Mercy and not judgment on suicide

Because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment. (James 2:13)

n my Facebook wall this past weekend, we were discussing this topic: Let’s have compassion on people who commit suicide and not judge them. You can find the thread here. As is typical, someone somewhere said something stupid and merciless (in this case about a person suffering from suicidal ideation); I got wind of it; and made a post. I did no more than quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church §2282–2283:

Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.

We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.

Almost at once, folks descended to make long list of all the reasons why we really have scant reason for hope. J. wrote:

Absolutely we should not despair. But “can diminish” is a possibility not a surety. [It almost never happens, you see.] So many people want to fling the door wide open when the Church [only] opens the door a crack to allow for hope. [It is a tiny, airless crack. May as well not be there.] Doing this flinging open suddenly diminishes the severity of sin and would be a sin in itself.

It’s a wee crack. Almost nobody fits through it; only one or two very wee small people. The rest, who suffer unfathomable despair in life, find the door shut upon ’em at death. This is the good news of salvation in Christ.

K. listed all the suicide victims who don’t fit through the crack:

1. The ancient Greeks and, even into the last century, the Japanese who committed “honor” suicides.

2. Many self-euthanists, who don’t seem to be trying to avoid suffering but boredom or hopelessness.

Then, like J., K. attempted to treat “we should not despair” as though it really meant “we should have only the most tenuous and minuscule hope.”

“Can diminish” doesn’t equal “eliminates.” Anguish, for example, doesn’t necessarily overpower reason (we all know this from our own lives), so someone who commits suicide in anguish may have adequate use of his reason so that his culpability is reduced only slightly or even not at all.

While we shouldn’t “despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives,” we have no reason for assuming their salvation.

The irony in these comments is that J. and K. wrote many words refuting an argument I never made, while ignoring the point that I was trying to get across. (Since I only quoted the Catechism, they may as well have been arguing with the Church.) As I put it in the thread:

When I speak about this subject, like similar ones (the fate of babies who die unbaptized), I always find I have to explain that the urge to compassion does not mean that anyone is “flinging the door wide open” and claiming certainty about whether such and such a person is in Heaven. All it is, in this case, is an urge for compassion—and compassion only—toward people who are suffering so badly they feel there is no escape but to kill themselves. This does not mean suicide becomes something other than grave matter, and it does not mean that any particular person is necessarily saved. It means we don’t know, we leave it to God, we trust in God’s mercy, and we have compassion for the human suffering in front of us.

At Aleteia, David Mills picks up on my Facebook post and adds the following observation to the discussion:

I would say that there’s something weirdly wrong with the people who react like [J. & K.], as if the Christian’s first responsibility is not to proclaim the good news of salvation but to make sure that no one presumes upon God’s offer. They sound like (not are, but sound like, let me stress) border guards who don’t care about their country’s virtues but hate the idea that anyone might sneak in.

Yes. First, let us make damn sure none of the wrong, undeserving people get any mercy. Let us make damnation the default; and let us set the bar for mercy so impossibly high that only two percent of Olympians can vault to heaven.

Others in the thread expressed similar sentiments as Mr. Mills. E. wrote:

I simply cannot believe the number of people in here (people who are presumably claiming to be Christians—and Catholic Christians at that) who are openly rubbing their hands in a kind of holier-than-thou glee at the thought of suicides going to hell. Shame on all of you. Keenly scouring doctrine for lists of reasons that anyone should go to hell is already a pretty ugly sight, but to do so in the case of suicides—where great anguish must always be involved, because the instinct of self-preservation is so overwhelmingly powerful—is simply disgraceful.

I can not echo that enough. It reminds me of what Mark Shea has often said about the death penalty: Far too many people spend far too much time asking, “When do we get to kill someone?” In this case, people search, not for the chance to show mercy and compassion, not for a reason to help people who are in deep crisis; they search, rather, for reasons to say that so and so does not qualify for mercy and must be in Hell. (As if anyone really deserves mercy.) Unless you prove mercy, I assume damnation.

“I actually feel,” C. wrote in a different thread, “a wave of gut-wrenching pain when I think of someone being damned, so I don’t understand the attitude that seems to almost enjoy it.”

•••

Nor do I. But let me add something else to the discussion, and point out that it is not just a distrust of grace at work here; it is also small understanding of what depression is—or other types of mental illness—and how they compromise reason and free will.

K., quoted above, sneered and dismissed such psychological illnesses as no more than people being “off their rocker.” This strikes me as the kind of comment that can be made only by someone who has small idea what mental illness is; what it does to a person; and more importantly, what it feels like to suffer from it. We understand physical illnes much better than mental illness. No one expects a quadraplegic to walk, but somehow someone with depression is capable of reason.

But it is so overwhelmingly and starkly beyond comprehension that, as Andrew Solomon put it in The Noonday Demon, one can only describe it through metaphor and poetry; as Emily Dickinson does:

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down—
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing—then—

“A plank in reason broke.” According to various nonprofit and government sources, more than 90 percent of suicide victims had a mental illness, often untreated, at the time of their death. That includes depression and bipolar disorder, but also schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa, and borderline personality disorder. Do we not have sorrow?

The idea that such people are, as J. put it, “rejecting God through serious sin,” is abysmally ignorant. I can not explain or understand such a mindset except to describe it as a monumental failure of empathy; of imagining, or trying to understand, what it feels like to be the other person. I wrote in response:

I choose to say this with reserve. People who commit suicide, because they suffer some form of mental illness and are in deep crisis, are *not* “rejecting God.” They simply do not have the capacity to make that choice with any semblance of reason. Whatever they do, they do because they are desperate and suffering.

That is the most important point, I think, to be made about the overwhelming majority of people who commit suicide. They are suffering. They suffer very badly, very starkly, very emptily. And even if you have suffered in such ways yourself, not even then can you begin to imagine the suffering of another; suffering is as individual as the person who suffers. You can’t be them; you can’t judge them; God calls you to compassion and compassion alone for them. (And He calls you to all the charity and help you can offer to save them.)

I did once know someone who killed herself; she suffered from severe, untreated depression; she shot herself in the head. I was thirteen and couldn’t grasp the magnitude of it; couldn’t grasp what had led her to such a desperate act; didn’t want to try to understand; and only felt overwhelming sorrow for her, overwhelming sorrow that anyone would have to suffer what she must have been suffering.

You can’t describe it or understand it outside the kind of poetic language Dickinson uses. And if you can’t, how can you judge with the judgment of God, or have mercy with the love of God? Is prayer and compassion and sorrow not enough?

Have you felt the funeral that Emily Dickinson describes? Have you ever felt like every day was your death; a constant drumbeat numbing your mind, boots of lead creaking across your soul; that your entire being—your very self—is a solitary wreck, and you can only have relief in annihilation? If you haven’t, pray God you don’t. And for the love of God stop using phrases like “off their rockers”; stop accusing a person in unutterable despair of rejecting God. Such people desperately need the mercy of God. Only the mercy of God can give them any relief. They do not need to have their circumstances and their despair and their feelings and their illness submitted to a human checklist to determine whether or not they’ve made the cut and can merit mercy. Stop it with that.

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