Krysia Waldock 0:04
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Autism and Theology podcast. I'm Krisha, and it's great that you've joined us this week. This podcast is a space where we engage with the latest conversations in the field of autism and theology.
Sharing relevant resources and promoting ways that help faith and non-faith communities enable autistic people to flourish. If you would like to access the transcript of this episode, this can be found via the link in the show notes.
Today on CATchat, I am absolutely delighted to have Brian Irvine with me and we're going to chat about everything to do with faith and perceptual processing. So hi, Brian.
Irvine, Brian 0:45
Krysia, hello, hello. It's just so lovely to join you. This is… I've been looking forward to this for about a week or so. It's brilliant.
Krysia Waldock 0:49
Same.
Irvine, Brian 0:52
I find myself. Yeah, I was coming into the office just bouncing on my toes because I needed to keep myself contained. Partly, and if you're a CATchat listener. You'll know Krysia is just so, so lovely. I've known Krisha for a little while now, and she is fast becoming one of my favourite people just to chat to about everything. So shall we try and keep this contained? It's probably not going to work for us, but we could do sprawling kind of things instead. Yeah, so.
Krysia Waldock 1:12
That's so lovely. Yes. Yeah, Brian and I did promise to each other that we would keep this as contained as possible because we could happily chat for hours on end. So I wonder in one way of to help us keep contained for listeners who don't know who you are, Brian, could you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?
Irvine, Brian 1:34
So my name's Brian. If you're trying to picture what I look like, look, look into your mind and see if you can see a slightly excitable garden gnome. So I'm getting on a little. Well, maybe this is just in my head because I'm just coming up to my 50th birthday, so I've got a big white beard and a shaved head and that hopefully just gives you something if your mind works like this to hang the following information on. Co I work at CRAE, that's the Centre for Research in Autism and Education at UCL’s Institute of Education. And I work here partly as a research fellow on the SUPER project. I'll come back to that in a second.
And the rest of the time I work as comms and engagement. So if you do follow us online, all those tweets that you come across, most of them are sort of manufactured by me and hopefully I spend a lot of time writing summaries about good autism research. And by good, I do mean participatory autism research.
And making sure that it can get communicated in a way which is accessible to most, if not all. I also work here, occasionally we have young folk come and work with us actually at the University. Some of these folk have learning disabilities as well, so they help me do the Comm stuff, making sure that this stuff gets out.
The SUPER project itself, which I've now been on for a couple of years, SUPER, is the Specificity and Universality of superior Perceptual processing in autism, I think that's the full proper title. So, we are looking… We know that autistic folk hear more, see more, sense more, that there's more information going in at any one moment. We know that that is the case for autistic folk who have been able to come to universities and do EEGs with us or do questionnaires online. Whether this is part of the entire autistic experience, whether folk with learning disabilities have that same perceptual need processing, that same way of doing stuff is what we're actually having a little look into.
Then we also look at universality, which is do ADHD folk have this same kind of perceptual focus? So we know lots of ADHD folk suddenly get really focused on stuff that they get that hyper focus. Hyper focus and autistic flow, are they the same thing? Is one a little bit more fragile? Are they, be coming together and to add to this, you know some of the findings that we find is I think you the latest official statistic is something like 60% of autistic folk would also pick up an ADHD diagnosis and about 50% of autistic folk-- of ADHD folk will pick up a what is it? A vice versa can't can't remember which way round I did that. But it does mean that we've got this sort of intersection of AuDHD, autistic ADHD, which is hugely under researched, what is it about that? The wonderful online memes about having two wolves inside you? One is autistic 1 ADHD sort of howling at each other and pulling in different directions.
Krysia Waldock 4:44
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 4:55
Or does an autistic way of thinking about things and an ADHD way of thinking, does it stack up? Does it interfere with each other, and does it really just depend on the time of day whether the wolves gang up on you or not?
Krysia Waldock 5:06
Yeah. And I wonder how you got interested in that and also what we're going to talk about today with perceptual processing, what brought you to this interest?
Irvine, Brian 5:13
OK, I'm going to reveal my own, I suppose minor constellation of Neurodivergence, so I'm an aphant. I have aphantasia which means I don't have any pictures in my head.
Krysia Waldock 5:22
OK.
Irvine, Brian 5:31
So when I started at the beginning saying this is what Brian looks like, I don't know what I look like. I've kind of almost got a list I can talk about, but I can't see even an image of myself. I can't tell you what my kids and wife look like, but I know who they are as soon as I see them.
Krysia Waldock 5:41
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 5:47
So it's different from sort of facial recognition. It's not having any images. I'm also both blessed and cursed by having a very minimal internal monologue, dialogue, whatever it is, folks have, that inner voice.
My inner voice, it's kind of, you know, when you're not tuned into a conversation at all and you can just kind of ignore it in the background until it says something important. And then you suddenly have to panic because it said something important. That's my own experience of my own thoughts.
So it did mean, Krysia, that when I'm preparing for things like podcasts, I can't run it through my head beforehand. I can't guess what my future is going to be. I can't plan for the future particularly well because I can't see myself there and I can't go back and visit my past because I can't see myself there.
Krysia Waldock 6:26
Hmm.
Irvine, Brian 6:38
So I'm a creature of, I suppose, a little bit of logic held together with stories
Krysia Waldock 6:44
I love it, held together with stories.
Irvine, Brian 6:46
Yeah. And I do. So I do lots of storytelling, but I don't know what they're going to be when I start, and I hope they match to the truth. So not having an inner world, I've become fascinated with inner worlds and because of this I this segued me across to perceptual and the perceptual world, which is what we build our inner worlds on.
Krysia Waldock 7:00
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 7:10
So if you see the world in more detail, the thinking is your inner world will have more detail, even if, like me, you might not be able to access your inner world, you might have a richness there. My richness in my own inner life. I'm assuming it's there, it's just not something I access.
Krysia Waldock 7:17
Mm hmm.
Irvine, Brian 7:29
But through a lot of the questionnaires and stuff we've done with Neurodivergent folk and I do put autism and ADHD and dyslexia and dyspraxia, and I think they all sit together with this different internalised world from the majority.
Krysia Waldock 7:45
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 7:46
And it is because of how we see the world changes the worlds that live within our head.
So that that was my own sort of personal journey towards it. This then got informed, so I spent 10 years, 12 years working as a specialist autism mentor in higher education. So I would spend, you know, 5-6 hours a day, every day, talking with autistic folk about how they saw the world. And it was a joy, and it was an honour and it was a pleasure and it made me such a better person because I was… Across our neuro divergences we were meeting and I met an awful lot of people who were very concrete, visual thinker thinkers. I don't think all autistic folk are concrete deal thinkers, but I think that there might be a tendency towards that. And so it really was.
Krysia Waldock 8:40
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 8:43
Yeah, it comes back to Milton's double empathy double empathy problem. I think you know, this whole sociological idea of a problem that we can see in society is really fascinating. But I also occasionally like to think of it as double empathy opportunities that only.
Krysia Waldock 8:59
Mm hmm.
