In one of his books on contemplative prayer, Thomas Keating shares with us a line that he occasionally uses in spiritual direction. People come to him, sharing how they used to have a warm and solid sense of God in their lives but now complain that all that warmth and confidence have disappeared and they’re left struggling with belief and struggling to pray as they used to. They feel a deep sense of loss and invariably this is their question: “What’s wrong with me?” Keating’s answer: God is wrong with you!

His answer, in essence, says this: Despite your pain, there is something very right with you. You have moved past being a religious neophyte, past an initiatory stage of religious growth, which was right for you for its time, and are now being led into a deeper, not lesser, faith. Moreover, that loss of fervor has brought you to a deeper maturity. So, in effect, what you’re asking is this: I used to be quite sure of myself religiously and, no doubt, probably somewhat arrogant and judgmental. I felt I understood God and religion and I looked with some disdain at the world. Then the bottom fell out of my faith and my certainty and I’m now finding myself a lot less sure of myself, considerably more humble, more empathetic, and less judgmental. What’s wrong with me?

Asked in this way, the question answers itself. Clearly that person is growing, not regressing.

Lost is a place too! Christina Crawford wrote those words, describing her own painful journey through darkness into a deeper maturity. To be saved, we have to first realize that we’re lost, and usually some kind of bottom has to fall out of our lives for us to come to that realization. Sometimes there’s no other cure for arrogance and presumption than a painful loss of certitude about our own ideas about God, faith, and religion. John of the Cross suggests that a deeper religious faith begins when, as he puts it, we forced to understand more by not understanding than by understanding. But that can be a very confusing and painful experience that precisely prompts the feeling: What’s wrong with me?

A curious, paradoxical dynamic lies behind this: We tend to confuse faith with our capacity on any given day to conjure up a concept of God and imagine God’s existence. Moreover we think our faith is strongest at those times when we have affective and emotive feelings attached to our imaginations about God. Our faith feels strongest when bolstered by and inflamed by feelings of fervor. Great spiritual writers will tell us that this stage of fervor is a good stage in our faith, but an initiatory one, one more commonly experienced when we are neophytes. Experience tends to support this. In the earlier stages of a religious journey it is common to possess strong, affective images and feelings about God. At this stage, our relationship with God parallels the relationship between a couple on their honeymoon. On your honeymoon you have strong emotions and possess a certain certainty about your love, but it’s a place you come home from. A honeymoon is an initiatory stage in love, a valuable gift, but something that disappears after it has done its work. A honeymoon is not a marriage, though often confused with one. It’s the same with faith; strong imaginative images of God are not faith, though they’re often confused with it.

Strong imaginative images and strong feelings about God are, in the end, just that, images. Wonderful, but images nonetheless, icons. An image is not the reality. An icon can be beautiful and helpful and point us in the right direction, but when mistaken for the reality it becomes an idol. For this reason, the great spiritual writers tell us that God at certain moments of our spiritual journey “takes away” our certainty and deprives us of all warm, felt feelings in faith. God does this precisely so that we cannot turn our icons into idols, so that we cannot let the experience of faith get in the way of the end of faith itself, namely, an encounter the reality and person of God.

Mystics such as John of the Cross call this experience of seemingly losing our faith, “a dark night of the soul”. This describes the experience where we used to feel God’s presence with a certain warmth and solidity, but now we feel like God is non-existent and we are left in doubt. This is what Jesus experienced on the cross and this is what Mother Teresa wrote about in her journals.

And while that darkness can be confusing, it can also be maturing: It can help move us from being arrogant, judgmental, religious neophytes to being humble, empathic men and women, living inside a cloud of unknowing, understanding more by not understanding than by understanding, helpfully lost in a darkness we cannot manipulate or control, so as to finally be pushed into genuine faith, hope, and charity.

There is no such a thing as pure objectivity, a view that is free of all bias.

Yet that’s the claim often made by non-religious, secular thinkers in debates about values and public policy. They argue that their views, unlike those who admit that their views are grounded in religious principles, are objective and free from bias. Their underlying assumption is that a purely rational argument, a view in effect from nowhere, is objective in a way that religious arguments, based upon someone’s faith and religious perspective, can never be, as if there was such a thing as a purely objective starting point. There isn’t.

