On Sunday, I ferried into the city and met a friend for a talk at the Opera House called Actually Autistic. Onstage, a panel of four autistic women talked for an hour about themselves and their experiences and I sat, laughing and crying–in recognition on The Kid’s behalf at the beautifully varied sameness of it all, the commonalities among those whose brains process life differently, and in gratitude of the way these women were willing and able to express that.

This varied sameness, this similarity within diversity–it’s a pattern. Pattern is something autistics excel at recognising, and sameness is something TK loves even more than I do, and this pattern of sameness/diversity is one of the many paradoxes of life that I’ve come to appreciate after so much time of trying to meld the two opposing components into something more understandable. But mystery isn’t always meant to be solved, and what seems contradictory can end up being a beautiful complementarity, an expansion and even rejection of the smallness we impose on life when we try to fit it into sensical categories just so we feel more comfortable with it all. Just so it fits our own narrative.

Holy disruption is an idea I’ve come to know well in life, but I came to a new familiarity with it as I read that book I mentioned. The holy disruption of disability, and disabled people, and the gifts they bring (other than the convenient ones invented by and/or for them, like telephones and bicycles and texting and touch screens and the list goes on and on). It’s a disruption that counters most comfortable narratives, and the church in particular has done a shitté job of recognising and accomodating this disruption to its often staid and static existence.

It’s another place where sameness within diversity comes in: the recognition of the disabled not as a community to condescend to, to be charitable toward, but a group of our equals who deserve the basic human rights we the abled and neurotypical have enjoyed for all of humanity’s existence.

Alas, my soapbox is teetering under the weight of my outrage. I’ll clearly need to have it reinforced because I am nowhere near done.

Last night we went to the final game of the NBL Championship and watched as the Sydney Kings fell a dozen points behind the New Zealand Breakers then clambered their way back to a lead that held to the end of the game. Championship won. And there we sat, and stood, and jumped our way through it, the boys and their friends screaming with glee and frustration and dissolving into tears at times over the surprising emotional intensity of it all within a stadium that was truly electric in its near-uniformity of purpose: supporting this team to a win. That sameness of desire among a group of 18,000 people, and one of my boys clinging to the railing in front of our seats while the other watched with occasional outrage at the ref’s calls, headphones in place to block out the sounds that his ears hear more powerfully and intensely than the rest of ours do.

The surge ahead in points came toward the end of the second quarter, a welcome deviation from the narrative thus far, but most disruptions aren’t as welcome. There is a “yes but” aspect to life and faith, a “blessed–with reservations” quality to our existence this side of perfection, that is exhausting to fight against–though I have tried. Now I’ve been worn down enough by life–by grace–to do more of a dance, even an embrace, with these paradoxes, these seeming-contradictions-but-actually-complements, the way love can throw us across oceans and into opera houses and stadiums that have become more familiar than churches yet are also houses of worship simply because grace and its source cannot be sheltered into existence: they exist unfettered, showing up everywhere, but especially in the spots that need to be upended by beauty.