“Forgive them Father for they know not what they do!” Jesus said this of his executioners. But a question can be asked: Is this true? Were Jesus’ executioners really that naive? Did they really not know what they were doing? A lot indicates that they were far from innocent. They knew they were shedding innocent blood. So why does Jesus say what he said?

I like Karl Rahner’s explanation of this. He suggests that those who crucified Jesus knew exactly that they were doing, at one level. They knew that they were acting in jealousy, being dishonest, putting an innocent man to death. In one way, they weren’t innocent at all. But they were innocent in another, more important, way. How? How were they innocent?

There is a place inside us, a place we are rarely aware of, where each and everyone of us is being touched and held unconditionally in love by God. The people who crucified Jesus didn’t know what they were doing because they didn’t know how much they were loved. That is the real blindness, the real ignorance, that can excuse bad behaviour.

This is an insight with many ramifications. Far too often we crucify others and ourselves because of this ignorance. We feel unloved. For this reason we are harsh in our judgements of others and unaware of why we ourselves are so prone to weakness and to compromise our dignity. We are judgemental and weak because, at the end of the day, we don’t know any better. We don’t know how much we are loved. We have the innocence of the child who hurts herself in ignorance. This is not a new insight.

In classical theology there is a distinction between CULPABLE and INCULPABLE ignorance. The latter, also called INVINCIBLE ignorance, was seen to excuse one from sin and responsibility. The idea was that you could do things that were wrong but not sinful because you were acting in ignorance. The idea was that you acted morally and responsibly only if you actually knew what you were doing. To sin, you had to act “knowingly”. That’s a tricky caveat.

Looking at our world today, I would risk saying that in many important moral matters, we are acting in invincible ignorance. Simply put, we don’t know any better. Only the type of ignorance that allowed sincere people to crucify Jesus can explain why so many good, sincere people can be so massively blind, communally and individually, to the economic and social demands made by our faith. The real reason we can live so comfortably as the gap between the rich and the poor widens is because we don’t know how much we are loved by God, not because we are bad and without conscience. We feel unloved and so we feel we have to take life for ourselves.

The same holds true for our attitude towards sex. We have been able to trivialize sex, split it off from the sacredness of marriage, and turn it into a simple extension of dating (or something worse) only because of a certain invincible ignorance. We don’t know any better, not because we lack conscience, but because we lack any real sense of being loved.

We are like Jesus’ executioners. We have an astounding capacity to rationalize, trivialize, and compensate precisely because we don’t know what we are doing. We don’t feel God’s love for us. Instead we feel unloved and all that goes with that – the sense of being tired, discouraged, lonely, hurt, excluded, fearful, and in need of doing the things we do in order to survive. Small wonder we settle for second-best or for almost anything else that promises to fill an aching void inside us. Jesus, no doubt, is looking at us and saying: “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do!”

But don’t we? Can we really plead ignorance, innocence, say that we don’t know any better? I think yes. We are ignorant, inculpably unaware of how much God loves us. Too few of us, at any real, personal level, have ever heard God say to us: “I love you!” Too few of us have ever heard felt what Jesus must have felt when, at this baptism, he heard his Father say: “You are my beloved child, in you I take delight!” Indeed, most of us have never heard another human being saying this to us, let alone God. Is it a surprise then that, like Jesus’ executioners, we have this amazing capacity to rationalize, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unforgiving, and to sell ourselves out?

Darkness is only bad because there is light. Sin can only happen if first there is love. Betrayal is only possible if first one has heard the words: “I love you.” Morris West used to say: “All miracles begin with the act of falling in love.” Jesus’ executioners acted in a darkness that came from never having had that experience. The same is true for us.

Shortly after his conversion, St. Augustine penned these immortal words: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unlovliness I plunged into the lovely things that you created. You were with me, but I was not with you.”

Augustine, sincere, but pathologically restless, had been searching for love and God. Eventually he found them in the most unexpected of all places, inside of himself. God and love had been inside of him all along, but he had hadn’t been inside of himself.

There’s a lesson here: We don’t pray to make God present to us. God is already present, always present everywhere. We pray to make ourselves present to God. God, as Sheila Cassidy colourfully puts it, is no more present in church than in a drinking bar, but we generally are more present to God in church than we are in a drinking bar. The problem of presence is not with God, but with us.

