Yes, I have Asperger’s and I definitely have a morbid streak, especially in my sense of humor. It does make it a bit difficult sometimes because none of my Catholic friends seem to share this and my friends and family who have AS or at least traits of it are not Catholic.
I know the feeling, as my personality seems to click a lot better with people who aren’t a part of the modern Christian cultural milieu. As a convert, the culture is alien to me: I came for the beliefs and I don’t see how those beliefs logically conclude in such a culture - unless our beliefs actually
are different, which is pretty much the fact of the matter, I feel. (However, Traditionalism’s culture seem about right to me, but not completely - a part of our tradition is to be kind of progressive, and it shuns that aspect too much for my tastes.) But anyways, people outside of the Church naturally assume that’s the way Christians are supposed to be and stay away from the religion for fear of getting assimilated, so I think a part of evangelizing needs to involve dirtying things back up a bit.
I restrain myself when I’m around people I don’t know well, or talking to people who I know are easily disturbed. But I am not going to change my sense of humor and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. There is actually a tradition of morbid humor in the Catholic Church - think of stories like St. Laurence being roasted to death and announcing to his executioners, “I’m done on this side,” or that one about St. Teresa being mocked by the devil while on the toilet and her retort, and personally I think that the story about the wheel on which St. Catherine was supposed to be tortured exploding, and flying splinters of it killing some of her executioners, is hilarious. There are lots of others. One saint told the men who were going to kill him that the name of Jesus was written on his heart, and when they killed him they cut open his heart and found the word “Jesus” written inside it in gold letters. (Ha ha!) This stuff is part of our heritage as Catholics. Medieval people in particular seem to have had very morbid humor (ever read Chaucer?). Maybe it was all those public burnings and lack of cleanliness.
- That’s freaking hilarious.
- It’s pretty much impossible to live a chaotic life like theirs without developing some kind of “darkness” to cope, because honestly it’s just being realistic. Resistance is futile (and induces some seriously painful cognitive dissonance to boot.)
- Comfortable lives tend to do the opposite and make anything but positivity seem unrealistic/unnatural, unless the person who is currently living comfortably has already been familiarized with evil somehow.
- I’ll leave you to make your own conclusions about our brethren, because what I wanted to write was too blunt. >.> Not angry, just stepping on toes.
Also, I
love Flannery O’Connor and she definitely had a dark sense of humor (I have wondered if she might have had Asperger’s - she had a lifelong obsession with raising poultry, for example, and there are other more subtle things). I like not only her stories, but her letters, too. They are quite wise and funny. She also struggled with feeling like a social outsider within the Church.
Ha, I just discovered her. I find her observations poignant and scathingly hilarious, but I feel like a squirrel when I try to read literature so I haven’t read her stories yet. But yeah, she was basically harangued for being “unorthodox” by some people.
In this as everything I have opted for being myself. As long as it is not sinful - and sin isn’t really “myself” anyway. I believe there is a place for eccentricity, even that it’s important. But one has to stop caring about what other people think. I mean this with regard to being unusual in ways that don’t hurt anyone. And you have to be willing to deal with a certain amount of pain because of it. Which I’m sure you already know.
Yep, it hurts but the misery of denying it hurts much more.
