Autism is a Bad Case of the Human Condition

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/163/story_16308_1.html

............There are so many ways for us to misunderstand and hurt each other, and even when things are at their best a sense of separateness shadows our joy. We look at others from the outside, making guesses about they're thinking. We reach out, and the very skin that allows us to touch is the barrier that keeps us apart. The most that two people can be is two planets in a common orbit, and it's at the happiest of times that we recognize this limitation. Maybe that's why people cry at weddings.
The problem that autists have with other people is just an extreme form of the alienation that troubles us all. Autists have a bad case of the Human Condition. Parents of autists may feel: if even the best human relationships are sadly limited, what hope is there for my child? ...............
Parents are pained by their inability to reach an autistic child; he's only a few feet away, at the other end of the sofa, but might as well be circling the dark reaches of space. But he is known by God. He is transparent to the light of God, who shines through us all, who understands us and our children, and everyone we know, and everyone we don't. Only in him will we one day love each other the way we want to, the way he already does. St. Paul writes, "Then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood" (1 Corinthians 13:12). We have been fully understood, even the least explicable among us, and one day we will rest in tranquil full communion.