Sadly, this is also true for our presence to the richness of our own lives. Too often we are not present to the beauty, love, and grace that brims within the ordinary moments of our lives. Bounty is there, but we aren’t. Because of restlessness, tiredness, distraction, anger, obsession, wound, haste, whatever, too often we are not enough inside of our ourselves to appreciate what the moments of our own lives hold. We think of our lives as impoverished, dull, small-time, not worth putting our full hearts into, but, as with prayer, the fault of non-presence is on our side. Our lives come laden with richness, but we aren’t sufficiently present to what is there. A curious statement; unfortunately true.

The poet, Rainer Marie Rilke, at the height of his fame, was once contacted by a young man from a small, provincial town. The young man expressed his admiration for Rilke’s poetry and told him that he envied him, envied his life in a big city, and envied a life so full of insight and richness. He went on to describe how his own life was uninteresting, provincial, small-town, too dull to inspire insight and poetry. Rilke’s answer was not sympathetic. He told the young man something to this effect: “If your life seems poor to you, then tell yourself that you are not poet enough to see and call forth its riches. There are no uninteresting places, no lives that aren’t full of the stuff for poetry. What makes for a rich life is not so much what is contained within each moment, since all moments contain what’s timeless, but sensitive insight and presence to that moment.” Poetry is about being sufficiently alert to what’s in the ordinary.

Augustine was lucky, the clock never ran out on him. He realized this before it was too late: “Late have I loved you!” Sometimes we aren’t as lucky, our health and our lives must be radically threatened or taken from us before we realize how rich these in fact already are, if only we made ourselves more present to them. If everything were taken away from us and then given back, our perspective would change drastically. Victor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, like Augustine, also was lucky. He had been clinically dead for a few minutes and then revived by doctors. When he returned to his ordinary life after this, everything suddenly became very rich: “One very important aspect of post-mortem life is that everything gets precious, gets piercingly important. You get stabbed by things, by flowers and by babies and by beautiful things-just the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends and chatting. Everything seems to look more beautiful rather than less, and one gets the much-intensified sense of miracles.”

The secret to prayer is not to try to make God present, but to make ourselves present to God. The secret to finding beauty and love in life is basically the same. Like God, they are already present. The trick is to make ourselves present to them. Rarely are we enough inside of our own skins, present enough to the moment, and sensitive enough to the richness that is already present in our lives. Our experience comes brimming with riches, but too often we are not enough inside of it. Like the young Augustine, we are away from ourselves, strangers to our own experience, seeking outside of ourselves something that is already inside of us. The trick is to come home. God and the moment don’t have to be searched out and found. They’re already here. We need to be here.

Karl Rahner was once asked whether he believed in miracles. His answer: “I don’t believe in them, I rely on them to get through each day!” Indeed, miracles are always present within our lives. Are we?

In a recent book, New Catholics for a New Century, Arthur Jones, an American analyst, makes an interesting comment. He says that when liberals and conservatives argue today in the church both try to claim Generation X (those who under 40 years of age) as an ally. Not a good idea, he suggests, because “Cardinal Ratzinger and Richard McBrien have more in common with each other and their experience of church than either have” with today’s Generation X.

That’s an insight worth highlighting because we haven’t recognized enough that a certain shared experience of church has been breaking down. Today’s young people, to a large extent, have had a fundamentally different experience of church than was had by those of us who are now over 45 years of age. There are some good things about this, they haven’t our hang-ups and neuroses, but there is a less positive underside, a certain “Catholic literary” is breaking down. What is meant by that?

Recently a woman, the mother of four young adults, shared with me this assessment of her own children. She’s a dedicated, highly-educated, Roman Catholic, fully complemented in this by her husband, and yet she has been, at least up to now, unable to impress into children her deep, cherished sense of God and church. Her children, while not particularly negative towards religious values are lackadaisical. Their attitude? Religion and church are a bit like world hunger, an issue that needs to be dealt with sometime, but, for now, other things (relationships, friends, plans, not to mention a bag of Doritos and a baseball game) mostly blot this out. She ended her assessment with the words: “What bothers me most is that they seem to have missed out on something our generation had, a certain Catholic literacy. They’re wonderful kids, but they aren’t literate in that old sense.”

