzNFa7ljapNItVtbi6_NWAZUNDJaUE4zTTlMTlFDRTRWSVFZTzczSUM4Ni4u
The transcript of the episode is available here: https://share.transistor.fm/s/08013989/transcript.txt
Register for the webinar on the 20th February here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=rRkrjJxf1EmQdz7Dz8UrPzNFa7ljapNItVtbi6_NWAZUNDJaUE4zTTlMTlFDRTRWSVFZTzczSUM4Ni4u
If you have any questions, or just want to say hi, email us at cat@abdn.ac.uk or find us on twitter @autismtheology.
This podcast is brought to you by The University of Aberdeen's Centre for Autism and Theology.
The artwork for this podcast uses the Centre for Autism and Theology Logo, created by Holly Russel
Creators and Guests
Host
Ian Lasch
PhD candidate at the university of Aberdeen researching autism and the Imago Dei
Host
What is Autism and Theology Podcast?
The Autism and Theology Podcast is a space where we engage with the latest conversations in the field of autism and theology, share relevant resources, and promote ways in which both faith and non-faith communities can enable autistic people to flourish.
Our episodes are released on the first Wednesday of every month. We have a variety of guests who are related in some way to the field of autism and theology. Some are academics, others are people with life stories to share, and some are both!
We also release CATChat every third Wednesday of the month. These are shorter and more informal episodes where your hosts will share news and give you as listeners an opportunity to ask questions and share your stories.
Zoe: Welcome to the Autism and Theology podcast, brought to you by the Center for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.
Krysia: Welcome to this episode of the Autism and Theology podcast. I'm Krysia and it's great that you've joined us for this week's Cat Chat. This podcast is a space where we engage with the latest conversations in the field of autism and theology, sharing relevant resources and promoting ways that help faith and non faith communities enable autistic people to flourish.
If you'd like access The transcript for this episode, it can be found by the link in the show notes. On today's Cat Chat, we are going to talk about Lent.
And so I'm going to open the floor and see who wants to join in, join the conversation.
Zoe: So before we started chatting, I suggested that Iain actually tell us all what Lent really is, because I know pretty much what it is, but not like the ins and outs, and yeah, . So Iain, do you want to give us like a crash course on Lent from the perspective of a priest?
Ian: Sure. Uh, and, and right. It's, it's useful sort of overview because not every, even Christian denomination observes the season of Lent. Um, it's more, it's definitely more of a, uh, liturgical denomination, liturgical tradition. Um, so Lent is a 40 day period that starts at, uh, this, the, the holy day known as Ash Wednesday, and you might notice Ash Wednesday because you see people walking around with ash crosses on their foreheads.
Zoe: It's that one after pancake Tuesday.
Ian: That is, yes, Pancake Tuesday is really the, so I could, I could go off on Pancake Tuesday, but pancakes used to be really, really indulgent. And maybe for some people, they still are. But it used to be that the season of lent is a, is a period of fasting and preparation in advance of Easter.
And it's 40 days long. And if you do the math, you'll realize Sundays aren't included because you get Sundays off. You can, you are meant to indulge on Sundays. Yeah, a lot of people don't know this. Uh, so it's a 40 day period, starts with Ash Wednesday, and it's fasting and preparation, and it initially was a series, a, a, a season where those who were going to be baptized at Easter would engage in baptismal preparation, right?
So it would be fasting, it would be, um, intensive learning, intensive formation in advance of them being baptized. So, we developed all these things around it. Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Tuesday, is meant to get rid of all the really indulgent foods. The eggs, and the butter, and the milk, and the, all the stuff that you weren't going to eat during the season of Lent.
You'd throw those all together, make pancakes, have a really indulgent day before Lent kicks off, and then you can't have any of that fun stuff anymore. So, um, nowadays, Uh, those who observe Lent can observe Lent in a lot of different ways, but oftentimes that is a, uh, it's a 40 day season of people engaging in maybe heightened prayer practices, right?
So they have maybe more prayer or more, um, structured prayer life than they might otherwise the rest of the year. So a lot of people give something up. This is, this is maybe more, Um, not traditional, but at least for, for previous generations, that was what you did was you gave something up. Maybe it was candy or maybe it was, um, you know, something that you really enjoyed.