Irvine, Brian 9:00
If we can have a only, we are living in the Kingdom. People were a little bit more perfect and a little bit better then we could have these beautiful conversations that acknowledge that we have different ways of seeing and thinking about the world.
Krysia Waldock 9:17
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 9:17
And then we meet together and in our community, I'm going to say community. I said communion instead together in our communion, I'm going to get a bit sacramental with this, but there's that, that, that bridging of different kinds of minds.
Krysia Waldock 9:28
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 9:32
Which allows us to create these beautiful and better communities where we don't think alike where the neurodiversity paradigm of different minds thinking in different ways becomes something real in the Body of Christ. There we go. This is where I will say it has been 30 years since I last studied theology, so it was what my undergraduate was in, though I now have a doctorate in education.
Krysia Waldock 9:50
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 10:04
So I have left the path of systematic Barthian theology, oh my. I couldn't tell you anything about it, apart from. Yeah, if you need 18 volumes of something to describe church dogmatics, it's possibly because the concept of God and a revealed God lies beyond human comprehension.
Krysia Waldock 10:06
Yeah. Yeah. And actually that brings me really, really nicely
Irvine, Brian 10:23
Does it?
Krysia Waldock 10:24
It does, on to what it does on to the next question of what does perceptual processing have to do with faith? What, why should we talk about this fantastic topic today?
Irvine, Brian 10:36
So perceptual processing, that whole idea that folk have different needs for information going in it. There's the practicality of it. It means that we need different churches that can provide different granularities of information, different places of worship in which our perceptual capacity is fulfilled.
Krysia Waldock 11:01
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 11:01
So one of the things and that that's not just a theology of having different minds and God obviously loves diversity, because God makes lots of different people. It's that whole idea of, yeah, we'll come back to the theology, but the practicalities of it is if you are running a church community, you can't do things in one way.
That we have a perceptual capacity that allows us to work at our best, so the theory goes, it's called load theory, where if your brain if you have a brain that likes information
Krysia Waldock 11:43
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 11:44
and has this broader bandwidth. Then, if that bandwidth isn't being filled up by the place you're in, the place you're at, it will start to fill itself up. And this is why we get a lot of neurodivergent folk talking about rumination.
Krysia Waldock 11:59
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 12:00
I'm fascinated by rumination because my brain really struggles to do it. I think it's ruminating, but it doesn't actually inform me which is I suppose quite nice.
Krysia Waldock 12:08
Well, it's nice because you, I obviously have your block of rumination in my brain. So it's obviously been dished out slightly unevenly.
Irvine, Brian 12:14
Well, we're sharing it around and so some are weirdly… OK, I'm sometimes jealous of people who can ruminate, because from an outsider's perspective, I can see it as a form of prayer.
Krysia Waldock 12:18
Ooh.
Irvine, Brian 12:29
It's that going back in time to an event which maybe wasn't what God intended, and being able to replay it in a prayerful manner and holding it before God allows us to actually process things where you know, I try and do that. And I I just zone out.
And then you suddenly find me, you know, playing another computer game because I've wandered off and done something else because my brain isn't active. And for me, it does mean that places like worship, because I need to have as I was saying, lots of information coming in, you know, it's part of an autistic way of being. It's a few of the stars that I realise in my smorgasbord and constellation myself. I need the information coming in, so I need my places of worship to sometimes smell good, a little bit of incense,
Krysia Waldock 13:15
Yeah, yeah.
Irvine, Brian 13:16
and that allows enough information to get keep on going in that my brain doesn't do the hamster wheel. Now I'm lucky when my hamster wheel spins, it does so in silence, but I still know it's it's going on.
Krysia Waldock 13:27
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 13:28
But I just don't know what you're saying. It's really irritating. So we need this, I suppose, perceptual load design to our worship spaces that actually for some folk, if you give them silent, contemplative prayer, they might go down the dark rumination instead.
Krysia Waldock 13:30
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 13:47
If you give some folk all joy and praise and you know, not just the singings of a harp, but a mighty squealing electric guitar. It will just become too much. And so it's finding these multiplicity--Worship shouldn't be everything. Worship, there should be many kinds of worship within the the body of Christ.
Krysia Waldock 14:05
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 14:10
In the church that allows us to approach worship through different ways because of our perceptual needs and our perceptual capacities.
Krysia Waldock 14:18
And that, to me, feels very neurocosmopolitan, a lot like the work that I've done.
Irvine, Brian 14:22
Ah, I love the word. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock 14:24
So it just feels like there's something for everybody. There's one set way. There's a kind of a flavour of a bit for everybody in every type of brain and body-mind.
Irvine, Brian 14:33
Yeah. And and yeah, we're indebted to people like Nick Walker for ideas like neurocosmopolitanism. But for those of you who who are just sort of tuned in and this is new neuro cosmopolitanism, you know, when you live in a really nice city and you can go out for an evening and you can have a nice pint in an Irish pub and then an amazing Malaysian Curry followed by having your nails done in a Thai bar because they're all in one place. Actually, that was me last Wednesday. But having all those places, it allows this experience to be able to sort of segue through a nice evening out because of the richness and diversity of the people who are there.
And a neuro cosmopolitan place like the church could be doesn't mean we have to be on church, which caters for all at one particular or one service. We have to have many services. We have to be. Yeah, occasionally. Your parish next door or or the the URC church down the road or the Methodist Church or, yeah, I love dropping in by the Quakers. Just for? Yeah, usually, for years. I've always, you know, picked up and done my Quaker research when I need to know what to protest next.
Krysia Waldock 15:48
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 15:49
Yeah. And it is. It's not just about having this multiplicity. The thing that I think pulls together the multiplicity is the common life of faith, the desire for, I started off with this: a Kingdom. Now I'm not a big Kingdom theologian. I'm probably from more…
These days I'm shimmying towards the higher Anglican kind of stuff, but this idea of a affected world in which we live in as the yes, but not yet. And so yeah, I do. I read around that sort of neurodiversity movement quite a bit. And I find these echoes of theology that we hope for this.
Krysia Waldock 16:31
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 16:35
You know neuro diverse world, which is a perfected version of what we have now in the fragmentation we have now. And there is something where if we can live with…
Krysia Waldock 16:45
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 16:49
This joy of neuro diversity with the people that we live with the multiplicities with the multiple dynamics of the people that we know and we love and that we break bread with, then we are ushering in this better place. But we're not there yet there, there are still so many battles to to find, and hopefully overcome for this.
But yeah, that that, yes, but not yet, not just of the Kingdom, but of the neuro diversity movement. I I see the parabells come the parabells come together. Parallels. I'm obsessed with parables.
Krysia Waldock 17:20
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess I I saw a lot of the same when I was looking at kind of some of the rationales for some of my research in terms of imago Dei and the new and the neurodiversity paradigm, as well as the valuing of all body-minds.
Irvine, Brian 17:41
So how do you, imago Dei, particularly with a idea of a God? You know the unity, the, the… A monotheism. How do you then get away from it being one way of being human? Discuss. There you go.
Krysia Waldock 17:58
That is a that is a good way to discuss and I wonder almost if it's because in a lot of church groups and faith groups, sometimes we're drawn to what is perhaps safe for us, which is people like us.