We all have a bias. The late Langdon Gilkey used to put this in a gentle, more-palatable way. We don’t have a bias, he says, but rather a “pre-ontology”, a subjective stance from which we look at reality. And that stance includes both the place where we stand, outside, when we look into any reality, as well as the software through which we perceive and reason as we look at anything. He’s right. There’s no view from nowhere, no view that’s unbiased, and no view that’s purely objective.  Everyone has a bias. The religious person and the secular person simply stand at different subjective places and process things through different subjective, mental software.

Does this mean then that all views are equally subjective and that everything is relative?  Can we not then distinguish between science and superstition?  No. There are clearly degrees of objectivity, even if no one can claim absolute objectivity.  To admit that even the strictest empirical scientific research will always contain a degree of subjectivity is not to put science on the same level as superstition or even of faith. Empirical science and rational thought must be given their due. It is medical doctors, not faith-healers, who cure physical diseases. Likewise, the scientific theory of evolution and the fundamentalist religious belief that our world was made in seven days are not to be given an equal claim.  Much as religious thinkers are sometimes irritated by the absolutist claims of some secularists, science and critical rational thinking must be given their due.

But religious thinking must also be given its due, especially in our debates about values and politics. Religious opinion also needs to be respected, not least with the more-explicit acknowledgement that secular reasoning too operates out of a certain faith, as well as by the acknowledgement that, like its scientific and philosophical counterparts, religious thinking also brings invaluable and needed perspectives to any debate. A lot of the world’s knowledge is contained within science and philosophy, but most of the world’s wisdom is contained in its religious and faith perspectives. Just as we cannot live on religion alone, we too cannot live on science and philosophy alone.  Wisdom needs knowledge and knowledge needs wisdom. Science and religion need to more deeply befriend each other.

More important however than having a proper apologetic about the place of faith and religion inside of public policy is an understanding of this for our own health and happiness.  We need to understand how subjectivity colors everything, not so much so that we might eventually convince secularists that religious perspectives are important in any discussion, but so that we can more deliberately choose the right pre-ontology so as to see the world through better eyes and make better judgments on the world.

The 12^th century mystic, Hugo of St. Victor, gives us, I believe, the right pre-ontology out of which to operate: Love is the eye!  For Hugo, we see most accurately when our eyesight works through the lens of love and altruism, just as we see most inaccurately when our eyesight is colored by suspicion and self-interest. And this isn’t an abstract idea. Experience tells us this. When we look at someone in love, beyond of course those periods when love is overly-obsessed with romantic attraction, we see straight.  We then see the other as he or she really is, with full recognition of his or her virtues and faults. That’s as accurate as we will ever see. Conversely, when we see someone through the eyes of suspicion or self-interest our vision is clouded and there’s not as fair a perception.

Jesus says as much with the first words that comes out of his mouth in the Synoptic Gospels. In his very first remarks, he invites us, in one word, to see the world as it really is. His first word? Metanoia. This is a Greek word that is generally translated in English bibles, as Repent, but it literally means “to enter a different, higher mind”. And that connotation is highlighted when we contrast it to another Greek word which we already know, namely, Paranoia.  Metanoia is the opposite of paranoia.

When we look at the world through the eyes of paranoia, we are not seeing straight. Conversely, when we look at the world through eyes of metanoia, we are seeing straight, religiously and scientifically.  Love, indeed, is the eye.

Recently I read, in succession, three books on suicide, each written by a mother who lost one of her children to suicide. All three books are powerful, mature, not given to false sentiment, and worth reading: Lois Severson, Healing the Wound from my Daughter’s Suicide, Grief Translated into Words, lost her daughter, Patty, to suicide; Gloria Hutchinson, Damage Done, Suicide of an Only Son, lost her son, David, to suicide; and Marjorie Antus, My Daughter, Her Suicide, and God, A Memoir of Hope, lost her daughter, Mary, to suicide. Patty and David were in their mid-twenties, Mary was still a teen.

You cannot read these biographies and not have your heart ache for these three young people who died in this unfortunate manner. What these books describe in each case is a person who is very loveable, oversensitive, has a history of emotional struggles, and is in all likelihood suffering from a chemical imbalance.  Hearing their stories should leave you more convinced than ever that no God worth worshipping could ever condemn any of these persons to exclusion from the family of life simply because of the manner of their deaths. Gabriel Marcel had an axiom which said: To love someone is to say of that person, you at least will not die. That’s solid Christian doctrine.

