The Pastor They Failed (Short Story)

I may look normal, but there is no true portrait of autism—no map a stranger can unfold and point to, no guidebook explaining how the noise shifts in my mind. The world has always demanded a face for everything: the face of joy, the face of rage, the face of love. But for me, emotion is an ocean under ice—deep, restless, alive, but unseen.

Some say I’m “high-functioning,” as if the function of a man is measured by how convincingly he can perform at a church potluck or laugh in the right rhythm at an elder’s joke. They saw the pressed collar, the soft nods, the faithful sermons, and they believed I was whole. But they did not see my shutdowns after each back-to-back service or hear the humming in my mind like a thousand wasps when I was forced to socialize before I was ready.

I was born in a town called Windmere, a small place where the horizon stretched wide and forgiving, and the fields rolled out like open palms offering prayers to the sky. My father worked at the lumber mill, his hands always a little nicked and stained, smelling faintly of cedar and sweat. My mother taught piano lessons in the parlor, her voice low and lilting, each note a small kindness in a house that was often too quiet for her liking.

From a young age, I found comfort in the slow, rhythmic things: the hush of book pages turning (especially those of dinosaurs and astronomy), the routine of getting ready for school, the gentle tap of rain against the kitchen window. But things also scared me: loud thunderstorms (always quietly singing “Jesus loves me this I know” beneath the sheets), the sun being too bright (even on overcast days), and the unfamiliarity of home.

School was a strange and foreign land. The other boys threw balls and shouted to each other as if their voices were Christmas ornaments they could toss into the air, unafraid of them shattering. I preferred the library, where the smell of paper felt like a blanket around my shoulders, and where words could be examined like tiny, beautiful insects pinned beneath glass. But of course, you couldn’t spend recess time in the library; you had to run around in the outside noise and the too bright sun. I tried my best to fit in, but I never did. The book fair every year felt like the year of Jubilee as delineated in Leviticus.

My teachers called me a “bad student” and told my parents I needed to try harder. But they couldn’t see what my parents saw: that I could complete the tasks just fine; I just needed reminders and more time. It wasn’t until decades later that I learned this was indicative of executive function struggles due to monotropism, where working memory is often overwhelmed.

As I got older, teachers and mentors alike told me I needed to “come out of my shell.” They never saw that the shell was not a prison but a chapel—a sacred place where I could take off the mask and finally breathe.

When I received the Call to serve as Associate Pastor at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Mt. Morris just a couple hours from home, I thought perhaps I had found a field where my quiet nature could take root. The church itself looked as though it had grown out of the earth, its whitewashed walls like the bones of some ancient, kindly creature. Inside, the air carried the scent of old wood, and the stained-glass windows spilled colors like spilled wine onto the worn oak floors.

In those early days, I believed I could be the shepherd they needed. Every morning, I prayed in the sanctuary for my flock, my voice barely above a whisper. Thanks to monotropism, I wrote sermons quickly yet thoroughly, as if carving them from a block of marble, each word weighed and measured, each pause a chance for God to breathe between my syllables. After services, the people would clasp my hand firmly, their voices booming with praise.

But one day, the senior pastor—James—sat in my office with me and expressed the elders’ concerns.

“Ray,” he said, “you need to be more approachable. Instead of going straight to preparing the service, you need to stop and talk to people. And your sermons need to be more personable. So the elders suggest that you talk to three to five people a day and report to me who they are.”

I was confused. James asked if I had any close relationships, and when I told him, he said those weren’t actual close relationships because they get along with every pastor. What the elders meant was that I needed to wear a different skin—a skin that laughed and chatted and winked at the ladies bringing pies to potlucks. Someone who’s not me.

I tried. God knows, I tried. At each fellowship event, I stood with hands nervously stimming in my pockets, rehearsing social scripts: “The weather’s been crazy, huh?” “How’s the new grandbaby?” “How ‘bout them Lions?” As well as rehearsed answers to shallow questions. “How are you?” Answer: “good,” even though I’m conflicted, or not good, or depressed, or anxious. “How’s your wife?” Answer: “good,” even though she’s actually doing terrible. And then silence, because what else do I say after “good”?

Each forced question and each forced answer felt like a splinter beneath my fingernails. I dissociated in nearly every forced social interaction, too aware of all the noise happening around me, too aware of myself, constantly analyzing every social behavior and calculating the expected response—my mind a field of sparrows rising and falling in terrified clouds. My anxiety during the Divine Service increased dramatically, for I was told to stop my pious preparation in favor of shallow sociability.

By the time I’d get home, I’d collapse on the couch, my body leaden, my spirit frayed like a rope left out in a storm.

My wife, Emma, understood me more than she ever said aloud. She would cuddle up against me, her hand resting on my chest, feeling the quick tremors of my heart, like a weighted blanket rooting me to Sabbath rest. She was the daughter of a librarian—a woman with eyes as deep and luminous as the cosmos. She knew how to love in silences and small gestures—my favorite candy waiting for me on the coffee table, a favorite meal waiting for me freshly cooked or in the fridge.

