Loss, Death, and Paths not Taken

It was a rough day in Poolesville this last Wednesday, as the news of a young man's suicide hit the town hard.  It was a hard weekend, as one of the faith communities just a short walk from my own spoke out words of sorrow and blessing over that life.

I didn't know him personally.  But he was a child of the town.   In a community where people still know one another, it was clear so many of the folks at my church had been touched by his life. I feel their hurt and the resonance of his loss through so many people around me, like placing your hand on a bell that's been struck, and feeling it hum against your skin.

It's a difficult thing to process.  Here, you had a life that is unquestionably full of promise, and then that promise seems to have vanished like smoke in a strong breeze.  All those moments that you hoped to share, gone.

It feels both so unnecessary and so understandable, particularly if you've been through the fires of adolescence yourself.  Everything feels so immediate, so intense, so radically defining at that momen...and if you're struggling with something, that can feel like it's your whole world.

I remember that feeling, in the same way I remember being a kid and I remember being 25.  If we are to remain ourselves, we can't forget that feeling.  Life was intense, immediate, and the encounter with the pressing realities of adulthood had that radiance that comes from our encounter with the new.  There were moments of failure, and they were abject and abysmal.  There were moments of joy and passion, and they were everything.

And when you're struggling with something, particularly the dark veil of depression, it can feel like that moment of struggle is forever.  There's no escape from it.  The only way out, you think in that moment, is something irrevocable.

That's wrong, because it's not true.  It is not a reflection of reality.  The reality is that there are people who love you, who care for you, and who will be impacted by your loss.  The reality is that if you wait a day, a week, a month--life will seem different.

But it's also wrong because it doesn't reflect the reality of creation.  In the wild universe in which we find ourselves, there's always a different path.  There's always a brighter and more life-giving choice.  The God who makes all things possible does not just set one path before any of us.  There are paths that lead to sorrow, isolation and darkness, sure.  But we do not have to walk them.  We are free to turn away, and choose something different.  That isn't easy, particularly with the blinders of depression constraining our vision.  But it's real.  That potential is there, resting in the knowledge of God.

And that truth, so important to hold in our times of despair, is also important to hold when we have lost someone too young.  What we mourn isn't just the life that has passed, but the life we will not know.  We mourn the moments we will not share with them, that future which is now precluded.

There, from my own faith, there is a solace.  Because although that future is precluded from our knowledge here in this life, it is not precluded from the knowledge of God.  The Creator knows not just what have done and what we will do, but what we might have done and what we might yet do.   Though hidden from us, we can trust that those unfulfilled moments are not unknown to God.  God knows what that life would have been, with a knowledge so deep that it is not simply knowing, but being.

In the heart of God, everything that our loved one could have been is held as surely as the reality we inhabit is held, because there is nothing that God does not know in its fullness.

When we look to a life cut short, to possibilities that seem suddenly gone, there is comfort in knowing that just as the past is not forgotten, neither is that future.

Castro and Justice

The apparent suicide of Ariel Castro late last night brought an end to a particularly blighted and malignant life.   For over a decade, Castro tortured and sexually assaulted three young women he'd abducted and imprisoned in his Cleveland home.  As crimes go, it was notably monstrous in duration, which is why he ended up being convicted and sentenced to life in prison plus a thousand years or so.

But now he's dead, most likely by his own hand.  Facing a seemingly endless captivity, he apparently could not cope with the very thing he had inflicted on his victims.  None will mourn his passing.

In his death, though, one wonders where justice might lie.  Justice...that restoration of balance and rightness...is a difficult thing in such a case, even with his sentence.  Here he inflicted sustained physical and psychological harm on three other human beings, who will carry echoes of that dark time for their whole lives long.  

And it wasn't just those women who were harmed.  Their families and friends mourned them as lost, in some instances dying certain that they had been murdered.  There is also a child, a daughter born to one of the women.  One wonders, as she grows, how she will come to terms with having Castro as her father.

Now he is no longer with us.   Is justice served by his short imprisonment?  Was justice served by his self-destruction?

It's hard to see how it is.  Imprisoning sociopaths does serve the purpose of eliminating their capacity to harm others.  That is a worthwhile goal.

But it does not itself restore, or reestablish a balance.  Finding a way to that balance is something that our systems of coercive power and retribution have found next to impossible.  Those crude systems, based and rooted in violence, have always fumbled helplessly towards justice.  They are as clumsy as a claw hammer in the hands of an amateur dentist.

And so we wonder, if we are prone to such things, where justice lies in such an instance.

For those who believe that this is all that there is, justice is an challenging concept to begin with.  His death is good riddance, sure, but the idea that there is any balance to be found is an absurdity.  In destroying himself, Castro has simply ceased to be, of his own volition.  Nothing further.

For those who embrace the idea of eternal damnation, Castro has simply expedited his entry into Hell.  Burn forever, you bastard, they'll say.   God condemns folks like Castro to an eternity of torture, punishment without end, or so that view tends to go.  And with monsters like him, it is a tempting perspective.