As Christians we believe that, as a community of believers, we make up the Body of Christ along with all of those who have died in faith before us. Part of that belief is that Christ has given us the power to bind and loose which, among other things, means that our love for someone can hold that person inside our family, inside the community of grace, and inside of heaven itself. In all three of these books, these mothers make it clear that this is exactly what they are doing.  Their family, their circle of grace, their love, and their heaven includes their lost child. My heaven too includes these three young people, as should any true understanding of God, of grace, of love, and of the family of life.

That’s a deep consolation, but it doesn’t take away the pain.  For a parent, the loss of a child to any kind of death leaves a wound that, this side of eternity, will find no healing. The death of one’s child goes against nature, parents aren’t supposed to bury their children. The death of any child is hard, but if that death comes by suicide, that pain is compounded. There’s the frustration and anger that, unlike a death from a physical disease, this is unwarranted, unnecessary, and an act of betrayal in some way. And there’s the endless second-guessing: How responsible am I for this? How should have I been more alert? Where was I negligent? Why wasn’t I around at the crucial moment?  Guilt and anger comingle with the grief.

But that isn’t all. Beyond all of this, which is itself more than sufficient to break a person, lies the stigma attached to suicide. In the end, despite a better understanding of suicide and a more enlightened attitude towards it, there is still a social, moral, and religious stigma attached to it, equally true in both secular and religious circles. In the not too-distant past, churches used to refuse to bury someone who died by suicide on blessed ground. The churches have changed their attitudes and their practice on this, but, truth be told, many people still struggle in their gut to accord a blessed, peaceful farewell to someone who has died by suicide. The stigma still remains. Someone who dies in this manner is still seen as somehow accursed, as dying outside the family of life and the circle of grace. There is, for most people, nothing consoling in their deaths.

I have suggested elsewhere in my writings that the majority of suicides should be understood as death by a mortal illness: a deadly chemical imbalance, an emotional stroke, an emotional cancer, or an oversensitivity that strips someone of the resiliency needed to live. Here, however, I want address more specifically the issue of the stigma attached to suicide.

There’s still a stigma attached to suicide, that’s clear. With that in mind, it can be helpful to reflect upon the manner in which Jesus died. His death was clearly not a suicide, but it was similarly stigmatized.  Crucifixion carried a stigma from every point of view: religious, moral, and social. A person dying in this way was understood to be dying outside the mercy of God and outside the blessing and acceptance of the community. The families of those crucified carried a certain shame and those who died by crucifixion were also buried apart, in grounds that then took on their own stigma. And it was understood that they were outside the mercy of God and of the community.

Jesus death was clearly not a suicide, but it evoked a similar perception. The same stigma as we attach to suicide was also attached to the manner in which he died.

What does it profit you if you gain the whole world but suffer the loss of your own soul?

Jesus taught that and, I suspect, we generally don’t grasp the full range of it meaning. We tend to take Jesus’ words to mean this: What good is it if someone gains riches, fame, pleasure, and glory and then dies and goes to hell? What good is earthly glory or pleasure if we miss out on eternal life?

Well, Jesus’ teaching does mean that, no question, but there are other lessons in this teaching that have important things to teach us about health and happiness already here in this life. How do we lose our souls? What does it mean “to lose your soul” already in this world? What is a soul and how can it be lost?

Since a soul is immaterial and spiritual it cannot be pictured. We have to use abstract terms to try to understand it. Philosophers, going right back to Aristotle, have tended to define the soul as a double principle inside every living being: For them, the soul is both the principle of life and energy inside us as well as the principle of integration. In essence, the soul is two things: It’s the fire inside us giving us life and energy and it’s the glue that holds us together. While that sounds abstract, it’s anything but that because we have first-hand experience of what this means.

If you have ever been at the bedside of a dying person, you know exactly when the soul leaves the body. You know the precise moment, not because you see something float away from the body, but rather because one minute you see a person, whatever her struggle and agony, with energy, fire, tension in her body and a minute later that body is completely inert, devoid of all energy and life. Nothing animates it anymore. It becomes a corpse. As well, however aged or diseased that body might be, until the second of death it is still one integrated organism. But at the very second of death that body ceases to be one organism and becomes instead a series of chemicals which now begin to separate and go their own ways. Once the soul is gone, so too are gone all life and integration. The body no longer contains any energy and it’s no longer glued together.