“They aren’t literate in that old sense.” What this woman means is not so much that her kids don’t know the basics of the faith (although certainly that isn’t their strong point) but that a certain shared religious language and conversation hasn’t permeated their consciousness as it did her own when she was their age. For her generation, Catholicism wasn’t something you learned, it was something you breathed in. It was a family you joined and it, all of it, beauty and stain equally, showed on you like a birthmark, made you recognizable. Partly this was an intangible thing, a gnosticism of sorts, an inexplicable sense of something, a certain badge of mutual recognition, that cradle Catholics had but couldn’t explain (paralleled, I suspect, by most cradle Protestants, Orthodox, and Jews). Partly though it was something very tangible, a common experience that brought you inside a well-defined circle of conversation, understanding, and humour.

A theologian friend of mine, occasionally tries to explain this by using the analogy of a joke (which unfortunately can easily be taken out of context and misconstrued). When someone tells a joke, you either get it or you don’t. Most of us who were raised Catholic in the previous generation, like the woman I just quoted, “got it”. It, the sense of being Catholic, didn’t always come to us pure, we didn’t always agree with it, we didn’t always like it, and we didn’t always live it out, but we “got it”. And we could share it with everyone else, at least with those others who also “got it”, because they were with us inside of a common something, in a way that our kids no longer are. Joseph Ratzinger and Richard McBrien may not agree on a lot of things, but they have this immense thing in common, they both “got it”. They both understand Catholicism from the inside. They’re both part of the same literary circle.

No doubt, as already suggested, the same thing holds true within many Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues, a common literacy that they once had is breaking down. Generation X, for all its other moral and religious strengths, and it does have these, does not have this. Most of its members are no longer really literate within their own religious traditions. Moreover, this is a thing that cannot simply be remedied by more catechetical and theological studies. I know students, in various traditions, who have graduate degrees in theology, but have never quite “got it”, at least in the sense of which my theologian friend speaks. They still lack some essential literacy within their own traditions.

Why? Because this kind of literacy is not something you learn in graduate school. It’s something you absorb through you skin, beginning with your mother as she cradles you and begins to speak to you of God, and then extending through those countless hours of Sunday masses, Sunday school, Sunday services, family prayer, rosaries, catechism lessons, bible memorization, bible camps, and all those other religious events and conversations that together conspire to eventually bring you inside of one family that has a common heart, speaks a common language, and even has the same sense of humour.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a column suggesting that we still have too many misconceptions about suicide. Among other things, I stated that many, perhaps most, people who die from suicide are, in the really meaning of those terms, not morally or otherwise responsible for their own deaths but are victims of a disease, not unlike cancer or heart failure. Suicide, understood in this way, is not the act of despair that it has too often been seen to be. Moreover, if this is true, then we need have no extra anxiety about the eternal salvation of those who are its victims.

The piece drew a mixed response. On the one hand, there were a number of sympathetic letters, particularly from people who had personally lost loved ones to suicide. Conversely a number of people wrote and challenged my view by quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church which states that “suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life” and is thus “gravely contrary to the just love of self.” (Catechism, 2281)

What’s to be said about this? Does the Catechism of the Catholic Church contradict what I said about suicide? Is suicide an act that is always “gravely contrary to the just love of self”? There is no simple answer to that question because everything depends upon how we format the word “suicide”. What does it mean “to commit suicide”? Does it always mean the same thing or are there perhaps radically different things being referred to by one and the same phrase?

We could help ourselves, I submit, by making a distinction between something that we might aptly call “suicide” and something else that might more properly be called “killing oneself”. What’s the difference? In the former case (“suicide”), a wounded, over-sensitive person, is over-powered by chaos and falls fatally victim to an illness; while in the latter instance (“killing oneself”), an arrogant, pathological narcissist, acting in strength, refuses to submit to the commonalities of human existence. Not everyone who dies by his or her own hand dies for the same reason, not by a long shot.