The challenge with that worldview, of course, is that it doesn't stop with monsters.  

A painfully large fraction of my co-religionists would affirm the same punishment for Castro had he been a gentle, kind-hearted Buddhist who staffed the hotline at a Cleveland rape crisis center.  Sin is sin, they say, no matter how self-evidently preposterous such a statement might be.  We all deserve damnation, they say, oblivious to how cruel and horrid it makes the Good News seem.

With the mystics of my faith, I tend towards another view.

Death is not negation or annihilation.  Neither does it lead to a crudely binary system of punishment and reward.  It is an opening up.  What we receive, when our mortal coil is ended, is nothing more and nothing less than the fullness of who we have been.  That means we know our whole story, the entirety of it, as our Maker knows it.  Everything we have done, everything we have chosen, that's our place in being.   If we have turned our whole selves to the love of others, that becomes the foundation of our eternity, the harvest of our actions.

If we have lived as Castro chose to live, then our encounter with our Maker is both the same and terribly, terribly different.

For the measure we give is the measure we get back, as a dear friend once said.

And in that, there is justice.

Suicide, Faith, and Purpose

Every now and then, I'll follow up on an old 'net conversation, one that I've had a while back and that was either particularly pointed or interesting.

A few months back, I'd checked in on an unfortunate exchange I'd had with a pastor who had decided that he was a new atheist.  It had genuinely baffled me, and I'd found myself wondering just how you could integrate being 1) a pastor and 2) believing that pretty much everything Jesus said was radically wrong.  It seemed odd.   The conversation, needless to say, did not go well.  I ended up walking from it.  It wasn't going anywhere, and I was perilously close to becoming a concern-troll.

I did remember the conversation, though, and tried to find it.  To my surprise, the blog...well trafficked, it was, unlike this one...was gone.  No trace of it.  I dug deeper, and what I found was another blog.  This was the new one, written by the pastor as a sustained part of the grieving process for his twenty-something son, who had taken his own life.  

It was raw and anguished, and as a father, it was impossible not to feel the pain of it.   On the one hand, it is unimaginable.  On the other, I have a good imagination.  Even the smallest taste of that darkness burns the mind.

I read through all of the entries, some several times.  There was nothing really I could say, as the faith that has sustained me in times of loss...of friends, of hopes...is not something I could share with him.  All I have to offer is my compassion.  It's a terrible thing.  Period.  It requires nothing other than the acknowledgement that it is terrible.

I'd been sharing that story with a friend whose brother had committed suicide over the weekend, and that afternoon came the news of another pastor having a child take their life.  It was the son of Rick Warren, he of megachurch and Purpose Driven Life fame.  His boy struggled with depression, and in a moment of intense anguish, he took his own life.

The irony is agonizing.  Here, a pastor whose entire ministry has been about articulating faith as that which gives purpose to existence...and his own child was unable to find that sense of purpose.   Clinical depression is such an implacable creature, and we pastors are not given the gift of forcibly imbuing purpose into a soul.  While I'm not on the same theological page as Rick Warren, that means nothing.  What matters is the pain he and his family feel at the loss of a loved one, period.  Shared sorrow and compassion are the only valid human responses.

As I reflected on those darkly harmonizing experiences, I found myself ruminating on how my own faith plays out against this terrible aspect of the human condition.

There are many reasons suicide is so wrenching.  It is wrenching because it assumes that we are not connected to one another, fundamentally, materially, actually and spiritually.   My own sons, and my wife, and my friends, they are a part of me.  Their reality shapes the arc of my existence.  The tragic untruth of depression is that it blocks us from seeing the deep, flesh-written love that others feel for us.

We cannot sense it.  We become numb to our interconnection.  I have known this state of being myself.  It is a terrible place.

The choice to commit suicide is also tragic because it presumes that there is no possible good future.  This is always not so.  There is, in almost every condition of human life, the potential for a  joyous path.  Only very rarely is the end so inevitable that we must choose the noble fall over the flames.

But we have trouble seeing that potential, being such limited creatures.  Those limitations are exacerbated by situational and clinical depression.  In either form, this blinds our imaginations to the possibility that pain will not be the only state of our being.  It closes us off from the moments of joy and reconciliation that could be written into us.

This is not said to judge tormented souls.  That is not our job, not ever.  But it is useful to hold in ourselves, for those moments in life when our own agonies seem unbearable.

So very often, that seemingly inescapable sorrow arises because we have lost the narrative of ourself.  We no longer know the story to tell.  Our career aspirations lie in ruins.  Our reputation is destroyed.  The relationship that we thought completed us is shattered.  Our future is nothingness, and meaningless, and as we lie there in the dark and our thoughts taste like battery acid, death seems a sweet release.

Again, this is not necessary.  It does not have to be.  But we need to be able...and some, Lord have mercy, are not...to listen for that new story that we ourselves do not yet know.

These things we need to hold, and hold fast.