A High Tolerance for Eccentricity

Oct 3

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

People sometimes say that a hallmark of Anglicanism is its high tolerance for ambiguity. We have never been a church that settles every question by decree. We hold Scripture, tradition, and reason in conversation with one another, and at our best, we let them argue among themselves while we get on with saying our prayers. It’s not that the debates are unimportant, but saying your prayers is essential. I’ve come to believe that in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, especially at the parish level, this tolerance for ambiguity shows up in a particular way: as a remarkably high tolerance for eccentricity. Just take a moment to think of the wide variety of characters that can be found at Smoky Tom’s, including amongst your clergy! We are not all alike, and for the most part, this is a good thing. As usual, St. Paul put it best: “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?” (1 Corinthians 12:17). We cannot thrive without “gifts differing” (Romans 12:6).

I first noticed this more than twenty years ago, as a curate at St. Paul’s, K Street, in Washington, D.C. I had never served in a parish so comfortable with, as the prayer book puts it, “all sorts and conditions.” It became clear that my job as a priest was to meet people where they were, and to work alongside folks with a dazzling variety of gifts and differences. I didn’t know at the time where this valuing of variety came from. I just knew it was there, the way you know there is incense in a church before you even see the thurible.

Now that I’m in my third Anglo-Catholic parish, I have a working theory. I think our tradition has an unusual capacity to accept that people march to different beats, and to treat that as part of the beauty of the Body rather than as a problem to be managed. In my experience, that includes plenty of room for neurodivergence. I suspect some of what we fondly call eccentricity in church is exactly that: people whose brains are wired somewhat differently from what society calls “neurotypical.”

Differences can prove challenging, and yet Anglo-Catholic churches somehow make them work. Grace makes all the difference. I’ve learned this at home as much as at church. In my family, grace means admitting, frequently, that my way is not the only way, and that people are generally doing the best they can, even when it doesn’t look or feel particularly good in the moment. It also means questioning my personal interpretation and entertaining perspectives other than my own, precisely in those moments of deepest conflict. It means seeking to understand the wider context, rather than responding with my first blush of anger or irritation or blame. Is this person responding out of grief or fear? What am I reacting to that I’m not even aware of in the moment?

One way of looking at things that I have found enormously helpful is the “double empathy problem.” The phrase was coined in 2012 by autistic researcher Damian Milton. At the time, the standard narrative held that since autistic people supposedly “lacked empathy and social skills,” it was their responsibility to learn “normal” ways of being and acting. But this blanket statement ignored the fact that plenty of neurotypical people also lack empathy and social skills, and many neurodivergent people are incredibly empathic and can be quite socially astute. Milton pointed out—sensibly—that the standard narrative missed the real point: When an autistic person and a non-autistic person misunderstand each other, the misunderstanding runs both ways. Neither side has a lock on the “right” way to do things. Each is simply using a different language, like Egyptian hieroglyphs and Ancient Greek. In other words, a good deal of what gets labelled a deficit is closer to a translation problem, and without a Rosetta Stone, we end up talking past and over each other.

I’m fully aware that this is only part of the picture. Neurodivergence in general, and autism in particular, takes many forms, and for some people and their families it brings real and serious challenges that require care, support, and patience. But for many people living with differently wired brains, the situation is not that “they” have a problem and “we” know how to behave. It’s a communication challenge, and communication always takes at least two parties.

Milton developed the idea to describe autistic and non-autistic people. But as he and his colleagues have since put it, the double empathy problem is a breakdown in mutual understanding “that can happen between any two people.” Most of us know the feeling of being on a different wavelength from someone: a colleague, a fellow parishioner, a relative across the table at Thanksgiving dinner next weekend. Most of us also know how quickly we assume the worst about them. We don’t extend them the good faith we take for granted in ourselves. But the double empathy problem suggests that the gap is often one of translation rather than of goodwill.

So here is what I’d like us to take away. It isn’t enough to say that difference is a good thing, though it is. The harder work is to question our assumptions about the motives of others. When someone’s tone strikes us as abrupt, or their manner seems cold, or they say something we find baffling or even offensive, our first instinct is usually to supply a motive, and usually not a flattering one. But the truth may be that we are simply misreading each other. So give people the benefit of the doubt. Assume good faith on both sides, and for God’s sake, cut each other some slack! I am convinced that a great deal of conflict in the world, and not a little in the church, could be handled far better if we could learn to do this more consistently with each other.

We will never manage this on our own. As the collect has it, we “have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” So let us pray for the grace to be slow to judge and quick to understand, trusting in the God whose “power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine” (cf. Ephesians 3:20).

The English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, who knew something about being an odd duck in the Church, gave thanks to God for “all things counter, original, spare, strange” (from his poem “Pied Beauty,” written in 1877). I can think of no better description of a healthy parish. May St. Thomas’s always be such a place, where the counter, the original, the spare, and the strange are not just tolerated but recognized as part of what it means to live together in community, for our own edification, to the greater glory of God, and for the sake of the world.

Yours in Christ’s service,