I was sitting with a friend once when the question of whether we could or could not be broken came up. This friend had what he would happily describe as a scientific view of the world, meaning he viewed life as a mechanical experience. There is a comfort in understanding life in this way. If something is wrong then, like all mechanical things, it must be broken, and if it is broken, you need only fix it and whatever was wrong will now be right. However, to maintain this comfort, everything must be breakable, including people.

Our discussion quickly moved to children, and for good reason. Adults who do terrible, broken things like Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot might not have started out broken, but instead have become broken by the cruelties of life, the way a toy might break over time from misuse. But if a child arrives in the world broken, then it is as if he has come out of the box missing certain crucial pieces that no amount of tape or glue can repair. In this way, these broken children are actually necessary to maintain a mechanical view of the world.

“What about the children,” he asked, “who are born without the ability to feel compassion? They simply can’t do it. They’re going to go on to become serial killers because they have no empathy. How are they not broken?”

How tempted I was to demand some evidence that these children even existed. I so hated this view of the world that I wanted to slay it with the sharp arrows of argument. Yet his question triggered within me a question I had never bothered to ask until that evening, a question I would not have asked if I had tried to prove somehow to this man that people couldn’t be broken.

“Even if such a child were born,” I said, “just because we don’t know at this time how to help that child learn to feel compassion, doesn’t mean we can’t learn to help that child feel compassion. And even if we never learn to help him feel compassion, that doesn’t mean we won’t. Are we really willing to give up on the idea that we could learn? Why would we do that?”

He agreed he had no interest in giving up on learning, and I felt the relief that comes when I stop trying to prove an enemy wrong and begin instead to speak to a friend from what I know has always been right. For instance, I have always known that learning itself is an act of faith, though I had never named such until that night. It is impossible to prove that you will learn something. Instead, you aim the arrow of your attention toward what you wish to learn and have something resembling faith that you will learn it. This is how the possible becomes the actual, how we launched rockets to the moon and built the Internet and wrote books and started businesses. And the only thing that can actually stand between us and this learning, the only thing that can actually stand between the possible and the actual is this useless, end-of-creation story of brokenness.

If brokenness is an option, we can place brokenness between ourselves and the world in which we wish to live. This is what my friend did accidentally. His perception of these children’s potential stopped where they were. They were broken. There was nothing more to do or think about them. But if no one is broken, if we take it off the table completely, then learning, which is our constant, conscious expansion of perception, remains not only possible, but inevitable.

Whenever I find myself in conversation with anyone about whether or not a person can be broken, it’s not long before Adolf Hitler raises his mustachioed head. After all, who but a broken person could have dreamed and made Auschwitz? It’s all very well and good to look at your child with his various challenges and say he isn’t broken, but are we really to extend this perspective to monsters like Hitler? The answer, almost without exception, is no.

It is an odd leap from children we call autistic to history’s worst villains, but it’s one I inevitably found myself making just the same. I had grown up believing in monsters. Monsters were in the movies I watched and in the books I read; they were in the newspapers, and the stories my friends and I told one another. Sometimes they were on street corners or across the playground. These monsters were the boys and men (they were always boys and men) whose actions were inexplicably cruel to me. We called their affliction evil, a thing, it would seem, that could infect a person like a permanent virus and reduce him to something less than human. 

Yet how is this so different than what we have come to call autism? We call a child autistic when his actions are inexplicable to us, and often view autism as something that has happened to our children. I soon had no use for this view of my son’s behaviors. Either he had freewill or he didn’t. If he had freewill, if he had the power to choose what he would say and what he would do, then I would help him choose those behaviors that were in service to his life. Until he proved to me that he had no power to choose his behaviors, I would treat him as if he did.

It wasn’t long before my mind drifted to those monsters I had lived my life quietly fearing, monsters of the past and monsters of the present. What but their behaviors had earned them their monstrous title? And what exactly is the behavioral line one can cross where an action is no longer the manifestation of a perception – of seeing an enemy where there is actually a friend; of seeing a threat where there is actually safety – and is instead the command of a force greater than us, where our bodies and minds become but puppets to some invisible and wicked puppeteer?

I found it impossible to hold in my mind these two opposing views humanity, to look at my boy or myself and say, “We are innocent. We are not broken because we are not our behaviors,” and then look at the men I called monsters and say they were guilty. If Hitler could be guilty then I could be guilty and Sawyer could be guilty. And so did I forgive Hitler in that moment? Not really. He was still mostly a caricature of evil in my imagination, as were many of the serial killers and dictators living and dead. 

I was not, however, going to hold my life hostage to these men’s gaudy atrocities. There are people I love, whom I trust and adore, who have, while caught in the momentum of anger and frustration and fear, spoken unkindly to me. In those moments, as I learned to do with Sawyer and those behaviors we called autistic, I have looked past my friends’ words to who they truly are. I cannot require myself to see everyone in the world with the same intimate clarity with which I see the people I know and love. I do not have God’s eyes. But I can hold within my heart the knowledge that no one is broken, and have faith in that which is beyond my current perception. Most of the world is beyond my current perception, and yet I can love it just the same if I can only trust that a stranger desires love the same as I desire it now.