Irvine, Brian 18:00
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock 18:14
I wonder what you think.
Irvine, Brian 18:16
Ah, many, many years ago. As I said, it's been, what, 30 years or so since I studied theology, we were lucky to have as a visiting lecturer John Zizioulas talking about being as communion and at the heart of God's Trinity is not a single monolithic God. It is a being that exists as communion as community with the God self,
Krysia Waldock 18:42
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 18:43
and that there is this flowing from God, Father to the Son to the Spirit, from the Creator to the Sustainer, to the Redeemer. That actually these beings are tied together, not in their individuality, but in their togetherness.
Krysia Waldock 18:56
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 18:57
And by getting together with folks who think in different ways, we make ourselves and our faith stronger, no matter where we hail from in the whole neurodiversity smorgasbord ourselves.
Krysia Waldock 19:12
I love the word neurodiversity, smorgasbord.
Irvine, Brian 19:13
Oh, it's something I came across on Instagram a couple of months ago, and it has. It was a graphic. And rather than actually going down diagnostic labelling, it went down the fact that there were sort of lots of little plates that you could chuck onto to your and some of them might be perceptual. You know, mine is definitely memory. So I've got a big pile of, I don't know, the herring of memory on my smorgasbord that's a good phrase. You need a subtitle title for this. The herring of memory on the smorgasbord.
Krysia Waldock 19:42
Yeah.
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 19:46
If it's sensory needs, if it's physical needs, then they all come together and we make our own smorgasbord rather than having a diagnosis. And I was thinking a bit more about this metaphor. I then thought that that sort of dark rye bread that we almost all have as neurodivergent folk. I think a lot of that comes from living in a neurotypical world.
Krysia Waldock 20:10
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 20:11
There is a commonality. That commonality is growing up knowing your brain works a bit different from the, for at least 25 kids in your class of 30. You hopefully will have had four who you know you can hang out and be beautiful weirdos with, but that's not always the case for some of us.
There will be a small number you get it with, but when you think that the majority, you know I would come up with ideas or, actually the thing I struggle with most not having a visual brain is I'm getting to my next lesson.
Krysia Waldock 20:44
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 20:45
Absolute trauma at school. I never know where I am or where I'm going. I don't know how to use a timetable, I can't hold it in my head. And so that the hours and it was hours wandering around school when all the doors are closed and you're sort of peering in each classroom to try and remember who was in your class so you could go and join them. And yeah, I spent a lot of my time late and in detention because of the way my brain works.
Krysia Waldock 21:05
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 21:06
But what I really needed was somebody to hold my hand and take you from class to class. Yeah, luckily, yeah. But particularly, you know, when I got towards GCSEs and A levels and those kind of things that kind of.
When you pass 14, when you my theories and 14 year olds not just being very nice to each other at school. But when you get into that life of being 15, 16, growing into your adulthood, or at least approaching the threshold, then there were people who would take me from lesson to lesson.
And in return I might get pushed in front to do something like a presentation, but because I can't remember messing things up, I don't sit with shame very easily. By the way, I say I don't stick with shame. I mean, I need to have to work really hard to get a sense of shame because I've forgotten.
Krysia Waldock 21:56
Ha ha ha ha.
Irvine, Brian 22:01
So yes, there we go. That was long, rambling. What was the question in the 1st place? I have no idea where we ended up. We went through everything perception to imago Dei and back again.
Krysia Waldock 22:05
It's all, I guess. Yeah. And I wonder almost when we were talking about planning this, we had a chat around Neurodivergent Saints. And I wonder what that could add in to what perceptual processing has to do with faith.
Irvine, Brian 22:12
Yeah.
Saints. Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, it it's perceptual processing. It's also goes into the sort of wider neurodiversity model. You know, I look into perception, I look into perception and how we create our own inner realities and how that isn’t just one monolith underneath diagnostic labels that actually there's a broad. If you take the idea that all brains are are wired differently, then we will have different approaches to our faith
Krysia Waldock 22:46
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 22:47
It means that the stories going back in history, the stories that have inspired the church, may have minds that worked different from their normal time and we can learn from them. So I love St Ambrose. Can't remember much about Saint Ambrose. But I do remember that he was revered at the time for his for being a non oral reader. So he would sit in front of the Scripture and he would put his finger upon the book and read in the privacy of his own mind.
Because at the time reading was always done out loud, so he well with his neurodivergent mind. Yeah, most of us now read in the silence of our we see that as the normative way of being. He came across it as a non, or as a non-out-loud-speaker in a time where this wasn't looked at. I love, you know, even before you go back to before the centre, people like Moses. Moses getting Aaron to talk to him,talk for him because you know he, you know, he says that his tongue isn't built for it, that you've got wonderful things like Saul, who was definitely emotionally dysregulated all over the place. Then you've got Sam Samson, Samson's and his food sensitivities.
And his vulnerability towards manipulation for from others. I, you know, Samson's an amazing character. And Jesus, I love the fact that, you know, if you're sitting with Jesus and you go, what was your special interest because yeah, I really like talking with rabbis. Well, really like, yeah, I ran away from my parents when I was 12.
Just to talk theology, hardcore theology, with the rabbis and you go, Jesus, wonderful. You've got that… Paul and and he's and he's Thorn in his side which is, sometimes some thinkers thinking, think it's that that depressive outlook that we've had in the Bible to start with all these different kinds of minds being passed to us is this glorious book of stories.
Krysia Waldock 24:54
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 24:55
And then you go into the the Saints, I I love Saint Teresa of Avila, who is reported for her meandering digressions, I think was the phrase. That she would have a habit of just conversations that would wander off into the sunset. She also wrestled with a prayer, but also wrestled with concentration. She wrestled a lot with concentration. So you have this mind which is beautifully fertile, but sometimes wanders, often does its own thing. And yeah, this is where sainthood is. Saint Augustine. Brilliant; super depressive. Saint Ignatius. Ignatius quite often talks about himself in the third person. He talks in about when he talks about desolation, sometimes I think he talks about suicidal ideation and desolation.
Krysia Waldock 25:54
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 25:55
And you know, desolation and consolation and where we make our decisions kind of stuff. You know, there's a man who suffered with his own way, his own internal life. And yet, there is sainthood in there. Minor Saints are great as well. I'm a great fan of the stories of Brother Juniper who hung around with a Franciscan sometimes.
There's Brother Juniper, and there's also Saint Joseph of Cupertino. Both are Saints I think that if they were around today, we would say actually have learning disabilities.
Krysia Waldock 26:34
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 26:35
Saint Francis himself said would to God, my brothers, I had a whole forest of such Junipers. It's actually having these people who, in their own way, have comprehended the majesty of God and actually who are we to prove their faith? Because, you know, some arcing theology.
That, if you like small Saints, that there's also Saint Christina the Astonishing who was 13th century Belgium, nun, and definitely epileptic. That there was cases of her having a Caesar, er a seizure and being dropped in a coffin, but there's also a wonderful line where she climbed churches to get away from the smell of people. Isn't that glorious?
