Glorious!

What does that word — glorious — suggest to you? A beautiful scene in nature, perhaps? An art work by some renaissance master? A symphony?

Probably it’s not the first word that would spring to mind at the sight of a sticky, dishevelled, eight-year-old boy.

Let me tell you a story…

Excursion

This was one of the very first trips I took Asher on. In the normal, day-to-day world, he was a young pupil in my class. This, though, was the weekend. His mother had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His parents needed some quiet time together, to come to terms with all that lay ahead. I’d offered to give the boy a day out; a treat for him, and some respite for the family.

He wanted a train ride, so I booked tickets to a large town some miles away. As we wandered around the centre, eating ice cream and chatting, we spotted a sign outside a disused church, proclaiming that it had been repurposed as a science activity centre for children.

“Can we go there?” Ash asked, eagerly. “I like science!”

We went inside. His private tragedy forgotten for a while, the child dashed happily from one exhibit to the next. He ran his fingers over a huge model of the moon, walked around a holographic image and explored it from all angles, constructed a model arch with foam building bricks… and then spotted the vacuum forming machine.

Creating a plaque

An assistant explained that, for £2, he would be able to create a sign, using the raised magnetic letters available. A sheet of flat plastic would be laid over them and, as he pushed the button, the suction from the vacuum machine would form the plastic into a permanent record of his words, which he’d be able to take home.

Asher looked at me hopefully, and I handed over the money. Other children were sitting around, creating their names and immortalising them in neon pink or black plastic.

I wandered off, hunting for inspirations for future science lessons, while Asher began creating his masterpiece. Soon, he was back at my side, eyes shining and proudly holding up a slightly wonky, duck-egg blue sign bearing the words:

I AM GLORIOUS

The assistant caught my eye across the room. He was sniggering.

I did a double take. We are conditioned by the language of our society. Few humans have that term applied to them. Still fewer apply it to themselves, unless they are joking or have an ego the size of a planet.

Neither of these was true of Asher. His autistic perception meant that he had not mastered jokes at that age and his ego was fragile at the best of times. I was certain he had a quite different reason for using this word.

Asher was one of those rare and extraordinary people who could view the world around him (and, it now appeared, himself) from a quite different perspective. He would often stare into this world, as if visiting a rare and wonderful place from afar. Quite mundane objects would take on an aura of wonder and beauty for him. He could stare at them, as a newborn baby or someone under the influence of psychedelics does, totally lost in their ‘is-ness’.

Aldous Huxley sums it up thus in The Doors of Perception:

Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.

This, I believed then, and still do, is how Asher was viewing himself when he felt driven to create that sign.

Are we glorious?

How many of us feel able to see ourselves as that small child did? Our self-effacing culture encourages us to reserve such terms for carefully selected others, such as the victims of warfare or monarchs.

If we can see ourselves objectively, though — see beyond the flaws and foibles and look into the mirror of life itself — we might begin to grasp the eternal ‘is-ness’ that we are. If, like Asher, we can view ourselves as a holographic part of consciousness and an essential aspect of All That Is, we may begin to recognise our own glory.