And since the soul is a double principle doing two things for us, there are two corresponding ways of losing our souls. We can have our vitality and energy go dead or we can become unglued and fall apart, petrification or dissipation, in either case we lose our souls.

If that is true, then this very much nuances the question of how we should care for our souls. What is healthy food for our souls? For instance, if I am watching television on a given night, what’s good for my soul? A religious channel? A sports channel? A mindless sitcom? The nature channel? Some iconoclastic talk-show?  What’s healthy for my soul?

This is a legitimate question, but also a trick one. We lose our soul in opposite ways and thus care of the soul is a refined alchemy that has to know when to heat things up and when to cool things down: What’s healthy for my soul on a given night depends a lot upon what I’m struggling with more on that night: Am I losing my soul because I’m losing vitality, energy, hope, and graciousness in my life?  Am I growing bitter, rigid, sterile, becoming a person who’s painful to be around?  Or, conversely, am I full of life and energy but so full of it that I am falling apart, dissipating, losing my sense of self?  Am I petrifying or dissipating? Both are a loss of soul. In the former situation, the soul needs more fire, something to rekindle its energy. In the latter case, the soul already has too much fire; it needs some cooling down and some glue.

This tension between the principle of energy and the principle of integration within the human soul is also one of the great archetypal tensions between liberals and conservatives. In terms of an oversimplification, but a useful one, it’s true to say that liberals tend to protect and promote the energy-principle, the fire, while conservatives tend to protect and promote the integration-principle, the glue. Both are right, both are needed, and both need to respect the other’s instinct because the soul is a double principle and both these principles need protection.

After we die we can go to heaven or hell. That’s one way of speaking about losing or saving our souls. But Christian theology also teaches that heaven and hell start already now. Already here in this life, we can weaken or destroy the God-given life inside us by either petrification or dissipation. We can lose our souls by not having enough fire or we can lose them by not having enough glue.

There are now more than seven billion people on this earth and each one of us feels that he or she is the center of the universe. That accounts for most of the problems we have in the world, in our neighborhoods, and in our families. 

And no one’s to blame for this, save God perhaps, for making us this way. Each of us is created in the image and likeness of God, meaning that, each of us, holds within a divine spark, a piece of infinity, and an ingrained knowledge of that unique dignity.  We are infinite souls inside a finite world. To paraphrase St. Augustine, we are made for the divine and our hearts aren’t just dissatisfied until they rest there again, they’re also grandiose along the journey, enflamed by their own uniqueness and dignity. God has made everything beautiful in its own season, Ecclesiastes tells us, but God has put timelessness into the human heart so that we are out of sync with the seasons from beginning to end. We’re overcharged for this planet, and we know it.

Moreover that sense of specialness lies at the center of our awareness: I think, therefore I am! Descartes was right: The only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that we exist and that our own thoughts and feelings are real. We may be dreaming everything else. We awake to self-consciousness aware of our specialness, frustrated by the fact that the world cannot give us what we crave, and insufficiently aware of the fact that everyone else on this earth is also equally unique and special. That’s human nature and it’s always been this way.

Today however a number of things are conspiring together to exacerbate both our grandiosity and our restlessness. In brief, today we are mostly overstimulated in our grandiosity and are not generally given the tools to handle that inflammation of soul.

How are we overstimulated in our grandiosity today? Various factors play together here, but contemporary media and information technology need to be highlighted. Through them, in effect, the whole world is being made available to us during every waking minute of our lives. We are not easily equipped to handle that. While information alone is mostly neutral, and at times even morally inspiring, the downside is that contemporary media overstimulates our grandiosity and restlessness by inundating us with the intimate details of the lives of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, the talented, the powerful, the super-intelligent, the mega-achievers, and the perverted in a way that titillates, seduces, and at times assaults our interior balance so as to leave us cultivating private fantasies of grandiosity, of standing out in a way that makes the world take notice. We see this in an extreme and perverted form in some of the mass shootings that occur in our society, where a lonely, deranged person randomly kills others out of sick vision of grandiosity.  We see it too in the growing phenomenon of anorexia. These examples may be atypical, but we’re becoming a society within which most everyone is perilously overstimulated in his or her grandiosity.

