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"From Hopelessness to Hope"

In our tradition the Minister always has final say on what subjects are addressed—freedom of the pulpit—but it’s helpful to get input from others about what they’d like to hear about. This weekend and next weekend members and friends have an opportunity to influence that decision by submitting the highest bid in the Dining for Dollars service auction. Yes, it’s true: I’ll preach on anything for the right price. You want bombast? Verbose superfluity? Moral indignation? Just pay the price…. There is another way to influence the minister’s sermon selection process and that is to become a member of the Pulpit Committee. It was there, last fall that one of the members suggested a sermon on suicide.

At first I was reluctant. I remember reading an article published year’s ago in the Co-Evolution Quarterly by Steward Brand. Always pushing the envelope, Brand had decided to print an article on “How to Commit Suicide.” But he had misgivings and decided to ask his minister, Richard Baker, then-Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center, what he thought. “Don’t publish an article on how to commit suicide,” said Baker Roshi, “Publish an article on how not to commit suicide.”

On the other hand, suicide merits our attention. As an option available to everyone, self death is also scary; whenever someone we’ve known succumbs to suicide, we are reminded of our vulnerability to its apparent allure. My dad committed suicide the summer I turned eighteen, two weeks after I graduated from high school. Others I have known and cared for have also committed suicide, including more than a few congregants over the years. In my last church the Chair of the Membership, a deeply loved and respected member of the community took her life alone at home despite the efforts of many who knew she was depressed and did all we could to keep her alive. I am still grieving.

Stewart Brand’s original intention had been sparked by the Hemlock Society’s efforts to promote death with dignity for the terminally ill. Now known as Compassion and Choices chapters across the country are led by Unitarian Universalists, including here in L.A. Compassion and Choices members argue that suicide is acceptable under certain circumstances, such as incurable disease and old age. The idea is that although life is in general a good, people who face irreversible suffering should not be forced to continue suffering. Most Unitarian Universalists would agree with this idea, or at least support the rights of those who do. By in large, liberal religion asserts that a person's life belongs only to him or her, and no other person has the right to force on others their own conviction that life must be lived. Only the individual involved can make such a decision, and whatever decision he or she does make, should be respected.

Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (named the 1973 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association) goes further, arguing that suicide is the most basic right of all. If freedom is self-ownership, i.e., ownership over one's own life and body, then the right to end that life is the most basic of all. If others can force you to live, you do not own yourself but belong to them.

Indeed, philosophical thinking in the 19th and 20th centuries led, in some cases, to the point that suicide was no longer a last resort, or even something that one must justify, but something that one must justify not doing. Many forms of Existentialist thinking essentially begin with the premise that life is objectively meaningless, and proceed to the question of why one should not go ahead and jump off the bridge; most answer by suggesting that the individual has the power to give personal meaning to life. The existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, both rejected suicide, considering it an escape from freedom. Fleeing from the absurdity of reality into illusions, religion, or into death was not—either for Camus or Sartre—the way out. We should embrace life passionately, both men believed, despite its meaninglessness.

Philosophy notwithstanding, nearly everyone who contemplates suicide does so because they’re depressed. In The Butcher’s Wife, Taiwanese feminist writer Li Ang points out that “people commit suicide for only one reason—to escape torment.” While I was living on Martha’s Vineyard Island, the award-winning author who lived nearby, William Styron, fell victim to a crippling and almost suicidal depression, the same illness that took the lives of Sylvia Plath, Primo Levi and Virginia Woolf. He wrote about his descent into the maelstrom in a memoir, Darkness Visible. Styron manages to convey its tortuous progression and his eventual recovery with heart-rending candor and precision that will arouse a shock of recognition even in people who have been spared the suffering it describes.

In the United States today, someone takes his own life every eighteen minutes. Suicide is much more common than homicide. It’s the highest cause of death among those 15 to 24 and among people over 65. Many of them were probably preventable.

Survivors often regret their decision immediately. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines are among the handful of souls who have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. As he leapt, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.” Kevin Hines was eighteen when he jumped off the bridge in September, 2000. “I was like, ‘Screw this, nobody cares,’ ” he recalled. “So I jumped.” But then, “My first thought was, what the hell did I just do? I don’t want to die.”