Um, these days, a lot of people take something on. Maybe it's a new prayer practice. Maybe it's, um, a new spiritual discipline. Maybe they try to, you know, To do something particularly spiritually enriching. So anyway, that's, that's what Lent is. It's that 40 days starting at Ash Wednesday and ending at the Easter vigil or at Easter Sunday, where you are, we are meant for those who engage in it, we are meant to, to, to, uh, engage in preparation and, and.
Um, sometimes self denial, although we're not fond of that these days, but, um, but engage in preparation and sort of spiritual formation in advance of Easter.
Thanks for that, Ian. That's really interesting. I learned a lot there.
Krysia: I did too. I did not know that Sundays were excluded from the 40 days.
Zoe: I wonder how many people will listen to this and be like, Thinking back to their, like, previous years of doing Lent and realizing that they could have just eaten chocolate or drank that coffee on a Sunday.
Ian: It's true, and I mean, a lot of people do still keep it up, and especially in churches, you'll still see Lenten Sundays are more stayed, more formal, um, sometimes more ascetic seeming. Because we don't see that, you know, that's the only, um, that's the only time that that we tend to be together during Lent.
So we have to give that season its own flavor. But yeah, if you, if you do the math, the 40 days of Lent do not include Sundays and they are meant every Sunday is a little Easter, even in Lent. So we are meant to, um, to feast on Sundays.
Zoe: Oh, interesting. Yeah, so with this being the Autism in Theology podcast, we thought we'd connect this idea with Lent, which is coming up, um, with autism and neurodiversity as well, more broadly, um, Ian, you mentioned something really interesting about, um, the structure of the day and the spiritual structures of the day and how that can be .
Yeah. a way that neurotypical people can almost start to understand what it's like for certain autistic people and the way that they structure their lives. Do you want to share more about that?
Ian: Sure. I, you know, so, um, for a lot of, a lot of people Lent is a season where you have to come up with a plan, right?
You have to start out because it's 40 days long. You have to know what you're doing on day one. It's a little bit like a new year's resolution, right? Only you only have to to keep it up for 40 days. So it's, it's much easier to maintain, but, um, for a lot of people when they, when the season of Lent approaches, they may not have just one thing that they're doing.
They may have two or three things. So they may even develop, you know, some of them, some people may even develop a whole rule of life, right? Which is a set of standards that you want to hold yourself to in order to deepen your formation, uh, your spiritual formation. So they may say, I'm going to go to prayer.
I'm going to go to public worship, you know, two times a week instead of one, or even three times a week, or something like that. I'm going to read scripture three mornings out of the week, or, you know, I'm going to give up X, maybe it's chocolate, or coffee, or, you know, whatever thing it is. So they may have a list of a couple of different things that they're going to do for Lent, and they may really try to hold themselves to that, Explicit standard and have a real structure in place, right?
Every Wednesday during Lent, I'm going to go to evening prayer, you know, if that's available in your context. And, and so, for a lot of people, when they have this structure to their life, and they, and they sort of plan out the way that they want their spiritual life to be in order to grow, part of me wants to say, as an autistic Christian, welcome.
We've been here a while, because for a lot of autistic people, this is the way that spiritual life goes is that we tend to have very explicit expectations of ourselves, and we tend to have a structure in place that says, here is what I'm going to do spiritually. I'm speaking generalizing, right? I don't want to, I don't want to overgeneralize.
This isn't true of every single autistic person, but for a lot of autistic people, that structure is necessary in order to feel like we're growing in faith or that we're doing Christianity right, right? And so a lot of people get to experience that when Lent comes around, and of course they do it for 40 days, and then they're like, ugh, enough, I'm done with that.
But I think it's, I think it's just, I think it's a really good practice to get into because I don't know, I genuinely do not know how you get better, how you improve, how you grow spiritually without setting explicit goals for yourself, because we are so good at letting ourselves off the hook, right?
Zoe: It's a really interesting point, but I think I want to push back on that a little bit and just say like, from a dyslexic perspective and like, um, a big part of my research and what I'm writing on right now is things like Bible in a year, where it's like you're kind of getting into that routine of spiritual practices.
And I just think sometimes these spiritual practices If you, like me, are the type of neurodivergent person that cannot get into a routine no matter how hard I try, and even when I do, it's like, generally not very focused and there's probably not much point, and I don't really get anywhere spiritually with some of these things, and then I experience guilt and shame and feel Like, I'm not a good Christian like we talked about in the last episodes.