We can speak of someone as “a victim of suicide”. The terminology is natural and apt. In a “suicide” a person is taken out this life against his or her will. Why do I say this? Because in fact most of the victims of suicide that you and I have known fit that description. They were claimed by a disease which they didn’t choose. The act that ended their lives was not a freely chosen one. It’s truer to say that suicide was something they fell victim to than to say that it was something that they inflicted upon themselves. Most especially it was not an act of arrogance, strength, or pride on their part. Every victim of suicide that I have known personally has been the very antithesis of the egoist, the narcissist, the strong, over-proud person who congenitally refuses to take his or her place in the humble, broken structure of things. It’s always been the opposite. In every case that I have known, the victim of “suicide” has had problems precisely because she or he was too-sensitive, too wounded, too raw, too bruised, or too weak to find the resiliency needed to absorb some of life’s harshness. In the end, they succumbed to a disease more than they actively did anything positively to harm themselves.

I remember a comment heard at a funeral of a suicide victim some years ago. The victim had been an over-sensitive young man, pathologically self-effacing, who suffered from clinical depression. The priest who presided at the funeral had hinted during the homily that this suicide was somehow the man’s own fault. At the reception afterwards, I overheard a man make this bitter remark: “There are people who should kill themselves – but those never do! This boy was the most sensitive person I’ve ever known. He’s the last one of us who should have committed suicide!” The remark speaks volumes.

“Killing oneself”, as distinct from falling victim to “suicide”, is something quite different. It’s how a man like Hitler passes out of this life. Hitler was not a victim in any sense. By every indication, he killed himself. In his case, and in instances like his, the issue is not that a person is too-sensitive, too self-effacing, too-bruised, and too clinically depressed to cope with normal life (though obviously too we are dealing with a very wounded person whose heart only God can judge). Rather the opposite appears true. Killing oneself, in this instance, is an act of strength, an act that roots itself in a pride, an intellectual arrogance, and a pathological narcissism that, like Lucifer, sets itself before the schema of things and says: “I will not serve!” 

It’s in cases like these, but only in cases like these, that suicide fits what is condemned as morally deficient in the  Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The incarnation should never be confused with Disneyland. In the incarnation God enters into actual humanity – pain, mess, ambiguity, misunderstanding, crucifixion. There’s some purity there, on God’s side; but, on our side, nothing is pure, including the priesthood.

Earlier this year, Donald Cozzens, the rector of a large USA seminary, published an important new book entitled, The Changing Face of the Priesthood, (Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Mn., c2000).

This book, like the incarnation itself, distances itself from what’s fanciful. Cozzens is eminently qualified to write on the priesthood since he is himself a priest (and by every indication a faithful, talented, and generous one). Moreover, he has spent much of his priesthood ministering to other priests and seminarians. He speaks as an insider, a sympathetic one. Yet his book has not been everywhere well-received. Why? Because Cozzens names some of the painful, hard issues that face the priesthood today in North America and elsewhere.

What are those issues? He focuses particularly on five things: the relational immaturity of many priests; destructive, unspoken jealousy within clerical ranks; the disproportionate number of gay men entering priesthood and the subsequent growth of a gay subculture within some clerical circles; a growing anti-clericalism within the culture that can make priesthood  unattractive; and a radical drop in the number of men who are entering the priesthood, not to mention the number of men who have, within the past 30 years, left the priesthood.

The picture he paints of the priesthood in North America today looks anything but like the priesthood that has so often been idealized within Roman Catholicism. The picture you get is this: There are simply a lot less priests than there used to be, many of these are immature in that they haven’t properly integrated their natural hunger for romantic and sexual intimacy, leaving them too susceptible to aloofness, irresponsible emotional affairs, workaholism, and the misuse of power; a destructive jealousy often abounds within clerical ranks, crushing energy and goodness; a disproportionate number of men entering the seminary are gay, to the point where, sometimes, those who are not gay unconsciously feel out of place and leave; and a fierce anti-clericalism within the culture constantly slanders the priesthood itself, linking it with scandal. Not the kind of picture one would want to put on a vocation brochure! Or is it?

What’s valuable about this book is that Cozzens does more than simply name the issues. He points to where faith lies within all of this. His believe, which I endorse, is that the priesthood today is alive and well and a life-giving option for any young man, not in spite of these issues but because of them. What Cozzens does is crack open the shell of pious encrustment that so often surrounds the priesthood and then place it back where it belongs, inside a proper theology of the incarnation and theological anthropology that is not confused with angelology or The Bells of St. Mary’s. The incarnation always comes fraught with mess, misunderstanding, and ambiguity because it enfleshes the love of a God who embraces the bad with the good, the unredeemed with the redeemed, who loves us for nothing, meets us in our sin, and invariably ends up on a cross, looking compromised, hanging among thieves.

