Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Then Job answered: 2"Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. 3Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! 4I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. 5I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. 6Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. 7There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.
8"If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him;9on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. 16God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; 17If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!
Returning from a ten-day trip to Europe, once I had cleared customs in New York City, I turned on my cell phone to see if I had missed any messages while I was in route from Athens. There were five. The first four were from a man I hardly knew whom we will call David.
David was an inactive member of my former church. I had dutifully called on him over the years when he was in the hospital but he never darkened the door of the church. In fact, he hardly left his home. He was frequently hospitalized for digestive reasons. When I saw him he always had the long hair and very long fingernails that reflected his hermit life.
His first message was a request that I call him. With each successive he sounded more desperate, more urgent, and his last call was breathless and panicked. The fifth message was from my secretary, telling me that David had been found dead in his apartment.
David had been the second son of a prominent Springfield businessman, a leader both in his church and in his political party.
His father had big plans for David and his older brother to follow in his footsteps and to carry on the family name. When, in their adolescence, he learned that both of his sons were gay, he disowned them both. The older one moved to St. Louis where he became a full-time alcoholic. David stayed in Springfield, becoming increasingly reclusive until a pastor he hardly knew was the only person he knew to call when he could no longer resist the urge to take his own life.
David is only one of the gay men I have known who committed suicide because they were cut off from society, from church, from employment, and, too often, from family. He held the gun to his own head but society helped to pull the trigger.
There are about 40,000 suicides in America every year. Most have been younger people who were said to be mentally ill.... Most of the ones I have known were not the ones who were ill.... Society was sick and society took away their humanity, insisted that they didn't fit in, that they were going to go to hell, that they had to change, to accommodate themselves to a mentally ill society and when the burden of either pretending or hiding became too much, they turn to a permanent escape from their pain.
But there are two segments of society that doesn't fit that description where the rate of suicide is dramatically increasing. One is among the aging citizens who are discovering that they can neither find employment nor manage to live on their retirement income. As pension funds become more rare and Social Security in no way provides a living income, more and more of the elderly poor are becoming their own "death panel."
And, of course, the other category, the one we hear about in the news, is among our returning soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq. The suicide rate has tripled among the Armed Forces during the years that we have been involved in these two theaters. More soldiers have died from suicide than have been killed in action in Afghanistan.
The military has recently spent more than $200 million on research into suicide prevention and yet the rate of suicide continues to climb. I have an important solution to their problem that I will give to them at no cost at all.... Don't send young men and women to occupy foreign lands and expose them violence and death for which there is no believable justification. I'm right, of course, but that's not the answer they are looking for.
There are people who commit suicide because they have a kind of organic depression... a painful mental illness that does not respond to medication or talk therapy. These are sad cases... the people who really try, who do have access to health care and whose families love and support them.
Others take their own lives to avoid a more painful and humiliating death. Robin Williams' widow offered this as the explanation for his suicide.... Though I fear that his long struggle with addiction may have played a role, she indicated that it was a Parkinson's disease diagnosis that he could not face.
Most of us have become aware of the sad case of Brittany Maynard who has very publicly and fearlessly discussed her plans to take her own life on November 1st. Just six months ago it was discovered that this very athletic 23 year old woman has a malignant brain tumor. Faced with no further medical options and only pain and suffering ahead of her, she has chosen the date of her own death.
Though there are people who would object even to this on the most cruel and irrational religious basis, I have only respect for her courageous decision not only to die with dignity but to talk about it in a way that can give others both comfort and courage.
Beyond the death with dignity and those whose brain chemistry refuses our best efforts, what remains, which are nearly all of the 40,000 suicides each year, are what we can call "preventable" suicides.
We too easily say that people who take their own lives are mentally ill... and in some cases that is absolutely true... in those cases, every kind of research into what medications, treatments and therapies might work is in order.
But I think that majority are not mentally ill.... Not in a very honest and painfully truthful way. Many of them simply can't adjust to an insane society. In lots of ways, that is our business.
WalMart just cut 30,000 of their employees off of health care to save money when the family that owns most of WalMart is the most wealthy family in the world. Ironically, WalMart just announced plans to start a health insurance company and they will sell policies at their stores! Most bankruptcies in America are caused by medical bills.
So you cut poor peoples wages and hours, take their health care away from them and then watch them be evicted and bankrupt when the get sick and we say that they are mentally ill when they decide to kill themselves? No! That's just not true. That's a preventable suicide.... There is mental illness there but it is treatable.... It is treatable with a national health care program and a minimum wage that is a living wage!
We don't need to give more anti-depressants and counseling to poor people... we need to give them more justice... we need to restore dignity to work and livability to wages. They aren't crazy but we make them think they are crazy because we expect them to adjust to a cruel, irrational, and mean employment and economic system that robs them of their humanity.
This is not at all unlike what I said about our brave sisters and brothers in uniform. There was PTSD among WWII soldiers but most of those people felt that they were liberators, they were defenders of their homeland. My father came back from WWII with battle fatigue and was hospitalized for a long time in a mental hospital. He had seen too much death, too much violence, and he never got over it.
PTSD can happen in any war.... But he died believing that his fallen comrades where heroes who died in a noble cause. He believed that he sacrificed to defend our nation from invasion. The drug and alcohol abuse, the depression and suicidal thoughts of many of our veterans from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan may well be because they just can't get their heads into the myth of the wars' purposes.
I am shocked by the compliance of our media in beating the drums for a new Middle East war and by the passive acceptance of our public. We have never yet gotten involved in tribal inspired civil wars in the Middle East and been able to effect a peaceful and just outcome. The soldiers who have PTSD are much more likely to have the sane view of these wars than are the hysterical people in our media and our Congress who want to keep us in a perpetual state of war.
If we keep sending the poor of our depressed rural states and impoverished inner cities to go and kill and be killed by the poor of rural Muslim nations and the unemployed of their inner cities then we will see the same outcomes. We need to put our foreign policy on Prozac and keep our young men and women here.
Finally, we have to admit that the largest share of madness that leads to suicide is born under our nation's steeples.... In our mosques and in our temples. Suicide rates among gay men is estimated to be nearly tens times the suicide rate of the rest of society.
And that comes more from mentally ill religion than from any other source. Like the man I mentioned earlier... what child can bear being rejected by their church, their parents, and, if they buy into it all, by God as well, and not wish that they were dead? Many people, including my best friends, have often implored me to turn down the volume on my criticism of evangelical Christianity, traditional Roman Catholicism, and of conservative Judaism and Islam but when there is a casualty count lying all around their sick religion, I cannot be quiet.
I doubt that there is a liberal in this part of the world who has not had to struggle with serious depression at times because we do not fit in. We are constantly experiencing rejection by our peers and our family members just because we have recognized that Fox News is a just pre-packaged hate masquerading as entertainment, masquerading as news.
I sometimes find it to be very nearly overwhelming. It is not just the profit driven wars, the corporate control of Congress, it isn't just seeing the Mitch McConnell's, Rand Paul's and Billy Long's who populate our government.... It is the indifference of intelligent and good people who accommodate themselves to the insanity and who insist that I join them in crazy-town.
Evil people are a constant. Evil people are not really the problem here. It is the indifference of good people that we have to fight and as tempting as it is to give up, there is always another David, another soldier, another victim of a broken church, a sick government, and cruel economic system who is waiting for us to wake up.
Being personally enlightened is not enough. Becoming liberated from the oppression of sick religion and being too old for military service doesn't give us permission to become indifferent to the deaths of others. There have been eight people who died by their own hand since I started talking this morning.... We cannot afford not to care.
