Sharing self-forgetting is like a glimpse of heaven

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant, essayist, novelist, poet, and author of an autobiographical account, Born on a Blue Day. The American Library Association in 2008 praised the book about his life with the Asberger syndrome as a "Best Book for Young Adults."

"Many people are surprised when they learn that I am a Christian. They imagine that being autistic makes it difficult or impossible to believe in God or explore spiritual issues. It is certainly true that my Asperger’s makes it harder for me to have empathy or think abstractly, but it hasn’t prevented me from thinking about deeper questions concerning such things as life and death, love and relationships. In fact, many people with autism do find benefits in religious belief or spirituality. Religion’s emphasis on ritual, for example, is helpful for individuals with autistic spectrum disorders, who benefit greatly from stability and consistency. In a chapter of her autobiography entitled “Stairway to Heaven; Religion and Belief,” Temple Grandin, an autistic writer and professor of animal science, describes her view of God as an ordering force in the universe. Her religious beliefs stem from her experience of working in the slaughter industry and the feeling she had that there must be something sacred about dying."

"Like many people with autism, my religious activity is primarily intellectual rather than social or emotional. When I was at secondary school, I had no interest in religious education and was dismissive of the possibility of a god or that religion could be beneficial in people’s lives. This was because God was not something that I could see or hear or feel, and because the religious arguments that I read and heard did not make any sense to me. The turning point came with my discovery of the writings of G. K. Chesterton, an English journalist who wrote extensively about his Christians beliefs in the early part of the twentieth century."

"Chesterton was a remarkable person. At school, his teachers described him as a dreamer and ‘not on the same plane as the rest,’ while as a teenager he set up a debating club with friends, sometimes arguing an idea for hours at a time . . .. He could quote whole chapters of Dickens and other authors from memory and remembered the plots of all the 10,000 novels he had evaluated as a publisher’s reader. His secretaries reported that he would dictate one essay while simultaneously writing another by hand on a different subject. Yet he was always getting lost, so absorbed in his thoughts that he would sometimes have to phone his wife to help him get back home.”

“Reading Chesterton as a teenager helped me to arrive at an intellectual understanding of God and Christianity. The concept of the Trinity, of God as composed of living and loving relationships, was something that I could picture in my head and that made sense to me. I was also fascinated by the idea of the Incarnation, of God revealing Himself to the world in tangible, human form as Jesus Christ. Even so, it was not until I was twenty-three that I decided to participate in a course at a local church . . .. At Christmas in 2002 I became a Christian."

"My autism can sometimes make it difficult for me to understand how other people might think or feel in any given situation. For this reason, my moral values are based more on ideas that are logical, make sense to me and that I have thought through carefully, than on the ability to ‘walk in another person’s shoes.’ I know to treat each person I meet with kindness and respect, because I believe that each person is unique and created in God’s image."

“There are many beautiful and inspiring passages in the Bible, but my favorite is the following from 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient . . .. So faith, hope and love abide these three. But the greatest of these is love.”

With his gay partner Neil, Daniel write with Neil: “All of a sudden I experienced a kind of self-forgetting and in that brief, shining moment all my anxiety and awkwardness seemed to disappear. I turned to Neil and asked him if he had felt the same sensation and he said he had.” Like a “glimpse of heaven.”

Daniel Tammet, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (Free Press, 2006), 223-226.