Krysia Waldock 27:27
It is.
Irvine, Brian 27:28
Actually finding a saint that… And people would come to her for her wisdom because she wanted to withdraw from the masses, from the people and and that goes back to the, you know, the stories of Jesus. I love the fact that Jesus meets a crowd does a miracle, talks to the crowd, and then has to go and hide in a boat and he hides in the boat to such an extent a storm gets up and he gets really grumpy with the storm. It's kind of like I was having some detox time now, shush!
Krysia Waldock 27:52
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 27:53
I love that kind of stuff and lastly for those people who haven't come across him, Saint Thorlak, who was, yeah.
Krysia Waldock 28:00
Yes, we've had _____ from Saint Thorlak’s on here before, but been really great to hear a bit more from your perspective.
Irvine, Brian 28:03
Oh yeah, I don't know huge amounts about him, but having a life of ritual that enables sensory processing to be processed,
Krysia Waldock 28:17
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 28:18
and this is the lovely thing about ritual. And I know it myself. If I'm feeling fragile, if I'm feeling that my brain, who that doesn't talk to me is obviously whirring as an empty hamster cage.
Krysia Waldock 28:28
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 28:39
Sometimes that regularity of stuff that I've done for the last 30, 40 years, that quiet pace of evensong.
Krysia Waldock 28:38
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 28:39
Just settles my soul, allows me to focus, and it's obviously that my quiet brain has just done some processing in the background because of the ritual nature of church and Saint Thorlak himself, he had this huge joy in ritual, his almost single minded prayer life and yeah, this is the other bit is is he's incredibly. So we call them robust ethics, this sensitivity towards justice. And also how he then manifested leadership and power. So in the Bishop's assembly, apparently he would only ever use a few words.
And during his few words, all the other bishops would go silence as he stood up and just said the truth that was needed for all. And this allows this whole idea of being wise beyond years, a rattling through of some of the Saints and their perceptual worlds and maybe neurodiversity paradigms.
Krysia Waldock 29:34
And I and I get. I guess my next question is everything the all the amazing threads we've talked about today, I wonder what churches and other faith communities can take from our discussion or learn from it in your view?
Irvine, Brian 29:48
It is in my view and, first: if you are going to do things in many ways for many different kinds of minds, you've got to ask and know about the kinds of minds.
Krysia Waldock 30:01
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 30:02
You know, I work at CRAE we, yeah, we're have participatory research at our heart. We do everything with autistic and neurodivergent folk. And in fact, many of us are neurodiverse or autistic folk, and it's how we not just do research, but how we live a life of faith which takes seriously the stories that those who may struggle with the neuronormative way struggle
Krysia Waldock 30:29
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 30:30
and doing that we can fix it and then we can find the multiplicities, the different communities within our big community that allow everyone to flourish.
I think the second bit is then we are not judgmental. We are not judgmental. We are forgiving about those who need to move church.
Krysia Waldock 30:49
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 30:50
But there will be some churches in some communities which will be catering to those that are there and that is OK. We just need to be able to have a nice church around the corner that or even online that we can actually become part of and find ourself in communion with others and echoing that Godhead of being as communion, by finding not just the minds that agree with us, but the minds that don't,
Krysia Waldock 31:16
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 31:17
and finding the spaces where we can do that. And I suppose that means that the lived experience of our neurodivergent people of faith, of our current neurodivergent saints become the heart of what we do. That there is sometimes a, you know, the paradigm that if you are not standing within the majority you have a place as a prophet. And I come back to this quite often. I think a lot about this, that for those people who can stand and needle poke the neuromajority.
Krysia Waldock 31:58
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 31:59
They actually have a prophetic voice in our midst. And this is the stuff, I love going through the Old Testament at times, and you’ll find these beautiful voices which don't think the world is going right and so get properly cross and grumpy, no-holds-barred ways of approaching how change should be
Krysia Waldock 32:19
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 32:20
because we are living in the church that is of this time.
Whether that's of next year or the year after, that's what we're moving towards.
And I think, I hope I pray most times that we're progressing towards this Kingdom, which has neurodiversity and multiple diversities, as part of what it is.
Krysia Waldock 32:42
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 32:43
And in doing so, we have this process, this lived process throughout history where it becomes hopefully a bit better and sometimes it will become a bit better and then we have to. So I've been reading a little bit of the sort of philosophy of Zizek at the moment. When there is progress, we then have to check to make sure that we haven't trampled on anyone as we progress and part of our journey towards the Kingdom is this. It's not just creating and having a utopia, which we will get to. It's pulling everyone with us.
Krysia Waldock 33:15
Yes, yeah, yeah. And if anybody wants.
Irvine, Brian 33:16
There we go.
Still caveat to add to, it's been 30 years since I did theology. I might be spitballing most of this, happy to say that out loud. I am proud in being wrong.
Krysia Waldock 33:23
I.
Ha ha ha ha.
Yeah.
And I wonder for any of our listeners who might want to get in touch with you. How's best to get in touch with you or follow what you're up to?
Irvine, Brian 33:40
Follow what we're trying to do so you can follow me either on X, I still monitor my X @bigbadb, but I'm more likely to be on blue sky these days and that is @brianirvin.bsky.social, whichever that the usual it is. Yeah. And you can also follow CRAE. We are on. Yeah. You just search for CRAE on LinkedIn. We're on Mastodon, I think. Which is weird. But we're also on blue sky. We're on X and LinkedIn and Facebook, of course. We're on Facebook and we also, and in fact, if you like this sort of thing, you can TuneIn to the Cray webinars on YouTube, where you might want to go back one or two episodes to hear the wonderful Krysia Waldock give a amazing lecture on the impossible subject
Krysia Waldock 34:36
Question mark.
Irvine, Brian 34:37
Question mark, indeed, and how we actually go about thinking about the communities and research within the communities that we are part of. So I do commend that to you, we're on YouTube search for CRAE. Two CRAE’s will come up, one of them will be working with a nice UCL logo and the other one is a pair of eyes staring off in the distance. The eyes staring off in the distance is some unhinged cartoons by someone called CRAE. We're we're CRAE.ioe. There we go.
Krysia Waldock 35:07
Fantastic.
Irvine, Brian 35:08
I love the Internet.
Krysia Waldock 35:09
Yeah, I do as well.
Irvine, Brian 35:09
It is. It's the varieties. Yeah, it comes back to multiplicities. One of the ways that the Internet works well, is there are many minds, sometimes all screaming into the void together. But there are many minds.
Krysia Waldock 35:21
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 35:25
Krysia, it has been such a pleasure and a joy to join you. You are an absolute star. Thank you ever so much.
Krysia Waldock 35:31
It's been a pleasure to join, to have you with us and thank you also to our listeners for joining Brian and I have a fantastic chat about everything to do with faith, perceptual processing, Saints, neurocosmopolitanism, smorgasbords, everything else in between.
Irvine, Brian 35:47
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock 35:47
If you have any questions, you can message us @autismtheology on blue Sky or Instagram, or you can send us an e-mail at cat@abdn.ac.uk, even if it's just to say hi, we would love to hear from you.