And today we are generally without sufficient personal tools to handle this. Human beings have always been restless and grandiose, but in previous generations they had more tools – religious and societal – to handle restlessness, grandiosity, and frustration. For example, in previous generations the cultural ethos gave people much less permission to cultivate ego than it does today. Previous to our own generation, one had to be more apologetic about self-promotion, self-canonization, overt greed, and crass self-centeredness. Humility was espoused as a virtue and no one was supposed to get too big for his or her britches. That threw a lot of cold water on ego, crass self-assertion, and greed, in effect dampening grandiosity. The message back then was clear: You’re not the center of the universe!

By and large, that’s no longer the case today. Society, more and more, gives us license to be grandiose, to set ourselves up as the center and proudly announce that publicly. Not only are we allowed today to get too big for our britches, we aren’t culturally admired unless we do assert ourselves in that way. And that’s a formula for jealousy, bitterness, and violence. Grandiosity and restlessness need healthy guidance both from the culture and from religion. Today, we generally do not see that guidance.

We are dangerously weak in inculcating into the consciousness of society, especially into the consciousness of the young, a number of vital human and religious truths: To God alone belongs the glory! In this life ultimately all symphonies remain unfinished. You are not the center of the earth. There is real sin! Selfishness is not a virtue! Humility is a virtue! You will only find life by giving it away! Other lives are as real as your own!

We have failed our youth by giving them unrealistic expectations, even as we are depriving them of the tools with which to handle those expectations.

Sometime soon we will witness the canonization of Dorothy Day. For many of us today, especially those who are not Roman Catholic, a canonization draws little more than a yawn. How does a canonization impact our world? Moreover, isn’t canonization simply the recognition of a certain piety to which most people cannot relate? So why should there be much interest around the canonization of Dorothy Day – who in fact protested that she didn’t want people to consider her a saint and asserted that making someone a saint often helps neutralize his or her influence?

Well, Dorothy Day wasn’t the kind of saint who fits the normal conceptions of piety. Many of us, no doubt, are familiar with a basic sketch of her life. She was born in New York in 1897 and died there in 1980. She was a journalist, a peace-activist, a convert to Christianity, who, together with Peter Maurin, established the Catholic Worker Movement to combine direct aid to the poor and homeless with nonviolent action on behalf of peace and justice. The movement remains vibrant today. She served too on the newspaper she founded, Catholic Worker, from 1933 until her death.

Her person and the movement she started have powerfully inspired Christians of every denomination to try to more effectively take the Gospels to the streets, to try to bring together Jesus and justice in a more effectual way. She is invoked today as the primary role-model for virtually everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, working in the area of social justice.

The honor is well-deserved. She, perhaps better than anyone else in her generation, was able to wed together the Gospel and justice, Jesus and the poor, and take the fruits of that marriage to the streets in an effective way.  That’s a rare and very difficult feat.

Ernst Kasemann once commented that the problem in both the world and the church is that the liberals aren’t pious and the pious aren’t liberal. He’s right. Politics and religion are both generally impoverished because the pious won’t be liberal and the liberals won’t be pious. You normally don’t see the same person leading the rosary and the peace march. You normally don’t see the same person championing both the pro-life movement and women’s choice.  And you don’t normally see the same person scrupulously defending the most-intimate matters within private morality and having the same moral passion for the global-issues of social justice. But that was Dorothy Day. She was equally comfortable leading a peace march and leading the rosary. Someone once quipped: If you drew out what’s deepest and best within both the conservatives and liberals and put them through a blender, what would come out is Dorothy Day.

A second feature which characterized Dorothy Day and her spirituality was her ability to simply act, and to act effectively.  She not only had faith, she acted upon that faith. She was a do-er, not just a listener; and she was able to institutionalize her faith and embed it into an institution, the Catholic Worker, which not only was able to minister directly to the poor but was able to form itself into something larger and more permanent than the faith, vision, and power of a single person. Dorothy was able to act in a way that was bigger and more effective than her own person. There’s an axiom that says: Whatever we dream alone remains a dream, but what we dream with others can become a reality.  Dorothy dreamed with others and made that dream a reality. Today, most of us struggle both to act on our faith and, even more so, to embed our faith concretely into effective, sustained community action.

