An Illness Not a
Sin
Meditations on
Depression and Suicide
I’m a Christian pastor. I serve a Christian church. I
have done work as a volunteer chaplain for a local fire department. In my
capacity as pastor and chaplain I have on a couple of occasions ministered to
survivors of a loved one’s suicide. Once it was a young man who lived with and
had been raised by his grandparents who took his own life. Twice it was a woman
who had been married to her husband for thirty years before he ended his life. In
those cases the surviving loved ones were of course in shock and grief, trying
with every resource they had to understand what had happened and how they would
go on without their now deceased loved one. Of course they wondered why. They
wondered what they could have done, the answer to that being (as it is in
nearly every such case) nothing they hadn’t done. Losing a loved one to suicide
must be a nearly unbearable trauma for those who live on. I have experienced
the death of loved ones, including my wife of thirty years; but I have never
experienced the death of a loved one through suicide. I’ve seen the pain in
people who have, but even so I’m sure I can truly understand it. It is always a
tragedy of immense proportions when the one who decided he or she could not
live on is otherwise not on the brink of death. Suicide is a tragedy, and it
brings immense pain to those survive.
I have seen the pain of the survivors, but in the cases I
just mentioned here I have also seen something going on with them that makes
their grief and the trauma of a loved one’s suicide even worse than it must
necessarily be. That thing is the fear that because loved one has taken his or
her own life that God is then punishing their loved one for the unforgivable
sin of suicide. They’ve heard that claim proclaimed by preachers and so-called
pastors as divine truth. They suffer their own pain, and they fear for their
loved one’s eternal soul. This fear that Christian preachers have instilled in
them makes an event that would be unspeakably painful in any event far more
painful. It adds fear to grief. It add fear of their loved one being in eternal
torment to their own torment at losing him or her. It adds a layer of spiritual
fear to a condition of emotional grief.
Back when I was a seminary intern one of the pastors I
worked with told me how years earlier, when he was serving a local church in a
different city, he had gotten a call from a parishioner whose child had just
committed suicide. I said I had no idea what I’d do. He said “you go.” I said “yes,
you go; but you go empty-handed.” In those very early days of my life in
ministry I had no Idea what I could say in such a situation. Now, years later,
I have been in that situation myself; and I have learned that you don’t necessarily
go empty-handed. You go as a conduit of the love of God for people in deep
pain. You go to offer them God’s care and grace. You go to hold them. You go to
sit with them. You go to be with them. In all of those things you do not go
empty-handed.
And you go with something else. You go with the good news
that there is no such thing as an unforgivable sin. You go with this profound
truth: Your loved one who has ended her or his life was suffering from
depression. As far as I know that is almost always true. I suppose that if one
has received some terrible diagnosis of a terminal illness that one might
decide to end one’s life without being depressed. That’s what the “death with
dignity” movement is all about, and I don’t think that’s a sin either. In the
cases I have dealt with as pastor or chaplain the person who has committed
suicide was indeed suffering from depression. In those cases I have told the
grieving survivors something that I know to be true: Suicide is a consequence
of depression, and depression is an illness not a sin. God does not condemn us
when we suffer from heart disease. God does not condemn us when we die from
cancer. God does not condemn us when we have failing kidneys. God does not
condemn us for the mental illness of depression either, and that means that God
does not condemn us even when our depression becomes so bad that we end our
life.
Depression is a mental illness. I’ve had it myself. It is
an illness every bit as physical as a heart attack or a stroke. Yes, it can interact
with conditions in our lives in complex and unhealthy ways; but it is a
chemical imbalance in the brain as much as anemia is a chemical imbalance in
the blood. It is an illness not a sin. God does not condemn us for having it.
God does not condemn us when it causes us to act in a self-destructive way.
I hope that the people to whom I have said that truth
heard and believed me. I don’t delude myself that I can overcome centuries of
bad Christian teaching all by myself. I just pray that maybe my sharing what I
know to be true helped these suffering people at least a little bit. I pray
that perhaps what I’m writing here may help someone else who discovers these
words online. Depression is an illness. It has spiritual and emotional effects,
but it’s still an illness. I don’t understand why anyone thinks God would
condemn a person for being sick. We all get sick. We all die. It’s part of our
human condition.
So if you have lost a loved one to suicide, I’m am truly
sorry for your loss and your grief. Know that God loved you before your loss.
God loves you now, shares your pain, and offers you God’s everlasting arms of
love as a comfort and support. Know that God loved your loved one before his or
her death. God loves him or her now and holds her or him in an eternal embrace
of peace. Depression is an illness not a sin. It’s way past time for the
Christian church to realize that truth.