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Autism and Theology podcast. I'm Krisha, and it's great that you've joined us this week. This podcast is a space where we engage with the latest conversations in the field of autism and theology.
Sharing relevant resources and promoting ways that help faith and non-faith communities enable autistic people to flourish. If you would like to access the transcript of this episode, this can be found via the link in the show notes.
Today on CATchat, I am absolutely delighted to have Brian Irvine with me and we're going to chat about everything to do with faith and perceptual processing. So hi, Brian.
Irvine, Brian 0:45
Krysia, hello, hello. It's just so lovely to join you. This is… I've been looking forward to this for about a week or so. It's brilliant.
Krysia Waldock 0:49
Same.
Irvine, Brian 0:52
I find myself. Yeah, I was coming into the office just bouncing on my toes because I needed to keep myself contained. Partly, and if you're a CATchat listener. You'll know Krysia is just so, so lovely. I've known Krisha for a little while now, and she is fast becoming one of my favourite people just to chat to about everything. So shall we try and keep this contained? It's probably not going to work for us, but we could do sprawling kind of things instead. Yeah, so.
Krysia Waldock 1:12
That's so lovely. Yes. Yeah, Brian and I did promise to each other that we would keep this as contained as possible because we could happily chat for hours on end. So I wonder in one way of to help us keep contained for listeners who don't know who you are, Brian, could you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?
Irvine, Brian 1:34
So my name's Brian. If you're trying to picture what I look like, look, look into your mind and see if you can see a slightly excitable garden gnome. So I'm getting on a little. Well, maybe this is just in my head because I'm just coming up to my 50th birthday, so I've got a big white beard and a shaved head and that hopefully just gives you something if your mind works like this to hang the following information on. Co I work at CRAE, that's the Centre for Research in Autism and Education at UCL’s Institute of Education. And I work here partly as a research fellow on the SUPER project. I'll come back to that in a second.
And the rest of the time I work as comms and engagement. So if you do follow us online, all those tweets that you come across, most of them are sort of manufactured by me and hopefully I spend a lot of time writing summaries about good autism research. And by good, I do mean participatory autism research.
And making sure that it can get communicated in a way which is accessible to most, if not all. I also work here, occasionally we have young folk come and work with us actually at the University. Some of these folk have learning disabilities as well, so they help me do the Comm stuff, making sure that this stuff gets out.
The SUPER project itself, which I've now been on for a couple of years, SUPER, is the Specificity and Universality of superior Perceptual processing in autism, I think that's the full proper title. So, we are looking… We know that autistic folk hear more, see more, sense more, that there's more information going in at any one moment. We know that that is the case for autistic folk who have been able to come to universities and do EEGs with us or do questionnaires online. Whether this is part of the entire autistic experience, whether folk with learning disabilities have that same perceptual need processing, that same way of doing stuff is what we're actually having a little look into.
Then we also look at universality, which is do ADHD folk have this same kind of perceptual focus? So we know lots of ADHD folk suddenly get really focused on stuff that they get that hyper focus. Hyper focus and autistic flow, are they the same thing? Is one a little bit more fragile? Are they, be coming together and to add to this, you know some of the findings that we find is I think you the latest official statistic is something like 60% of autistic folk would also pick up an ADHD diagnosis and about 50% of autistic folk-- of ADHD folk will pick up a what is it? A vice versa can't can't remember which way round I did that. But it does mean that we've got this sort of intersection of AuDHD, autistic ADHD, which is hugely under researched, what is it about that? The wonderful online memes about having two wolves inside you? One is autistic 1 ADHD sort of howling at each other and pulling in different directions.
Krysia Waldock 4:44
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 4:55
Or does an autistic way of thinking about things and an ADHD way of thinking, does it stack up? Does it interfere with each other, and does it really just depend on the time of day whether the wolves gang up on you or not?
Krysia Waldock 5:06
Yeah. And I wonder how you got interested in that and also what we're going to talk about today with perceptual processing, what brought you to this interest?
Irvine, Brian 5:13
OK, I'm going to reveal my own, I suppose minor constellation of Neurodivergence, so I'm an aphant. I have aphantasia which means I don't have any pictures in my head.
Krysia Waldock 5:22
OK.
Irvine, Brian 5:31
So when I started at the beginning saying this is what Brian looks like, I don't know what I look like. I've kind of almost got a list I can talk about, but I can't see even an image of myself. I can't tell you what my kids and wife look like, but I know who they are as soon as I see them.
Krysia Waldock 5:41
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 5:47
So it's different from sort of facial recognition. It's not having any images. I'm also both blessed and cursed by having a very minimal internal monologue, dialogue, whatever it is, folks have, that inner voice.
My inner voice, it's kind of, you know, when you're not tuned into a conversation at all and you can just kind of ignore it in the background until it says something important. And then you suddenly have to panic because it said something important. That's my own experience of my own thoughts.
So it did mean, Krysia, that when I'm preparing for things like podcasts, I can't run it through my head beforehand. I can't guess what my future is going to be. I can't plan for the future particularly well because I can't see myself there and I can't go back and visit my past because I can't see myself there.
Krysia Waldock 6:26
Hmm.
Irvine, Brian 6:38
So I'm a creature of, I suppose, a little bit of logic held together with stories
Krysia Waldock 6:44
I love it, held together with stories.
Irvine, Brian 6:46
Yeah. And I do. So I do lots of storytelling, but I don't know what they're going to be when I start, and I hope they match to the truth. So not having an inner world, I've become fascinated with inner worlds and because of this I this segued me across to perceptual and the perceptual world, which is what we build our inner worlds on.
Krysia Waldock 7:00
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 7:10
So if you see the world in more detail, the thinking is your inner world will have more detail, even if, like me, you might not be able to access your inner world, you might have a richness there. My richness in my own inner life. I'm assuming it's there, it's just not something I access.
Krysia Waldock 7:17
Mm hmm.
Irvine, Brian 7:29
But through a lot of the questionnaires and stuff we've done with Neurodivergent folk and I do put autism and ADHD and dyslexia and dyspraxia, and I think they all sit together with this different internalised world from the majority.
Krysia Waldock 7:45
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 7:46
And it is because of how we see the world changes the worlds that live within our head.
So that that was my own sort of personal journey towards it. This then got informed, so I spent 10 years, 12 years working as a specialist autism mentor in higher education. So I would spend, you know, 5-6 hours a day, every day, talking with autistic folk about how they saw the world. And it was a joy, and it was an honour and it was a pleasure and it made me such a better person because I was… Across our neuro divergences we were meeting and I met an awful lot of people who were very concrete, visual thinker thinkers. I don't think all autistic folk are concrete deal thinkers, but I think that there might be a tendency towards that. And so it really was.
Krysia Waldock 8:40
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 8:43
Yeah, it comes back to Milton's double empathy double empathy problem. I think you know, this whole sociological idea of a problem that we can see in society is really fascinating. But I also occasionally like to think of it as double empathy opportunities that only.
Krysia Waldock 8:59
Mm hmm.
Irvine, Brian 9:00
If we can have a only, we are living in the Kingdom. People were a little bit more perfect and a little bit better then we could have these beautiful conversations that acknowledge that we have different ways of seeing and thinking about the world.
