five-minute lesson
I sit down at the table next to Adam, and he smiles, silently tender. Love, that’s the recognition I see softening his features. It flickers, this light that shatters darkness: You love me, and I adore you, and here we are, together.
You wonder maybe how Adam’s heart could be so plain to me, but here is the grace in having a relationship not overly reliant on words. Here is the grace of a life full of intellectual challenges. The work of God through our Autistic children has taught me that love surpasses human knowledge and human expression. Adam and I live as co-beneficiaries of grace. We say a lot to each other in silence.
Adam wants to reach out and touch me, even though touching sometimes hurts him. I can feel that energy traveling through his arm, see it making his fingers tap lightly against the table. He bends over his computer and online school, acknowledging that requirement of his attention, but he keeps tossing his grin to me, keeps looking in my direction, keeps teaching me about the meaning of everything.
In Douglass Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy–an old favorite of mine, a super computer churns and churns and then finally spits out the answer to the meaning “of life, the universe, and everything.” It’s 42, an answer as incomprehensible as the original question, and Adams’ bit of humor over all our human philosophizing. We can –ize until we have no eyes. I think of this now, grinning because Adam has a way of reminding me not to overcomplicate things. He loves numbers and has such a numerical mind that he might even understand Adams’ joke better than I do. He might express The Answer similarly, or he might, if he could be eloquent in his uncomplicated wisdom, just say that it all comes down to this: You love me, and I adore you, and here we are, together.
Adam can’t stand it now; he reaches for me, stretches his arms across the remaining space between us to flick my right ear with his fingers, grinning wider. His bright blue eyes blink joy.
The apostle John wrote, “Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth (1 John 3:18).” Lightly I cover Adam’s hand with my own and try to absorb the lesson, the generous way Adam receives love without presuming lack, with a smile as wide as outstretched arms, first drawing nearer in body–all those long angles, even though he’s prone to pull away. Prone to leave you, Lord, I feel it. The snatch of a hymn focuses my heart; this teaching isn’t only about loving people. The first step of faith is always nearer, even when it hurts. Nearer still nearer, close to your heart.
Adam laughs now, as though we’ve uncovered a secret, and his voice soars.
Always he adores me watchfully, with those eyes that refuse to lose track of me, that keep searching me out even while daily life rolls on around him. Seek me first, God says, and I think it must be a bit like this, this looking that, once finding, bubbles over with joy that nothing can separate us from love, that nothing can keep us apart.
