At the close of last week I dressed early in the morning in
order to attend the funeral of a friend who took his own life. The event causes
me to come to the keyboard confused this week, feeling as if I have been turned
inside out, my soul and my body somehow switching places. I dare not say I am
feeling “sad” or “depressed” or even “melancholy” for that matter. Suicide has
a way of giving a truer value to those words much in the same way Westerners
are apprehensive to call themselves persecuted after hearing about the martyrs.
I will, however, admit that I do feel quite vulnerable and fragile, like a
sailor who has emerged from his cabin after a storm to find that the mast has
been ripped from the deck. Disoriented. Not because I don’t know the right
answers, but simply because I know that now is not the time for them to be
given.
Stephen Hightower was a pastor, a husband, a friend and a fellow
brother in the faith that we both share. And despite the fact that the news of
his suicide was given to me a week ago, the words still seem to hang in the
air like a thick fog that has no intention of lifting.
I have been confronted with suicide before. I have even
written about it previously through this blog. I
studied it during my years in seminary, read books and articles dedicated to it
throughout my time as a pastor and I have counseled numerous people who had either
attempted it in the past, or would attempt it in the future. Academically, I
can interact with it. Theologically, I can wrestle with it. Emotionally,
suicide leaves me feeling stripped and crushed, the weight of its darkness
almost too much to bear.
This is especially true in the case of a man like Stephen
who shared with me just two months prior to his death that his desire was to establish
a church “for the people no other church wanted.” People that were
misunderstood, people wrestling with doubts and hard questions, people on the
margins…people just like Stephen.
Stephen Hightower was usually seen wearing a clerical collar
and a large iconic cross around his neck with a head-full of beautiful
dreadlocks and jean-clad legs draped over a motorcycle. All of which made him incredibly whimsical and
disarming. It also makes his death all the more difficult for me, and many
others, to deal with. In the face of such tragedy (and all tragedy for that
matter) we are often tempted to grab onto a solution to the problem. We look for
answers, and even absurd ones will often do. We desperately want to know the why. Our anxiety is fueled by an
overwhelming sense of our smallness, our mortality and our ultimate powerless,
the fact that in the face of catastrophic events we are confronted once again
with the glaring reality that, indeed, we are not in control.
In the wake of suicide we are often tempted to look for
solace by questioning the victims faith and their spiritual maturity. We talk
about a lack of hope or a diminished view of God’s promises. Sometimes we blame
the pride that kept them from asking for help. In the case of Stephen Hightower
the truth of the matter remains that Stephen knew the gospel. Not in mere
cerebral terms, but in life altering ways. Ways that changed his own life and
called him into ministry where the central focus of his life would become the
simple act of bringing that message of hope to others in desperate need.
So what remains for me is to let go of my need for resolve
and admit that the darkness that some people experience is, at times,
profoundly unbearable. The sun fails to rise. And day after day, even if it
does shine, the sunrise fails to lift the night.
In the days after his death I quickly found myself reading
the Psalms. They are often a place of refuge for me during such times. They are
honest, and raw and have a sort of human integrity that only poetry can convey.
The words are often able to express what my heart longs to say. Psalm 6 finds
David crying out to the Lord,
“I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood
my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My
eye wastes away because of grief.”
While the church has made great strides in recent years
dealing with mental illness, much is still left to do in order to help lift the
stigmatism of depression. And while the need is great for honesty in the pew,
it is all the more essential in the pulpit. If the masses who cross the
thresholds of churches each week feel the constant temptation to mask their
pain, how much more are their leaders asked hide? We live in a world, and even
a Christian subculture, that prizes the strong, the successful, the beautiful
and the powerful. Leaders are seldom if ever invited to lead from their
weakness. It is the anti-gospel, and it causes thousands of pastors, young and
old, to walk away from their calling - sometimes with violent permanence.
In God’s sovereign grace I was scheduled to teach on the
subject of “God and the Problem of Evil” less than 24 hours after I heard the
news about Stephen. Tempted to cancel the class, I instead took the opportunity
to glance through my notes to see if there might be some way to salvage a talk
that offered some semblance of coherence despite my clouded thoughts.
Thankfully, years ago I had come across the writing of Os Guinness whose book Unspeakable Evil had thoroughly
transformed the way I approach human suffering. I end with the quote I shared
with my class that day. I am holding onto it for dear life.
“No one can ever go so low that God in Jesus has not gone
lower. The horrendous evil that looks as if it is the final obliteration of
goodness and humanness becomes God’s deepest identification with his creatures.
There is hope for victims; there is even forgiveness for perpetrators. For
those who know the cross, the pages of history are stained indelibly in blood
with the evidence of the goodness of God.”