Krysia Waldock 9:17
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 9:17
And then we meet together and in our community, I'm going to say community. I said communion instead together in our communion, I'm going to get a bit sacramental with this, but there's that, that, that bridging of different kinds of minds.
Krysia Waldock 9:28
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 9:32
Which allows us to create these beautiful and better communities where we don't think alike where the neurodiversity paradigm of different minds thinking in different ways becomes something real in the Body of Christ. There we go. This is where I will say it has been 30 years since I last studied theology, so it was what my undergraduate was in, though I now have a doctorate in education.
Krysia Waldock 9:50
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 10:04
So I have left the path of systematic Barthian theology, oh my. I couldn't tell you anything about it, apart from. Yeah, if you need 18 volumes of something to describe church dogmatics, it's possibly because the concept of God and a revealed God lies beyond human comprehension.
Krysia Waldock 10:06
Yeah. Yeah. And actually that brings me really, really nicely
Irvine, Brian 10:23
Does it?
Krysia Waldock 10:24
It does, on to what it does on to the next question of what does perceptual processing have to do with faith? What, why should we talk about this fantastic topic today?
Irvine, Brian 10:36
So perceptual processing, that whole idea that folk have different needs for information going in it. There's the practicality of it. It means that we need different churches that can provide different granularities of information, different places of worship in which our perceptual capacity is fulfilled.
Krysia Waldock 11:01
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 11:01
So one of the things and that that's not just a theology of having different minds and God obviously loves diversity, because God makes lots of different people. It's that whole idea of, yeah, we'll come back to the theology, but the practicalities of it is if you are running a church community, you can't do things in one way.
That we have a perceptual capacity that allows us to work at our best, so the theory goes, it's called load theory, where if your brain if you have a brain that likes information
Krysia Waldock 11:43
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 11:44
and has this broader bandwidth. Then, if that bandwidth isn't being filled up by the place you're in, the place you're at, it will start to fill itself up. And this is why we get a lot of neurodivergent folk talking about rumination.
Krysia Waldock 11:59
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 12:00
I'm fascinated by rumination because my brain really struggles to do it. I think it's ruminating, but it doesn't actually inform me which is I suppose quite nice.
Krysia Waldock 12:08
Well, it's nice because you, I obviously have your block of rumination in my brain. So it's obviously been dished out slightly unevenly.
Irvine, Brian 12:14
Well, we're sharing it around and so some are weirdly… OK, I'm sometimes jealous of people who can ruminate, because from an outsider's perspective, I can see it as a form of prayer.
Krysia Waldock 12:18
Ooh.
Irvine, Brian 12:29
It's that going back in time to an event which maybe wasn't what God intended, and being able to replay it in a prayerful manner and holding it before God allows us to actually process things where you know, I try and do that. And I I just zone out.
And then you suddenly find me, you know, playing another computer game because I've wandered off and done something else because my brain isn't active. And for me, it does mean that places like worship, because I need to have as I was saying, lots of information coming in, you know, it's part of an autistic way of being. It's a few of the stars that I realise in my smorgasbord and constellation myself. I need the information coming in, so I need my places of worship to sometimes smell good, a little bit of incense,
Krysia Waldock 13:15
Yeah, yeah.
Irvine, Brian 13:16
and that allows enough information to get keep on going in that my brain doesn't do the hamster wheel. Now I'm lucky when my hamster wheel spins, it does so in silence, but I still know it's it's going on.
Krysia Waldock 13:27
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 13:28
But I just don't know what you're saying. It's really irritating. So we need this, I suppose, perceptual load design to our worship spaces that actually for some folk, if you give them silent, contemplative prayer, they might go down the dark rumination instead.
Krysia Waldock 13:30
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 13:47
If you give some folk all joy and praise and you know, not just the singings of a harp, but a mighty squealing electric guitar. It will just become too much. And so it's finding these multiplicity--Worship shouldn't be everything. Worship, there should be many kinds of worship within the the body of Christ.
Krysia Waldock 14:05
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 14:10
In the church that allows us to approach worship through different ways because of our perceptual needs and our perceptual capacities.
Krysia Waldock 14:18
And that, to me, feels very neurocosmopolitan, a lot like the work that I've done.
Irvine, Brian 14:22
Ah, I love the word. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock 14:24
So it just feels like there's something for everybody. There's one set way. There's a kind of a flavour of a bit for everybody in every type of brain and body-mind.
Irvine, Brian 14:33
Yeah. And and yeah, we're indebted to people like Nick Walker for ideas like neurocosmopolitanism. But for those of you who who are just sort of tuned in and this is new neuro cosmopolitanism, you know, when you live in a really nice city and you can go out for an evening and you can have a nice pint in an Irish pub and then an amazing Malaysian Curry followed by having your nails done in a Thai bar because they're all in one place. Actually, that was me last Wednesday. But having all those places, it allows this experience to be able to sort of segue through a nice evening out because of the richness and diversity of the people who are there.
And a neuro cosmopolitan place like the church could be doesn't mean we have to be on church, which caters for all at one particular or one service. We have to have many services. We have to be. Yeah, occasionally. Your parish next door or or the the URC church down the road or the Methodist Church or, yeah, I love dropping in by the Quakers. Just for? Yeah, usually, for years. I've always, you know, picked up and done my Quaker research when I need to know what to protest next.
Krysia Waldock 15:48
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 15:49
Yeah. And it is. It's not just about having this multiplicity. The thing that I think pulls together the multiplicity is the common life of faith, the desire for, I started off with this: a Kingdom. Now I'm not a big Kingdom theologian. I'm probably from more…
These days I'm shimmying towards the higher Anglican kind of stuff, but this idea of a affected world in which we live in as the yes, but not yet. And so yeah, I do. I read around that sort of neurodiversity movement quite a bit. And I find these echoes of theology that we hope for this.
Krysia Waldock 16:31
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 16:35
You know neuro diverse world, which is a perfected version of what we have now in the fragmentation we have now. And there is something where if we can live with…
Krysia Waldock 16:45
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 16:49
This joy of neuro diversity with the people that we live with the multiplicities with the multiple dynamics of the people that we know and we love and that we break bread with, then we are ushering in this better place. But we're not there yet there, there are still so many battles to to find, and hopefully overcome for this.
But yeah, that that, yes, but not yet, not just of the Kingdom, but of the neuro diversity movement. I I see the parabells come the parabells come together. Parallels. I'm obsessed with parables.
Krysia Waldock 17:20
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess I I saw a lot of the same when I was looking at kind of some of the rationales for some of my research in terms of imago Dei and the new and the neurodiversity paradigm, as well as the valuing of all body-minds.
Irvine, Brian 17:41
So how do you, imago Dei, particularly with a idea of a God? You know the unity, the, the… A monotheism. How do you then get away from it being one way of being human? Discuss. There you go.
Krysia Waldock 17:58
That is a that is a good way to discuss and I wonder almost if it's because in a lot of church groups and faith groups, sometimes we're drawn to what is perhaps safe for us, which is people like us.