And I just think this is where sometimes I struggle with these things, because I completely see what you're saying, and I get that for some people, but I also wonder if sometimes these things, like, if you then fall short and don't do it, does that then negatively impact your spiritual life? Which then, like, yeah, not doing it in the first place is maybe slightly more beneficial.
Or again, it comes back to that exploring other ways of doing things. But Krysia, I don't know if you have any thoughts on this.
Krysia: I think it's found exploring other ways of doing things, because one of the things I often find is because that kind of, although Lint is a set 40 days, The actual time span it covers shifts around every year.
It's not like Christmas where a lot of, obviously not all churches do exactly the same thing, but the church calendars across different denominations may follow similar ish patterns where things will fall. We have your Advent services that will fall round about the same time, and then you'll have your Christmas services or your Epiphany services or Christmas services if you have that in January.
So it's quite a Routined way, but it's quite clear when that always is. It's not necessarily coming from you. It's almost set from the outside. Um, but a lot of stuff with Lent is very intrinsically set, and I find sometimes I forget when Lent is because it changes so frequently. And, if you're like, obviously I can set routines, but I find sometimes they don't necessarily last that long.
Or if I don't know when it is because it's not really clear, um, because of the dates shifting, cause it's obviously shifts with the moon. It means it's perhaps things get done a bit differently, perhaps then Christmas where it's really, really clear that when the buildup is and when gatherings might happen and when services happen and when you might be doing certain things, if that makes sense.
Zoe: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I wonder as well if a lot of this comes back to like what denomination you're brought up in and like massively influenced by because I grew up in a church in Scotland where it was mentioned but it, what, not much emphasis like are just Yeah, I didn't know a huge amount about it, so I wonder as well if that kind of like, like, I'm similar to Krysia, I never know when it's coming, but I wonder if that, if you're in a denomination from a younger age where it's really central, then that's maybe a slightly different perspective on it?
I don't know.
Krysia: Yeah, because I guess I've always been in denominations where Easter is really central. Um, and the Lent period, generally the end is marked much stronger, things like Palm Sunday. There's generally quite a bit going on around Palm Sunday, but there's perhaps less going on on, for example, Ash Wednesday.
It's only been more recently when I've been in churches where they want to do the Ash thing on the forehead. Growing up that was not something the church I went to did, so there wasn't necessarily always a very clear marker. And it's also midweek as well often, it's not necessarily starting on a Sunday.
So when you go to church on Sunday, it's not necessarily day one, it's usually been a few days in.
Ian: Yeah, I, um, I, I definitely hear Your point, Zoe, about the, the, the need for grace, especially because sometimes structure is not sometimes we aim for structure that we can't maintain. Right? One of my, I don't know if I've ever said this on the podcast, but one of my favorite quotes that I continually return to, it's like, one of those foundational things is from Thomas Keating, who did a lot around centering prayer and he led centering prayer workshops and was famous for it.
Right. Um, and centering prayer is a type of contemplative prayer. That's really, really difficult for people, especially to start out with. And so he was leading this one and, and, um, leading this workshop. And it was only for five or 10 minutes. He starts out very, very small increments so people can get used to it.
And afterwards, I think it was a nun who came up to him and said, what a, what a failure I was at that. In in five minutes, my mind must have drifted 10, 000 times and Brother Keating said, what a gift 10, 000 opportunities to return to God, right? I think that's the spirit of grace that we always need to hold around the standards that we set for ourselves.
If you set a standard that you can always meet. Then it means that you aren't challenging yourself, right? But if you set a standard that you can't meet all the time, you have to have that sense of grace about it, right? You have to be willing to forgive yourself. And I'm not saying that's easy. And I'm not saying that that's, that we, that we are successful about that, but that needs to be a component of it because you are challenging yourself.
And if you're challenging yourself, the, the, the, the thing about challenges is sometimes you will fail at them. Right? Um, at least in terms of the standard that you set out for it. But failure isn't failure in God. Right? And Lent always ends at Easter. So there's a 40 day period where we challenge ourselves.
And at the end of it is always, always resurrection. Right? Um, and I just think that's important to hold on to in general, Lenten disciplines. If you're going to challenge yourself, you are unlikely to do it perfectly. And if you have done it perfectly, then it's something you could do every day, right? It wasn't a challenge for you.
It just probably should be part of your regular practice, right?