Finally, Dorothy Day can be an inspiration to us because she did the right thing for the right reason. Dorothy’s commitment to the poor arose not out of guilt, or neurosis, or anger, or bitterness towards society. It arose out of gratitude. Her route to faith, Jesus, and the poor was rather unorthodox. In the years prior to her conversion she was an atheist, a communist, a woman ideologically opposed to the institution of marriage, and a woman who had had an abortion. Her turning to God and to the poor happened when she gave birth to her daughter, Tamar Theresa, and experienced in the joy of giving birth a gratitude that seared her soul.  In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she describes how, at seeing her baby daughter for the first time, she was so overcome with gratitude that a faith and love were born in her that never again left her. Her passion for God and the poor were fueled by that.

She was also an earthy saint. She will, no doubt, be the first canonized saint whose photographs show a woman with a cigarette in her mouth. She’s a saint for our time. She showed us how we can serve God and the poor in a very complex world, and how to do it with love and color.

Just because something is politically-correct doesn’t mean that it might not also be correct. Sometimes we have to swallow hard to accept truth.

Some years ago, I served on a Priests’ Council, an advisory board to the bishop in a Roman Catholic diocese. The bishop, while strongly conservative by temperament, was a deeply-principled man who did not let his natural temperament or his spontaneous feelings dictate his decisions. His decisions he made on principle, and sometimes that meant he had to swallow hard.

At one point, for example, he found himself under strong pressure to raise the salaries of lay employees in the diocese. The pressure was coming from a very vocal group of social-justice advocates who were quoting the Church’s social doctrines in the face of protests that the diocese could not afford to pay the kind of wages they were demanding.  Their cause also leaned on politically-correctness.  This didn’t make things easy for the bishop, given his conservative temperament and conservative friends.

But he was, as I said, a man of principle. He came one morning to the Priests’ Council and asked the priests to give him a mandate to give the diocesan employees the wage increase they are demanding. The Priests’ Council told him that they would not bow to political-correctness and voted against it. A month later, the bishop came back to the Priest’s Council and asked the priests again for their support, prefacing his request by telling the priests that, should they vote against it again, he would do it on his own, invoking executive privilege. One of the priests, a close personal friend of his, said: “You’re only asking us to do this because it’s politically correct.” The bishop answered him: “No, we’re not doing this because it’s politically correct. We’re doing it because it is correct!  We can’t preach the gospel with integrity if we don’t live it out ourselves.  We need to pay a living-wage because that’s what the gospel and Catholic social doctrine demands – not because it’s politically correct.” In saying this, the bishop was swallowing hard, swallowing his own temperament, swallowing his friend’s irritation, and swallowing his own irritation at having to bow to something that was presented as politically-correct. But principle trumped feeling.

And principle needs to trump feeling because, so often, when something comes at us with the label that this must be accepted because it is politically-correct, our spontaneous reaction is negative and we are tempted, out of emotional spite, to reject it simply because of the clock it’s wearing and the voices who are advocating for it.  I’ve had my own share of experiences with this, in dealing with my emotions in the face of political-correctness. Teaching in some pretty sensitive classrooms through the years, where sometimes every word is a potential landmine that might blow up in your face, it’s easy to fall into an unhealthy sensitivity-fatigue. I remember once, frustrated with the hypersensitivity of some students (and the pompousness evident inside that sensitivity), I told a student to “lighten up”. He immediately accused me of being a racist on the basis of that remark.

It’s easy then to react with spite rather than empathy. But, like the bishop, whose story I cited earlier, we need to be principled and mature enough to not let emotion and temperament sway our perspective and our decisions. Just because a truth comes cloaked in political correctness and we hear it voiced in self-righteousness doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t the truth. Sometimes we just have to swallow hard, eat our pride and irritation, and accept the truth of what is being presented. Political correctness is normally irritating, exaggerated, unbalanced, pompous, and lacking in nuance, but it serves an important purpose. We need this mirror: How we spontaneously speak about others flushes out a lot of our blind-spots.

Among other things, political correctness, as a check on our language, helps keep civil discourse civil, something in short supply today. Talk-radio, cable-television, blogs, tweets, and editorials are today more and more being characterized by a language that’s rude, insensitive, and flat-out disrespectful and, in its very disdain for political correctness, is, ironically, the strongest argument for political correctness. Politics, church, and community at every level today need to be much more careful about language, careful about being politically-correct, because the violence in our culture very much mirrors the violence in our language.

