Praying by the Rules: What Autistic People Teach the Church about Prayer

What makes prayer difficult for autistic people, and what can autistic people teach the Church about this? Working with 18 autistic Christians to build a phenomenological account of why autistic people can feel anxious about their prayer lives, Helena Cundill places their experiences in dialogue with the existing corpus of theological work on prayer. By examining autistic accounts of prayer, she explores the anxiety that can arise from feeling that one’s prayer life is not ‘good enough’ and how shame arises when one’s practice of prayer does not match the ideals embodied by the Church’s teaching, theological writings on prayer, and traditions. Three particular ‘ideals’ of prayer are discussed, including the ideal of praying every day and the (sometimes competing) ideals around prayers of intercession. Autistic accounts of prayer can reveal the Church’s latent assumptions, and autistic and non-autistic members alike will benefit from understanding autistic experience in this area, hearing from those willing to share about the difficulties that they have with praying and the creative solutions that many have found. Cundill invites Christians to be more open and honest with each other about what forms the ‘rules’ in churches and Christian communities, reflecting on how the raw honesty and lived wisdom of autistic people can enrich the Church’s discourse around prayer.