Zoe: Yeah, that is a really interesting point, but I wonder as well, just like, I do, I see what you're saying, and it's challenged me slightly in some of my thinking. Um, sometimes you say things, Ian, and I'm just like, I need to quote you in my thesis because you put things in a way that I just can't. Um, but yeah, I wonder just kind of like, because I understand that, but I think sometimes.
when we experience failure a lot around these things, we're not in a healthy place to then start challenging ourselves to experience that failure. Um, and I wonder if, just to come back what, um, me and Krysia both briefly touched on that, like, alternative way of doing things, I wonder if there's that sense in which, like, um, you mentioned some people take up new spiritual practices.
I wonder if, like, could be a time of exploring new ways of, you know, doing spirituality. Something I'm looking into a lot at the moment is, um, sensory Bible reading. So it's, um, I keep forgetting her name. Again, I've forgotten the name. Um, I have a book here. So it's, um, a book by Janine Marie Hanger. And she was actually a PhD student at Aberdeen Uni, but she's written on engaging Jesus with our senses.
And she talks about, like, reading into the Bible and scriptures, sensory things. So, for example, what did it smell like when the woman was anointing Jesus feet with perfume? And I just wonder if things like that maybe, for me, it makes more sense to sort of use lent as a time to try new things, rather than set a goal or an expectation.
I don't know, but maybe that's a very, like, non appropriate Lent way of thinking of things. Because, uh, yeah.
Krysia: I think that's really good. Although, immediately, as soon as you said the smell of deep perfume on the, kind of, the perfume in the feet thing, I immediately smelt 4 7 11 perfume that my Nan used to wear, which is really strong.
So, I guess there's almost, kind of, when we try new things, we're aware of things that actually do work for us and things like that. Oh, that's a bit much. So I think when we think about kind of engaging the senses or doing things differently, being aware of who we are and what we can do, because I'm not going to put myself through perhaps something that's really aversive.
Zoe: Yeah.
Krysia: There's a difference between challenge and putting yourself through something genuinely really aversive. And I think there is, as neurodivergent people, we need to be aware of that line. That challenging ourselves should not be making ourselves more neurotypical. It's about being our best neurodivergent self.
Zoe: Yeah, absolutely.
Ian: Yeah, I, I, I regularly have to remind people that even in Lent, God does not want you to be miserable. Right? The point of challenging yourself is not to become abjectly miserable. It is to, it is to stretch yourself in certain ways. I'm going to draw a parallel here to something we touched on briefly offline earlier, um, from the autistic world, which is the idea of self diagnosis, right?
Um, and bear with me a second because this does, this does come into play. The reason self diagnosis for a lot of autistic people is considered valid is because even if you go to a really talented and well trained psychologist or psychiatrist who knows the tests, they are unlikely. In three to four hours to get to know you better than you know yourself, right?
Um, the same is true for lent, right? I have a lot of ideas and a lot of thoughts around lent But I don't know anybody as well as they know themselves and the importance of lent is to grow Uh is to is to challenge yourself in some way shape or form But zoe what you've described is a form of growth You are challenging yourself to try something new.
That is a challenge. And you may try something that absolutely doesn't work for you, right? Um, but, but that is challenging yourself in order to do something that you haven't really done before. Right. And that's part of what Lent is about. Nobody else is going to know. No one else is going to know exactly what you need most desperately, or what area of spirituality you need to grow the most in.
Um, I can't think of anything. I can't prescribe that for anyone, although I'm happy to talk with anyone and figure out what area they do, they need to grow the most in, but no one else is able to say, here's where you need to grow. So if one of the difficulties, I just speaking of autistic Christians, right?
If one of the difficulties that autistic Christians have is going Feeling like they continually fall short of what they are supposed to be doing. Then maybe what they need for Lent isn't a list of things that they need to do and are potentially going to fail at, but maybe what they need to do is cultivate practices that recognize forgiveness for our shortcomings, right?
Maybe, uh, maybe not necessarily even confession and absolution, although that's a, that's a potential venue for it, but focusing on ways of trying to internalize the grace of God when we are so focused on the ways that we fall short. Though these are all, there are many different ways to grow. And we all know what we need better than anybody else does.
And Lent is a fantastic time to sort of focus on whatever it is that we know we aren't always good about, or the things that weigh us down, and how can we eliminate those things that get in the way between us and God.
