An Illness Not a Sin

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.