Cozzens concluding words say it well: “[The] reason for hope lies in the apparent purification and maturation the priesthood has undergone in the last two decades of the twentieth century. From their own pastoral experience, priests know something happens to the soul when it is subjected to ordeal upon ordeal, to unrelenting criticism, and to the anxiety that follows the loss of one’s place and identity. Either it surrenders to despair or chooses to hope against hope that life will go on, that mercy upon mercy will lift it up. Most priests have not given in to despair or lost their nerve. Their confidence has been shaken, to be sure, and their spirit bruised. But now, with status diminished and reputation questioned, priests have turned with renewed poverty of soul to the sustaining mercy and grace of God. In the midst of unprecedented crises, they stand as men without illusions, totally dependent on the strength of the Spirit. In the truth of their circumstances, their humility inspires freedom and courage.The strongest reason for hope, of course, is their faith in the power of the Spirit to be with them through the darkest hours. In the power of the Spirit they are reminded that nothing can separate them from Christ’s abiding love and the saving promise of their creator God. In this abiding love and saving promise they look, without fear, to the renewal and transformation of the priesthood. Behind the changing face of the priesthood remains the saving face of Jesus the Christ.”

Well put. The great mystery of priesthood is that it tries, however inadequately, to give a human face to a wondrous God who walks with us even when things aren’t all pure. What an awesome challenge!

During my graduate studies in Louvain, I had the good fortune of having Cristianne Brusselmanns as a professor. Many will recognize that name and recognize as well the pivotal role this woman played in restoring the adult rite of initiation (RCIA) in the West. Cristianne was an exceptional teacher, one-in-a-million, who radiated catholicity, graciousness, and depth. One of the things she would say again and again about the restored rite for adult initiation, was that it was not meant as the only way of entering the church. It was meant only as a way, an ideal way even, but never, never as the only way. God, she would always affirm, works outside of even good program. Sadly, we have fallen a long ways from both her catholicity and depth.

Today we are falling victim, I fear, to a new authoritarianism in the church, the tyranny of program. It may look different from the old authoritarianism, but it is not. Many of us remember only too well the days when all the power was concentrated in the hands of one man, the pastor, and where his ecclesiology, interpretation of church law, temperament, and whim pretty much decided everything. The oral tradition abounds with stories (both horrific and humorous) of the classical, old pastor or monsignor who ruled with an iron hand and by divine right.

But that kind of authoritarianism is now mostly the stuff of legends. Gone are the old pastor and monsignor of who could do this. There is a new church, though it seems that things haven’t changed much. People are still too much the victim of one narrow view of ecclesiology and church law. Sadly too temperament and whim still play a large a role in deciding who enters the church, how one enters the church, and who gets to receive the sacraments. The old patriarchy has largely been replaced by a new absolutism, the tyranny of good program. A narrow authoritarianism still rules, except now it is the authoritarianism of the parish staff, freshly-trained in theology and liturgy but is not nearly as deeply schooled in catholicity and compassion. The absolutism of the new parish staff has replaced the authoritarianism of the old monsignor.

It can of course be argued that the parish staff of today is  certainly operating out of a better ecclesiology and theology of liturgy and sacraments than did the authoritarian monsignor of old. Point granted. However: Is Christ being made more accessible? Is our ecclesiology healthier in its Catholicity, depth, and compassion? Are many of the poor still being excluded from church and sacrament because of our misuse of power? Is a false use of authority still blocking the full compassion of the gospel and giving God a bad name? Are there really less horror stories than before?

Certainly new horror stories abound: “I wasn’t allowed to join the church in this parish and diocese, except through one program, the RCIA.” “There will be no eulogy at a funeral in this parish or diocese (no matter how painful the anthropological and emotional circumstances in this particular instance) because the funeral liturgy is complete in and off itself!” “All parents must take the pre-baptism program, even if they themselves have helped instruct those who teach these programs!” “No hymn that isn’t approved by the parish team will be sung a wedding in this parish, irrespective of background (religious, aesthetic, ethnic, and emotional) of the couple who are actually getting married!” The list goes on and on.

A new legalism is replacing the old and it parallels perfectly the old in its lack of compassion, catholicity, depth, and nuance – not mention how, just like the old, it echoes the personality of the person or persons who are doing the adjudication.

