Month: March 2026

In reading about an author considered brilliant, but troubled, I came upon this quote cited a few paragraphs on. The fellow later committed suicide.

As having known a few (suicides), some of whom I have counted as friends, but not knowing the depths to which their troubling isolated them, I simply thought their lack of communication was just the simple falling away to time and distance.

And it was easier, at that time, to just think estrangement was them ‘getting on’ with their own lives and me with mine. Being rather peculiar myself, even to myself, collecting peculiar friends along the way just seemed the way of things. But news then comes…and the comfortable normalcy we may not know that has been worn as a blanket, even in our ‘some peculiarity’, is upset or torn from us.

Suicide is a rather loud statement…with echoes.

And although my vanities may seem precious to me, how few of us like to consider ourselves blandly ‘normal’ as in that unwelcome weight the word often implies. Yes, we do, despite all telling otherwise…think ourselves special in some way or another. After all, the world is full of “yous’, ‘thems’, “theys’ and others…but to each of us, we are the only ‘me’ we know.

Drawing our circles relatively big or small makes little difference here, as some already know. At any moment and in certain circumstance…the intensity of being that only ‘me’ known…can be made, or seem unbearable. It may be the most unique thing about us is the also most common…

“Each of us believes ourselves…unique”. We are really just like the everybody else.

And, may God help us here. Our commonality often decried as bane as we each pursue an individuality (fleeing as it were the terrors of being faceless in the crowd) no less beckons with all intensity, to community. We seem to need to be and know ourselves as quite singular (even by display) but are terrorized by the isolation the perfection of that estate would so plainly speak.

We may often ‘want to be alone’…but…not ‘that alone’ as would be to us ‘too alone.’ Even the company of other prisoners can sometimes make for us better company than solitary confinement. IYKYK

Being so called ‘spiritual’ or thinking we are, may often cause us to believe we are inured to this tension which, if left as only an estate assigned others, (a thing unthinkable to ourselves in such experience as hopelessness’ grip) many a saint has come ‘up against’.

When days are bright and sunny how connected we may feel with bellies and larders full, never imagining any circumstance could shake our trust and faithfulness (as we experience even those joys of trust and faith). Job is for us a ‘lesson’, or Christ’s words of a soul troubled to death, some hyperbole. Yes, we do have words of greatest comfort and encouragement, yet often failing to see from which estate such words were forged and burned into the bones of the speaker:

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And yes, it is good to find comfort and encouragement in the words God gave Paul, nothing doubting, but not without some healthy caveat…none of us are ever ‘above’ such experience of total helplessness of ourselves to help ourselves, and out from which such words came. There is a recitation (not at all ever to be denied) and meditations upon (again, never to be denied)…and there is a ‘knowing’. And no less (particularly as I find in my case) a temptation to a presumption of knowing as though realities of despair of self have been fully plumbed. God help me.

And God forbid any of this be seen as some beckoning to hopelessness, or excuse for suicide, as though such depths of hopelessness prove a thing to some triumph of depression, or even entrance into some suffering or loss to ‘prove’ a piety.

Paul also spoke of the vanity of our own precious (to us) attempts to enter into sacrifice that do not avail. We do not choose our own forms for the experience of the cross, only acknowledge that particular gifting of Christ’s gift of His, not denying such acknowledgement will include whatever and however God chooses to reveal by experience, our likewise participation.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

As unlovely as suicide does appear, even if somehow we have been brought to see it as some ‘final act’ of trying to slap God across the face in all frustrations for having arms too short…even in some measure of spiteful screaming out in fullest measure of finally taking matters ‘into our own hands’ (as is so easily resolved to the most ‘pious’ among us) may we not be so callously unlovely to consign an end where, to us, God cannot appear.

God can slow a bullet, God can appear in milliseconds to a jumper, God can insert Himself at any time before a poison or drug has completed its work. Do I say He does this? God forbid. But God worse forbid, even far worse forbid with all Godly power, that my observations of matters that lead to my own judgments of matters is always final conclusions of ‘how things are’. Or to say in all, there are things God simply will not, or cannot do.

Yes, God forbid any denial by me of ‘how far’ mercy is ‘allowed’ to extend.

Yes, for a man ‘like me’…that would be the very worst thing to believe ‘about God’, and quite particularly the God and Father of Jesus Christ. I tremble to consider such conclusion be allowed…to a man ‘like me’. For I am terrorized to consider where a man like me must appear if man is allowed to conclude the limits of God’s mercy in Christ.

Does that mean we can never adjudge seeming ‘sad’ end? Again, God forbid. But there is a great difference between sad and bad. One may arouse a compassion, at best…another may provoke us to assuming an already assigned seat to which we have no right.

So, it is this quote written by the deceased author, which struck me. Yes, it is far too easy to ‘spiritually’ assume suicide is the final act of a soul so given to rebellion and spiteful resistance of God to be the last and final act of all and any party to salvation. Forgetting the ‘parties’ to salvation are reserved to Christ and His Father alone, as though believing that allows me to insert myself to a just position for the choosing of its objects to fall upon. To be ministered to. I am beneficiary, not benefactor.

God forbid.

We have many wonderful words providentially written and preserved for us as testimony to the goodness and faithfulness of God. May we fully embrace them.

But to those who have had some taste of a dungeon that seems inescapable, even prisons of flesh to some seeming enforcement of an unbreakable solitary confinement from which relief is most direly sought, may they understand we are very common in experience…and how often we are just moved by what appears to us in only ‘lesser’ of two evils presentation. We might be foolish to believe in our own capacity to ‘choose good’, rather than another’s intervention, another’s sole intervention…to keep us, even prevent us (often!) against our own will…from ‘the evil’.

This is the quote:

“David Foster Wallace once wrote something in Infinite Jest that explained exactly what he went through. He said the person who jumps from a burning building isn’t choosing to fall. They’re not suddenly attracted to death. They’re simply choosing the lesser of two terrors. The flames of depression get so unbearably hot that falling becomes the better option. Nobody watching from the ground can understand that choice unless they’ve personally felt those flames licking at their skin.” End quote.

I will not lie. It is unbearable for me to be me, though I sometimes forget. I have no doubt my being is also unbearable for you. But it really is in the jumping to flee the death we cannot but conclude to ourselves and of ourselves as for ourselves…another is found. Even when it appears for a time as only the choosing the lesser of two evils…Christ has shown Himself willing to bear that appearance for us, and that without complaint.

We may yet have so little understanding of His having endured being “cut off”…for our sakes. May appreciation…even in smallest amounts as ‘less evil’ than denying, have its full course in us to His conclusion.