In the musical Les Miserables, there’s a particularly haunting song, sung by a dying woman (Fantine) who has been crushed by virtually every unfairness life can deal a person. Abandoned by her husband, sexually harassed by her employer, caught in abject poverty, physically ill and dying, even as her main anxiety is about what will happen to her young daughter after she dies, she offers this lament:

But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather
I had a dream my life would be
So much different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed
The dream I dreamed.

For centuries, in our popular mind, despair was understood as the ultimate and unforgivable sin against God and against nature. We weren’t always sure how exactly to define despair, but we saw it as someone giving up on life, on God, on love, and on meaning. Suicide was often seen as its prime analogate, ultimate despair.

This notion needs to be radically rethought, not just for own consolation when we see loved ones collapse into seeming despair, but also because it belittles God.

The popular notion that someone who seemingly gives up on life and God and dies in that state is guilty of a sin that cannot be forgiven and is condemned to an eternity outside the community of love, is based on some serious misunderstandings. What are those misunderstandings?

First, what’s best in us doesn’t believe this at all. What’s best in us understands human weakness and the anatomy of a collapse of soul. And what’s best in us reaches out in empathy to those who collapse in this way, not least because we understand their weakness.

Second, the notion that a certain collapse of soul (seeming despair) is somehow an act against life itself and against the God who gave us life, is theologically false. It goes against the foundational principle running through all of scripture, namely, that God has a special, preferential love for the weak, for those not strong enough to stand, for those who have collapsed under the burdens of life.

Even more important, the notion that someone who collapses in this way puts himself or herself irrevocably outside of God’s mercy is an insult to God, a belittling of God’s person and God’s love. It’s predicated on the misguided belief that if we do not hang onto God, God will not hang on to us. If we give up on God, God will give up on us. That’s utterly false, and a belittling of God’s person and God’s fidelity.

At the very heart of what Jesus incarnated and revealed about the heart of God lies the truth that God does not abandon us, particularly when, crushed in body and spirit, we give up on God. God will never abandon us because we are too weak and wounded to hang on to God.

Moreover, as Christians we believe (as we affirm in the Apostles’ Creed) that Jesus descended into hell, not just once after his death on Good Friday, but forever afterwards. Whenever Christ sees someone whose circumstance and wound have landed him or her in a private hell from which he or her can see no way of escaping and instead surrenders to hopelessness, Christ never says, since you gave up on me, I give up on you! No, that’s not the God we believe in. Rather Christ descends into that hell and breathes out forgiveness and peace. There is no hell, no collapse of soul, no despair into which Christ cannot penetrate and breathe out peace. If there is anyone in hell, he or she is there because of arrogance, not because of weakness.

It’s not incidental that the Church canonizes certain people and declares them, by name, to be in heaven, whereas it has never, by name, declared anyone to be in hell, not even Judas who betrayed Jesus with a kiss and then (seemingly in despair) died by suicide.

In a book entitled Peculiar Treasures, the renowned novelist and spiritual writer Frederick Buechner reflects on the death of Judas. Buechner, who had lost his own father to suicide, speculates on the reasons Judas dies in what outwardly looks like despair. He suggests that perhaps Judas chose suicide out of hope instead of despair, that is, he felt dammed and counted on Jesus’ mercy after death, thinking that perhaps “hell might be his last chance of making it to heaven.” 

Imagining Jesus meeting Judas after death, Buechner writes: “It’s a scene to conjure with. Once again they met in the shadows, the two old friends, both of them a little worse for wear after all that had happened, only this time it was Jesus who was the one to give the kiss, and this time it wasn’t the kiss of death that was given.”

Passing strange, for someone utterly crushed by life, hell might be his or her last chance of making it to heaven.