Irvine, Brian 18:00
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock 18:14
I wonder what you think.
Irvine, Brian 18:16
Ah, many, many years ago. As I said, it's been, what, 30 years or so since I studied theology, we were lucky to have as a visiting lecturer John Zizioulas talking about being as communion and at the heart of God's Trinity is not a single monolithic God. It is a being that exists as communion as community with the God self,
Krysia Waldock 18:42
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 18:43
and that there is this flowing from God, Father to the Son to the Spirit, from the Creator to the Sustainer, to the Redeemer. That actually these beings are tied together, not in their individuality, but in their togetherness.
Krysia Waldock 18:56
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 18:57
And by getting together with folks who think in different ways, we make ourselves and our faith stronger, no matter where we hail from in the whole neurodiversity smorgasbord ourselves.
Krysia Waldock 19:12
I love the word neurodiversity, smorgasbord.
Irvine, Brian 19:13
Oh, it's something I came across on Instagram a couple of months ago, and it has. It was a graphic. And rather than actually going down diagnostic labelling, it went down the fact that there were sort of lots of little plates that you could chuck onto to your and some of them might be perceptual. You know, mine is definitely memory. So I've got a big pile of, I don't know, the herring of memory on my smorgasbord that's a good phrase. You need a subtitle title for this. The herring of memory on the smorgasbord.
Krysia Waldock 19:42
Yeah.
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 19:46
If it's sensory needs, if it's physical needs, then they all come together and we make our own smorgasbord rather than having a diagnosis. And I was thinking a bit more about this metaphor. I then thought that that sort of dark rye bread that we almost all have as neurodivergent folk. I think a lot of that comes from living in a neurotypical world.
Krysia Waldock 20:10
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 20:11
There is a commonality. That commonality is growing up knowing your brain works a bit different from the, for at least 25 kids in your class of 30. You hopefully will have had four who you know you can hang out and be beautiful weirdos with, but that's not always the case for some of us.
There will be a small number you get it with, but when you think that the majority, you know I would come up with ideas or, actually the thing I struggle with most not having a visual brain is I'm getting to my next lesson.
Krysia Waldock 20:44
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 20:45
Absolute trauma at school. I never know where I am or where I'm going. I don't know how to use a timetable, I can't hold it in my head. And so that the hours and it was hours wandering around school when all the doors are closed and you're sort of peering in each classroom to try and remember who was in your class so you could go and join them. And yeah, I spent a lot of my time late and in detention because of the way my brain works.
Krysia Waldock 21:05
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 21:06
But what I really needed was somebody to hold my hand and take you from class to class. Yeah, luckily, yeah. But particularly, you know, when I got towards GCSEs and A levels and those kind of things that kind of.
When you pass 14, when you my theories and 14 year olds not just being very nice to each other at school. But when you get into that life of being 15, 16, growing into your adulthood, or at least approaching the threshold, then there were people who would take me from lesson to lesson.
And in return I might get pushed in front to do something like a presentation, but because I can't remember messing things up, I don't sit with shame very easily. By the way, I say I don't stick with shame. I mean, I need to have to work really hard to get a sense of shame because I've forgotten.
Krysia Waldock 21:56
Ha ha ha ha.
Irvine, Brian 22:01
So yes, there we go. That was long, rambling. What was the question in the 1st place? I have no idea where we ended up. We went through everything perception to imago Dei and back again.
Krysia Waldock 22:05
It's all, I guess. Yeah. And I wonder almost when we were talking about planning this, we had a chat around Neurodivergent Saints. And I wonder what that could add in to what perceptual processing has to do with faith.
Irvine, Brian 22:12
Yeah.
Saints. Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, it it's perceptual processing. It's also goes into the sort of wider neurodiversity model. You know, I look into perception, I look into perception and how we create our own inner realities and how that isn’t just one monolith underneath diagnostic labels that actually there's a broad. If you take the idea that all brains are are wired differently, then we will have different approaches to our faith
Krysia Waldock 22:46
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 22:47
It means that the stories going back in history, the stories that have inspired the church, may have minds that worked different from their normal time and we can learn from them. So I love St Ambrose. Can't remember much about Saint Ambrose. But I do remember that he was revered at the time for his for being a non oral reader. So he would sit in front of the Scripture and he would put his finger upon the book and read in the privacy of his own mind.
Because at the time reading was always done out loud, so he well with his neurodivergent mind. Yeah, most of us now read in the silence of our we see that as the normative way of being. He came across it as a non, or as a non-out-loud-speaker in a time where this wasn't looked at. I love, you know, even before you go back to before the centre, people like Moses. Moses getting Aaron to talk to him,talk for him because you know he, you know, he says that his tongue isn't built for it, that you've got wonderful things like Saul, who was definitely emotionally dysregulated all over the place. Then you've got Sam Samson, Samson's and his food sensitivities.
And his vulnerability towards manipulation for from others. I, you know, Samson's an amazing character. And Jesus, I love the fact that, you know, if you're sitting with Jesus and you go, what was your special interest because yeah, I really like talking with rabbis. Well, really like, yeah, I ran away from my parents when I was 12.
Just to talk theology, hardcore theology, with the rabbis and you go, Jesus, wonderful. You've got that… Paul and and he's and he's Thorn in his side which is, sometimes some thinkers thinking, think it's that that depressive outlook that we've had in the Bible to start with all these different kinds of minds being passed to us is this glorious book of stories.
Krysia Waldock 24:54
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 24:55
And then you go into the the Saints, I I love Saint Teresa of Avila, who is reported for her meandering digressions, I think was the phrase. That she would have a habit of just conversations that would wander off into the sunset. She also wrestled with a prayer, but also wrestled with concentration. She wrestled a lot with concentration. So you have this mind which is beautifully fertile, but sometimes wanders, often does its own thing. And yeah, this is where sainthood is. Saint Augustine. Brilliant; super depressive. Saint Ignatius. Ignatius quite often talks about himself in the third person. He talks in about when he talks about desolation, sometimes I think he talks about suicidal ideation and desolation.
Krysia Waldock 25:54
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 25:55
And you know, desolation and consolation and where we make our decisions kind of stuff. You know, there's a man who suffered with his own way, his own internal life. And yet, there is sainthood in there. Minor Saints are great as well. I'm a great fan of the stories of Brother Juniper who hung around with a Franciscan sometimes.
There's Brother Juniper, and there's also Saint Joseph of Cupertino. Both are Saints I think that if they were around today, we would say actually have learning disabilities.
Krysia Waldock 26:34
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 26:35
Saint Francis himself said would to God, my brothers, I had a whole forest of such Junipers. It's actually having these people who, in their own way, have comprehended the majesty of God and actually who are we to prove their faith? Because, you know, some arcing theology.
That, if you like small Saints, that there's also Saint Christina the Astonishing who was 13th century Belgium, nun, and definitely epileptic. That there was cases of her having a Caesar, er a seizure and being dropped in a coffin, but there's also a wonderful line where she climbed churches to get away from the smell of people. Isn't that glorious?
Krysia Waldock 27:27
It is.