Moreover, attentiveness to language helps, long-term, to shape our interior attitudes and widen our empathy. Words work strongly to shape attitudes and if we allow our words to chip away at elementary courtesy and respect and allow them to offend others we help spawn a culture of disrespect.

Political correctness comes to us from both the left and the right. Both liberals and conservatives help dictate it and both can be equally self-righteous and bullying. But we must always be conscious that just because something is politically-correct doesn’t mean that it also might not be correct. Sometimes we just need to swallow hard and accept the truth.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That axiom still holds true for our understanding of suicide. Despite all the advances in our understanding, there are still a number of stigmas around suicide, one of which pertains to how we write the obituary of a loved one who dies in this way. In writing an obituary we still cannot bring ourselves to write the word, suicide: He died by his own hand. We still turn to euphemisms: He died expectantly. Her sudden death brings great sadness.

Suicide, in many cases, perhaps in most cases, is the result of a disease, the emotional and psychological equivalent of cancer, stroke, or heart attack. If that is true, and it is, why then, when I loved one dies of suicide, might we not write this kind of an obituary?

We are sad to report the death of J__ D__ who died after a long and courageous struggle with emotional cancer. Jane, as you know, was born into this world with a tortured sensitivity, a gift and an affliction she grappled with from her earliest youth. She found comfort and peace at times, but was never able to fully extricate herself from some inner chaos which was always partially hidden to those around her and which medicine could not cure, counsellors could not quiet, and our affection and solicitousness could not adequately soothe. In the end, despite her courage and our best efforts to help her, the disease was incurable. Her temperament was both her blessing and her curse. She was a gentle person, not given to ego and unhealthy self-assertion, always overly-anxious not to hurt others or to claim too much space for herself. But her self-effacement was part of her disease as well. No amount of encouragement was able to ultimately take away this inchoate constriction that somehow deprived her of her full freedom. In the end, she died, against her will; but her life, lived with such sensitivity, was a precious gift to all who knew her, even as it sometimes brought anxiety and heartbreak to those around her. Given the sad circumstance of her death, she, with her extraordinary sensitivity, would be the last person who would want us to feel guilty and second-guess ourselves about what we might have done to help prevent her death. When a disease is terminal, all the love and concern in the world can still not bring a cure. But she died inside of our love even as we feel frustrated that our love could not do more to help her. She lives now, still, inside our love and affection, and, God-willing, inside a peace and security that so much eluded her in this life. In lieu of flowers please make donations to the Mental Health Association.

Or perhaps, in another situation, it might read like this:

We are sad to report the death of J__ D__ who died expectantly of an emotional heart attack. His death came as shock since those closest to him had no reason to suspect that he suffered from dangerously high emotional cholesterol or that he carried inside him some congenital heart disease that had not yet manifested itself clearly and had not been medically or psychologically diagnosed. In the face of this, understandably, we find ourselves questioning ourselves as to why we were not more alert or attentive to his person and his health and why we did not pick up on any symptoms manifesting themselves in his situation. Sometimes a potentially fatal disease can lurk beneath the surface and remain unobserved until it is too late. Such is the nature, often times, of deadly heart attacks and strokes. While his death leaves us feeling raw, struggling for understanding, at loss to explain how this could happen, and needing to resist the temptation project a certain anger at him for keeping for keeping his disease so private and hidden, we can also understand that much of his disease was hidden from him too and that the anatomy of this particular kind of death has within itself a particularly pernicious pathology which demands of its victim precisely this propensity to hide what he is undergoing from those closest to him. And this asks for our understanding: Everyone’s life is its own mystery, and not always open to outside understanding. Moreover, emotional heart attacks and strokes, like their biological equivalents, are not willed and claim their victim against his or her will. J__ was a gentle soul who wished no one any harm and tried to do no one any harm. He, no doubt, is as grieved as we are that his unwanted death has caused so much pain. But, no doubt too, he asks for our continued love and affection and, especially, for our understanding. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to your local mental health association.

It is hard to lose loved ones to suicide, but we should not also lose the truth and warmth of their mystery and their memory.