lifted
Oh my goodness Adam trusted his group to lift him today.
My dear friend the dancer sent her text in the autumn of the day, just as practice ended and maybe right when they all piled sweaty-weary into the car to drive home, and I grinned so wide Riley had to ask what and who. My friend is right. It is goodness, and much of it hers, as she is the reason I know Adam loves to dance.
It was such a big moment, my friend texts, and I nod even though she can’t see me, still grinning, because the moment was huge in my estimation, and because I know for Adam it represents rare freedom.
Adam doesn’t trust very easily. I’ve always been concerned that Riley might not see danger coming in an unreliable person because she believes everyone lives love like she does, but Adam, ever her opposite, believes at best that most people will make him uncomfortable and at worst that they’ll definitely hurt him. He jerks away from erratic and unpredictable movements; he shies away from growls (real or imagined); he hides from cartoon pictures of teeth. Adam lives quietly and always alert to the possibility of pain.
I don’t know why my autistic son harbors such precautious distrust, but education and experience tell me that he has very likely collected evidence, some valid and some not, that informs his fears. He made rules to protect himself. He just doesn’t have the ability to tell me about them.
I once heard an adult man who has autism explain that he had always refused to walk on carpets because one time–literally once–as a child, he felt the zing of static electricity in his toes when he walked across a carpeted room. He remembered numerous occasions before he could speak when he fell into anxious, rebellious tantrums each time his mother tried to drop him off for therapy, not, as she supposed, because he didn’t like therapy, but because carpet covered the floors of the therapy rooms wall-to-wall. Ever since that one time, he feared that every carpet would shock him, shoes or no, and to him, with his heightened sensitivity to pain, that first shock had been excruciating. For years, this man lacked the language skills to explain his fear, and even if he had been able to explain, he lacked the conversation skills to be persuaded otherwise.
Maybe the experiences of autistic people like that man and my son seem extreme to the rest of us, but they’re not entirely unique. I still find myself overprotecting for the emotional wounds in my past, and often I’m not able to explain it very well to other people. God keeps gently showing me how for years I’ve relied on unhealthy strategies born in the innocence of my childhood, how long ago I made illogical rules when I experienced the excruciating pain of rejection. Honestly, sometimes I still find it difficult to trust true friends to lift me.
Kevin and I often jokingly say that if we only understood the reasons for Adam’s unspoken rules–for example, why he always sits at the table to eat breakfast on Saturday but stands at his desk to eat every other day of the week, or why he always wears his white t-shirts first, or why he turns down the sound on his tablet when Kevin walks downstairs–we could unlock the secrets of the world. When we tease Adam, we make new discoveries, like the fact that he’s aggressively opposed to “pinch-y” finger movements and afraid of forks moved in the air, no matter how far away from him. Adam keeps his distance from barking pets and hairbrushes that snag in tangles and people who seem prone to outbursts.
But today, he trusted his group to lift him. Definitely a big moment.
My friend the dancer sends a video of the lift, and before I read what she writes, that he laughed every time they practiced it–I catch Adam’s smile in the footage, that grin that sometimes surprises him when it slips past his careful control. I watch the other dancers kneel and take hold of Adam’s legs as he stretches his arms out cruciform, like propeller blades or winged seeds set for flight, and as they lift him into the air I see it, the way trust sets him free. I can almost hear the sound of his voice, the surprised, giddy way he suddenly recognizes his own lack of fear when, for a moment, he loses track of everything that could go wrong.
A verse flashes through my mind as I watch the video loop and with it a few threads of wisdom—something the apostle Peter wrote, “clothe yourselves with humility toward one another”; something C.S. Lewis said, that “the humble man will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all”; something from Tim Keller, that “humility is not thinking more or less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.”
Watching the video, I understand why in trust Adam can step away from fear and allow his friends to lift him. Dancing allows Adam to forget himself.
How fitting that in that same passage, Peter continued imperatively, “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time.”
Trust gives way to self-forgetfulness and self-forgetfulness gives way to trust, and the emptying of the carnal ego will lead us all to freedom. I see that I must be wary of that which draws my attention back to me, whether in disparagement or pride, and I must be careful of any rule or strategy that leaves me reliant upon myself.
My past should be my teacher, not my jailer.
There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, and what if in fear we miss the changing of the seasons? I think of Adam and what he might have missed had he refused this chance, of the loss of that smile and the surprise of joy. Tears spring to my eyes as I consider it, and I whisper an honest prayer:
Father, please grant me the freedom of self-forgetfulness.