We might all take a lesson in catholicity and good pastoral theology from the incident in the gospels where Jesus is confronted by a Canaanite woman, asking that he cure her daughter. Transliterated, this text, Matthew 15, 21-28 might read like this:

It was the night of the Easter vigil. Jesus had just helped to conduct an eight-month RCIA program and was helping set up things for the candidates who were to be baptized at the vigil liturgy, when I woman, who hadn’t taken the program, came up to him and said: “Jesus, leader of this RCIA program, I would like to be baptized tonight, with these others.” Jesus replied: “You never took the program! This is only for those who took it. It isn’t fair to them to baptize you!” But the woman addresses Jesus a second time: “Jesus, you who are the compassion of God for the world and not just for this parish and program, I’m as ready as all those who did take the program!” And Jesus, after interviewing her, right then and there, concludes: “Amen. Indeed you are more ready than any of the candidates scheduled for baptism tonight. Step into line and be baptized … even though you didn’t take the program!” There’s a lesson here.

In Time Magazine there’s a column called Numbers. It’s purpose is to startle you by throwing out curious statistics that you could never have imagined. Reading these, I often find myself precisely surprised, not always happily so.

Recently, there and elsewhere, I have seen statistics that are indeed startling. They have to do with how globalization is widening the gap between the rich and the poor. Here’s a sample:

• 8 million. The number of millionaires in the United States. This has quadrupled in the last 10 years and that number now represents more than one-quarter of the population of Canada.
• 10,000. The number of millionaires in Seattle, Washington, alone.
• 1.3 million. The number of people who will find themselves homeless this year in the United States.
• 30 million. The number of people who will experience “food scarcity” (more commonly called “hunger”) this year in the United States.
• 22.4 percent. The percentage of USA children living in poverty, second highest (after Mexico) in a survey of industrialized nations.
• 2.6 percent. The percentage of Swedish children living in poverty, the lowest among all countries surveyed.
• 1 out of 5. The number of children who live in poverty in North America even as this continent is undergoing a record-breaking economic boom.
• 100 percent. The percentage that size of an average house in North America has increased in the last 10 years.
• 100 percent. The percentage that homelessness has increased in North America in the last 10 years.
• 100 percent. The number of shelters for the homeless, food banks, and soup kitchens that are over-strained and over-stretched in North American cities.
• Number 1. The place that the United States holds in the industrialized world both in terms of its number of millionaires and the number of its elders and children who are living in poverty.

   
These contrasts speak loudly about the differing effect of globalization of the economy on various groups within society. While the present economic boom has been wonderful for some it has been less wonderful for others. Our present prosperity has left too many people behind. What’s to be said this?

One must be careful not to make a moral judgement that is too-simplistic. Some things that are happening are in fact good, even as some others are cause for considerable concern. However as Jim Wallis, in a recent editorial in Sojourners states: “To put it in the plainest moral terms, this just isn’t right. Something is terribly wrong with this picture.”

What’s wrong is pretty obvious at one level, the gap between rich and poor is widening and it is simplistic to suggest, as many do, that those who are left behind are themselves to blame since the rules, after all, are the same for everyone. This would be true (everyone has been given equal opportunity) if everyone was lined up in the same way and at the same starting gate. But that’s not the case. Some of us participate in the new world-economy from a position of privilege; be that historical, national, ethnic, gender, intellectual, or physical. We may well play fairly, but the rules favour us and we have started from a place far ahead of many of the others. An appeal to fair play is a dubious moral argument when we are playing on a field that is not level for everyone. Right now the economy grossly favours those who already have wealth or some other exceptional endowment. This is a good time, if you are even a little privileged, to get obscenely rich!

What is less obvious is the root of this thing, namely, a shift in moral thinking that is leaving us comfortable again with the most brutal of all evolutionary laws, the survival of the fittest. Initially this was true for our species biologically, now it’s becoming true economically. Good arguments can be made of course to extol globalization’s other virtues, to extol the amount of employment and wealth the present economy has generated, and to extol the real virtue inherent in personal initiative and hard work; but, at the end of day, there is a brutal Darwinianism at work too in all this. As Hank Zyp, Western Canada’s moral maverick, put it in a recent column: “Those who drop out of the race are written off as `genetically challenged’, unfit to participate in the booming economy. `They are dealt an unlucky intellectual or physical allocation from the roulette wheel of genetic inheritance,’ according to Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute. `That’s life,’ the new realists say.”