Zoe: Yeah, I really like that way of thinking about that. Um, yeah, I think that's, that certainly really challenges me to think about things differently, because I think I, like, I know I'm guilty of always thinking of these.
sort of spiritual practices as like a, oh, can we stop making people do things? But I think that's a really helpful thing you're talking about, like sometimes the challenge is in that like, challenging yourself and being more forgiving, more loving towards yourself. And I think there could be more of that in the church around these things.
Like, um, Yeah, like encouraging people just to see themselves how God sees them through changing their practices. And that can sometimes be even more challenging than taking on an extra prayer life or reading your Bible more. Um, yeah, like, that's, yeah, really interesting perspective Ian. I'm very challenged by this podcast.
Ian: I, uh, that's, I'm, I'm flattered to hear it. I, I, I view my role as challenging people as like muddying the waters, because we tend to sort of view things in black and white, even spiritually, even in our spiritual life. Like, we get used to the idea that challenge is bad or that That, um, that we, that what we need is to, to know that we are beloved.
And that's true. And I don't ever want to take that away. But part of being beloved means that we are beloved, even when we try things that take us that that that take us different places. And part of being beloved means that we are meant to let go of what weighs us down. Right? Um, and, and everybody has those burdens.
And that's, That's sin, right? That's sin in that it's what gets between us and God. And I don't mean to add a layer of guilt to it, and I know that sin is laden language. I'm not saying that you are individually responsible for that sin. But it is sin in the sense that it gets between us and God. And God doesn't want that stuff in between us.
Right? That's part of the point of Christianity is that God wants to be right here with us. And so Lent is a really wonderful season of trying to internalize that and trying to see what is it that gets between us and God. And that's where giving stuff up originally came from, right? If we build our lives around dessert, if every, every moment of the day we're focused on what we're going to eat next, that's That's, uh, that's putting something at a central position in our lives.
Right. And the only thing that's meant to be central is God. Um, and so the reason we give those up is not because they're inherently bad. It's not because we're bad people. If we like those things. But the reason people initially started giving things up like that is it allowed them space to be. to actually consider what's central in their lives.
And so that's what Lent is really meant to do, is meant to reorient us, meant to, meant to, to make us prepare for the resurrection by saying, have we really put the living Christ at the center of our lives? And if not, how can we do that? And what can we do to, to, to make that more of the case?
I
Krysia: guess the only thought I have is I really liked the idea of Ian saying, it's your job to muddy the waters. I backtracked a little bit because my brain has just focused it because I'm always one for saying, bringing more nuance in, especially when we think all autistic people are like this or all ADHD is like this.
When actually, That's just not the case, um, we're just all neurodivergent people, and obviously I just used two examples there of autistic people in ADHD, there's so many different types of people who are neurodivergent, um, that yes, there might be common neurodivergent experiences, but there are different things are going to challenge us, and I think nuance is just so important to this conversation.
conversation so incredibly so to keep it really challenging because although I'm probably feeling less challenged than Zoe I'm finding it really really interesting and really kind of feeling oh that's a really interesting point and that kind of really breaks it down and spells it out quite Clearly, without being kind of, you must do this, you must do that.
So keeping the tension with the nuance, which I just think is so important when we think about neurodivergent people.
Zoe: Yeah, definitely. And I think like, like you said, kind of like, it's really interesting what you're saying. And I think it's been interesting for me because I have kind of always seen Lent as a sort of very like, rule thing and not fully understood the reasons behind it.
And when it's kind of, when you're presented with something that feels like, I'm going to fail at this, I'm not going to enjoy it, this is going to be a horrible experience, you immediately just say like, I'm not going to engage in that. I'm not even going to bother to find out when it is. Like, not for me.
Yeah, I'll eat my chocolate happily. Um, But yeah, it's been really interesting just actually understanding more about lent from your perspective and what it actually, like yeah, what these things actually mean and why we do it and what the kind of underlying stuff is. Um, yeah.
Krysia: So thank you so much for joining us for this episode. If you have any questions, you can message us on Blue Sky, we're now on Blue Sky at autismtheology, also on Instagram, or you can send us an email at cat@abdn.ac.uk and even if it's just to say hi, we would love to hear from you. We also have a webinar on the 20th of February at 7. 30pm and the link to register is in the show notes.
Zoe: Thank you for listening to the Autism and Theology podcast. If you have any questions for us, or just want to say hi, we'd love to Please email us at cat@abdn.ac.Uk or find us on Twitter at Autism Theology.