As the weeks turned into months, the elders’ gentle suggestions hardened into expectations. “People see you as unfriendly,” they said.

Unfriendly? I wanted nothing more than to kneel among them—to wash their feet as Christ did. Hell, when I got a phone call at 3 a.m. about an emergency hospitalization, I got up and drove to the hospital even when they didn’t ask or expect me to. College students talked to me about their sins and temptations when no one else would listen. I spent an hour, sometimes more, with shut-in invitations rather than the expected 15-30 minutes. I listened to the bereaved tell stories of their deceased loved one. I prepared a time and space for the youth to ask their questions without judgement—and free pizza!

They could not see the love hidden in my quietude, and the devotion folded into my soft answers.

During this period, I was diagnosed with clinical depression and autism spectrum disorder. I preached what was my last sermon there, which I didn’t know at the time. I preached about mental health, opening up about my own, encouraging everyone to seek professional help if they feel it’s needed, and to seek the essential things: the Word and Sacraments.

Then Emma almost died. A year earlier, she had emergency surgery for a volvulus—her intestines were twisted in two knots. The following November was a planned reversal surgery for the ostomy she was given to help her intestines recover. The surgery went well, but suddenly during recovery, her vitals sank. They rushed her into the operating room… and she came out of it in the ICU. Long story short, I transferred her to a better hospital, and after two weeks of recovery and another ileostomy, I finally brought her home.

Twenty-two hours later, the head elder, Kevin, called an impromptu elders’ meeting. “Pastor,” he said, “we’ve asked you to make changes, and instead of improving, you’ve been defiant. We no longer see a place for you here, and we demand your resignation.”

For a moment, I was silent. I looked at James, the senior pastor, for support. He would not meet my eyes, remaining silent, keeping his head down as if ashamed of himself.

Finally, I told them what they’re doing is illegal. They cannot discriminate me against my autism.

“In our discussions these past few months,” Kevin said, “your autism was never mentioned. This has been in development for some time.”

I told them about autistic burnout and skill regression—that I wasn’t being defiant but literally burning out and losing my ability to socialize because of the increased expectations I could not fulfill as someone on the spectrum. I reminded them that I had asked them for patience and understanding after telling them about these diagnoses. But they refused to understand.

So I said, “So be it,” and got up and left.

When I returned home, Emma was sitting in her art room. I almost didn’t tell her, but then I considered the foolishness of keeping secrets from your wife. So, I told her about what had just happened.

Immediately, she was angry—not at me but at the elders. “How could they do this to us?” she said. “As soon as things get hard, they kick you out? How can they call themselves Christians?”

For months, I wandered through life like a ghost. Mount Morris was preparing for Christmas, stringing lights throughout the trees bordering Main Street, hanging evergreen wreaths on shop doors. Children ran through the snow, their shrieks slicing through the crisp air. I watched them from a distance, feeling the world turn without me.

In those hollow days, I wrestled with God under the long winter stars. I asked Him why He had knit me this way—all quiet edges and cautious movements, a heart tuned to the hushed music rather than the roaring choirs. In the deepest hours of the night, when Emma slept beside me and the furnace hummed like an old hymn, contemplating suicide, I heard an answer not in words but in a warmth that spread through my bones: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness”—a verse echoed in the corridors of my spirit, a verse I had preached a hundred times but never felt so keenly.

Spring arrived with shy footsteps, greening the fields beyond town and shaking the last frost from the churchyard roses. We moved to a small apartment across the street from the town’s high school. I began writing—so much writing: poems, stories, devotions, studying deeply the Psalms, Proverbs, and Book of Job.

In that slow, unfolding life, I discovered a new ministry—one not bound by pews or programs or by the simple, trembling threads of humanity shared over steaming cups of coffee and quiet walks through blooming rows of lavender. I saw Christ not in the busy chatter of crowded halls but in the single tear slipping down a widow’s cheek, in the nonvocal autistic (the mute) whose silence makes the world question whether he feels anything, in those hurt by the Church because they cannot live up to the impossible standards of the sinners who run it.

People still say I look normal. “You don’t look autistic,” they say. I just let the words of their ignorance pass like a breeze across a field, knowing they cannot see the hidden cathedrals within me, the stained-glass thoughts, and the silent hymns that hum in my bones. In my quietude, I have met the gentle Christ who walked dusty roads and wept in gardens, who knew the pain of being misunderstood and the agony of unrequited love.

One evening, as fireflies rose like tiny lanterns over the apartment lawn, Emma turned to me and whispered, “You’re a good pastor, Ray. You didn’t fail the church; it was the elders who failed you and the church.”

In that moment, I felt the gentle shudder of grace—the slow healing of old wounds. For in this quiet life, unmasked and unashamed, I have found not exile but homecoming. I wait now, with hands open as seed beds, for the day when all our hidden struggles will be transfigured into light—when we will know and be fully known, and every trembling be stilled in the embrace of the One who called us beloved long before we learned the cruel language of this world.

And perhaps then, on that final morning when the dew clings like tears to the new grass, I will hear Him say not “You look normal,” but “You were Mine all along.”