It may well be life. Nature has this brutality in it. The fittest survive so as to make for ever-stronger seed and progeny. But moral evolution, as both the Jewish and Christian scriptures assure us, works exactly the opposite. We evolve morally not by the survival of the fittest but through the survival of the weakest. This is what makes for an evolved moral offspring. The biblical gauge for morality within any culture is always how its weakest members fare. Lately that hasn’t been very well.

It’s always painful when someone close to us dies, but the pain is compounded considerably when the cause of death is suicide. Suicide doesn’t just leave us with a sense of loss, it also leaves us with a residue of anger, second-guessing, and fearful anxiety. Partly this is because we still have some unhealthy notions about it. What are these?

The first is the idea that suicide is an act of ultimate despair. We are only just emerging from a mindset that understood suicide as a final act of despair – culpable, irrevocable, and unforgivable. To commit suicide was to put oneself under the judgement that the early church pronounced on Judas Iscariot: “Better for that man if he had never been born.” Until very recently, victims of suicide were not even buried in church cemeteries. As G.K. Chesterton, the great apologist, once put it: “A person who commits suicide defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake.”

What we didn’t understand of course when we still thought those things was that the propensity for suicide, most times, is an illness, pure and simple. We are made up of body and soul. Either can snap. We can die of cancer, high blood pressure, and heart attacks or from malignancies of the heart, emotional strokes, and mortal wounds to the soul. In most suicides, just as in any terminal disease, death is not freely chosen. Suicide is a desperate attempt to end unendurable pain, much like when a man who throws himself through a window because his clothing has caught fire. That’s a tragedy, not a sin; a succumbing to disease, not despair; a real death, not intended.

Given this truth, we must also give up the mistaken notion that in committing suicide, a person puts himself or herself outside of God’s mercy.

After the resurrection, we see Christ, time and again, going through locked doors to breathe forgiveness, love, and peace into hearts that are unable to open up because of fear and hurt. God’s mercy and peace can reach through when we can’t. This side of eternity, sometimes all the love, stretched-out hands, and professional help in the world can no longer reach through to a heart locked inside a prison of pain and illness. We try to reach through but our efforts are for naught and suicide claims our loved one anyway.

God’s compassion however can reach through where ours can’t. God’s love can descend into hell, where it can breathe peace and reconciliation right into the middle of wound, anger, and fear. God’s hands our gentler than our own, God’s understanding infinitely surpasses ours, and God is not, as scripture assures us, stymied by locked doors in the same way as we are. When our loved ones die of suicide and awake on the other side, Christ is standing inside their huddled fear, gently saying: “Peace be with you.” Jesus told us that God does not promise to eliminate pain, death, and suicide in this world. These remain. What God does promise is to redeem these, to write straight with their crooked lines, and to rescue us even beyond suicide.

 Then too there is the myth about suicide that expresses itself this way: This could have been prevented if only I had done more, been more attentive, and been there at the right time. Rarely is this the issue. Most of the time, we weren’t there for the very reason that the person who fell victim to this disease did not want us to be there. He or she picked the moment, the spot, and the means precisely so that we wouldn’t be there. Perhaps, more accurately, it could be said that suicide is a disease that picks its victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others and their attentiveness.

 Of course, this may never be an excuse for insensitivity to the needs of others, especially those suffering from dangerous depression, but it is a healthy check against false guilt and neurotic second-guessing. I have stood at the bedside of a number of people who were dying and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop the process. They died, despite my attentiveness, presence, and prayers. So too, generally, with those who have died of suicide. We were present in their lives to the end, though not (as we found out after the fact) in a way that could stop them from dying.

The Christian response to suicide should not be horror, fear for the victim’s eternal salvation, and guilty self-examination about what we didn’t do. Suicide is indeed a horrible way to die, but we must understand it for what it is, a sickness, and then stop second-guessing and worrying about the eternal salvation of its victim. In the pain of losing a loved one to suicide, we must affirm the bottomline of our faith, God redeems everything and, in the end, all will be well and every manner of being will be well – even beyond suicide.