There’s a mixed-up, confused quality to most suicidal thinking—a sense of power that comes from having the last word. But do we? Buddhists and Hindus, believing in reincarnation, also believe that we carry our karma with us beyond the grave. While they do not consign suicides to hell or anything like it, they point out that according to their understanding taking one’s own life doesn’t resolve any of a person’s problems; that whatever’s gnawing at their soul will continue through many lifetimes, if necessary, until it’s properly addressed. Meanwhile, you have here in this life a support system—if you avail yourself of it—that can help you. Reach out to them! I often mention this to UUs who confide in me about their suicidal ideation. Despairing over the loss of a job, or loved one, or declining powers, these overwrought souls just want to die and escape it all. Knowing they cannot blot out a certain page of their lives, they decide to throw the book in the fire. Okay; but if the Buddhists and Hindus are correct all their issues will abide within their soul, whatever they do to their bodies.

The other thing I always try to gently remind those contemplating taking their own life—and here I speak from experience—is what a terrible burn suicide is for their survivors.

A wound that doesn’t have to be. Consider: some suicides are carefully planned, but most are not. Few people wake up thinking they’ll take their life, but circumstances suddenly make it possible. An impulsive thought, a gun, and a couple of beers make a very volatile mixture. Berkeley suicidologist Dr. Richard Seiden published a study, “Where Are They Now?,” in which he followed up on five hundred and fifteen people who were prevented from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge between 1937 and 1971. After, on average, more than twenty-six years, ninety-four per cent of the would-be suicides were either still alive or had died of natural causes. “The findings confirm previous observations that suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented and acute in nature,” Seiden concluded; if you can get a suicidal person through his crisis—Seiden put the high-risk period at ninety days—chances are extremely good that they won’t kill themselves later.

Ninety critical days. Three months. One season. How to keep on keepin’ on for a quarter of the year?

1. Reach out to people who care about you, starting with your family and your minister.
2. Talk to your doctor. Medication can achieve a lot. Even mild sleeping pills are helpful—very helpful—when it comes to making it through emotionally rough patches.
3. Be careful about self-medication—alcohol and controlled substances—it only tends to add fuel to the fire.
4. lock up any guns or other lethal methods.
5. don’t be afraid to talk about your situation—you’re not alone!

It’s impossible to know whether any one suicide might have been prevented, but many suicidal people do in fact want to be saved. As the eminent suicidologist E. S. Shneidman has said, “The paradigm is the man who cuts his throat and cries for help in the same breath.”

After thinking about this for the last forty years, I’ve decided that what would-be suicides need is hope: the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent. That things will change. That our pain—excruciating as it may be—will heal and that better days will come. As the English author and poet Vita Sackville-West once put it, “To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.” Just imagining a better day is the first step to discovering it. But how to mobilize hope?

When dealing with superhuman powers—and depression, for those who have suffered it, is such a power—we are often helped by personifying them. That’s the benefit (or one important benefit, anyway) of mythology. Consider the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box…. After Prometheus' theft of the secret of fire, Zeus ordered Hephaestus to create the woman Pandora. She was given many seductive gifts from Aphrodite, Hermes, Hera, and the other gods and goddesses. Fearing reprisals, Prometheus warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from Zeus, but Epimetheus became smitten, would not listen, and married Pandora. Pandora had been given a large jar and instruction by Zeus to keep it closed, but she had also been given the gift of curiosity, and ultimately opened it. When she opened it, all of the evils, ills, diseases, and burdensome labor that humankind had not known previously, escaped from the jar. But it is said, that at the very bottom of her box, there lay one additional spirit: hope. As the poet says, “hope springs eternal.”

“Hope” is a thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops at all. (Emily Dickenson, 1861)

Hope, it seems to me, is not so much a feeling as something you do. A modus operandi. The old Universalists used to refer to their religion as “the Larger Hope.” They believed that, ultimately, all would be saved, everything redeemed, and that the entire universe would be reabsorbed into the eternally loving Godhead. Those Universalists then organized their lives accordingly—on the assumption that that the whole of reality was connected and was destined for wonder and joy and happiness. I still believe that, unequivocally. Others of you may be less sure. Like Camus and Sartre, you may think the world is meaningless. Fine. But go a step further and, like Camus and Sartre, embrace it in spite of its meaninglessness—you’ll find the absurdity funnier and the human touches sweeter and more beautiful. Be part of the Larger Hope. Like the poet Kabir proposed—himself a universalist—make love with all you find beautiful and important and special in the life before you. Music? Art? Nature? Your grandchildren? Working for Justice? A good book? Marx Brothers movies? Gardening? Talking to old friends? Whatever you love, hope is there. And it will sustain you, if you let it, even through the darkest night.

So let it be; shalom, and amen.

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