Irvine, Brian 27:28
Actually finding a saint that… And people would come to her for her wisdom because she wanted to withdraw from the masses, from the people and and that goes back to the, you know, the stories of Jesus. I love the fact that Jesus meets a crowd does a miracle, talks to the crowd, and then has to go and hide in a boat and he hides in the boat to such an extent a storm gets up and he gets really grumpy with the storm. It's kind of like I was having some detox time now, shush!
Krysia Waldock 27:52
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 27:53
I love that kind of stuff and lastly for those people who haven't come across him, Saint Thorlak, who was, yeah.
Krysia Waldock 28:00
Yes, we've had _____ from Saint Thorlak’s on here before, but been really great to hear a bit more from your perspective.
Irvine, Brian 28:03
Oh yeah, I don't know huge amounts about him, but having a life of ritual that enables sensory processing to be processed,
Krysia Waldock 28:17
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 28:18
and this is the lovely thing about ritual. And I know it myself. If I'm feeling fragile, if I'm feeling that my brain, who that doesn't talk to me is obviously whirring as an empty hamster cage.
Krysia Waldock 28:28
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 28:39
Sometimes that regularity of stuff that I've done for the last 30, 40 years, that quiet pace of evensong.
Krysia Waldock 28:38
Yes.
Irvine, Brian 28:39
Just settles my soul, allows me to focus, and it's obviously that my quiet brain has just done some processing in the background because of the ritual nature of church and Saint Thorlak himself, he had this huge joy in ritual, his almost single minded prayer life and yeah, this is the other bit is is he's incredibly. So we call them robust ethics, this sensitivity towards justice. And also how he then manifested leadership and power. So in the Bishop's assembly, apparently he would only ever use a few words.
And during his few words, all the other bishops would go silence as he stood up and just said the truth that was needed for all. And this allows this whole idea of being wise beyond years, a rattling through of some of the Saints and their perceptual worlds and maybe neurodiversity paradigms.
Krysia Waldock 29:34
And I and I get. I guess my next question is everything the all the amazing threads we've talked about today, I wonder what churches and other faith communities can take from our discussion or learn from it in your view?
Irvine, Brian 29:48
It is in my view and, first: if you are going to do things in many ways for many different kinds of minds, you've got to ask and know about the kinds of minds.
Krysia Waldock 30:01
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 30:02
You know, I work at CRAE we, yeah, we're have participatory research at our heart. We do everything with autistic and neurodivergent folk. And in fact, many of us are neurodiverse or autistic folk, and it's how we not just do research, but how we live a life of faith which takes seriously the stories that those who may struggle with the neuronormative way struggle
Krysia Waldock 30:29
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 30:30
and doing that we can fix it and then we can find the multiplicities, the different communities within our big community that allow everyone to flourish.
I think the second bit is then we are not judgmental. We are not judgmental. We are forgiving about those who need to move church.
Krysia Waldock 30:49
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 30:50
But there will be some churches in some communities which will be catering to those that are there and that is OK. We just need to be able to have a nice church around the corner that or even online that we can actually become part of and find ourself in communion with others and echoing that Godhead of being as communion, by finding not just the minds that agree with us, but the minds that don't,
Krysia Waldock 31:16
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 31:17
and finding the spaces where we can do that. And I suppose that means that the lived experience of our neurodivergent people of faith, of our current neurodivergent saints become the heart of what we do. That there is sometimes a, you know, the paradigm that if you are not standing within the majority you have a place as a prophet. And I come back to this quite often. I think a lot about this, that for those people who can stand and needle poke the neuromajority.
Krysia Waldock 31:58
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 31:59
They actually have a prophetic voice in our midst. And this is the stuff, I love going through the Old Testament at times, and you’ll find these beautiful voices which don't think the world is going right and so get properly cross and grumpy, no-holds-barred ways of approaching how change should be
Krysia Waldock 32:19
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 32:20
because we are living in the church that is of this time.
Whether that's of next year or the year after, that's what we're moving towards.
And I think, I hope I pray most times that we're progressing towards this Kingdom, which has neurodiversity and multiple diversities, as part of what it is.
Krysia Waldock 32:42
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 32:43
And in doing so, we have this process, this lived process throughout history where it becomes hopefully a bit better and sometimes it will become a bit better and then we have to. So I've been reading a little bit of the sort of philosophy of Zizek at the moment. When there is progress, we then have to check to make sure that we haven't trampled on anyone as we progress and part of our journey towards the Kingdom is this. It's not just creating and having a utopia, which we will get to. It's pulling everyone with us.
Krysia Waldock 33:15
Yes, yeah, yeah. And if anybody wants.
Irvine, Brian 33:16
There we go.
Still caveat to add to, it's been 30 years since I did theology. I might be spitballing most of this, happy to say that out loud. I am proud in being wrong.
Krysia Waldock 33:23
I.
Ha ha ha ha.
Yeah.
And I wonder for any of our listeners who might want to get in touch with you. How's best to get in touch with you or follow what you're up to?
Irvine, Brian 33:40
Follow what we're trying to do so you can follow me either on X, I still monitor my X @bigbadb, but I'm more likely to be on blue sky these days and that is @brianirvin.bsky.social, whichever that the usual it is. Yeah. And you can also follow CRAE. We are on. Yeah. You just search for CRAE on LinkedIn. We're on Mastodon, I think. Which is weird. But we're also on blue sky. We're on X and LinkedIn and Facebook, of course. We're on Facebook and we also, and in fact, if you like this sort of thing, you can TuneIn to the Cray webinars on YouTube, where you might want to go back one or two episodes to hear the wonderful Krysia Waldock give a amazing lecture on the impossible subject
Krysia Waldock 34:36
Question mark.
Irvine, Brian 34:37
Question mark, indeed, and how we actually go about thinking about the communities and research within the communities that we are part of. So I do commend that to you, we're on YouTube search for CRAE. Two CRAE’s will come up, one of them will be working with a nice UCL logo and the other one is a pair of eyes staring off in the distance. The eyes staring off in the distance is some unhinged cartoons by someone called CRAE. We're we're CRAE.ioe. There we go.
Krysia Waldock 35:07
Fantastic.
Irvine, Brian 35:08
I love the Internet.
Krysia Waldock 35:09
Yeah, I do as well.
Irvine, Brian 35:09
It is. It's the varieties. Yeah, it comes back to multiplicities. One of the ways that the Internet works well, is there are many minds, sometimes all screaming into the void together. But there are many minds.
Krysia Waldock 35:21
Yeah.
Irvine, Brian 35:25
Krysia, it has been such a pleasure and a joy to join you. You are an absolute star. Thank you ever so much.
Krysia Waldock 35:31
It's been a pleasure to join, to have you with us and thank you also to our listeners for joining Brian and I have a fantastic chat about everything to do with faith, perceptual processing, Saints, neurocosmopolitanism, smorgasbords, everything else in between.
Irvine, Brian 35:47
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock 35:47
If you have any questions, you can message us @autismtheology on blue Sky or Instagram, or you can send us an e-mail at cat@abdn.ac.uk, even if it's just to say hi, we would love to hear from you.
