On Thursday, November 10, I got word that a 15-year-old girl in the church’s youth group had taken her own life. I jumped in my car and went to the hospital where I found her mother in the waiting room. I hugged her and hugged her, not knowing what to say and thinking it might be best not to say anything. But on Tuesday, November 15, we held a memorial service for her daughter in a sanctuary full of grieving friends and family members and a few hundred tearful teenagers, wondering how such a thing could happen to one of their own. This is what I said:
Last Friday morning I went running with my friend Wallace Adams-Riley, Rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church here in Richmond, and as we ran I told him what had happened the day before, Thursday, when I got the news about Kat. I told him the whole sad story and he was a good pastor to me. He listened, and consoled me, and promised to pray for me today, because he knows how hard it can be to try to find just the right words in times like these. But when we finished our run he asked, “What was her name again?” “Fink,” I said. “Kat Fink. I’m sure it means something beautiful in German.” “It does!” he said. “I had a friend in college named Fink. It means ‘finch,’ you know, like the bird.” And I did know the bird. Finches are some of my favorites. They are tiny birds with bright eyes and beautiful voices. I thought, “How perfect for Kat, who seemed so fragile, so vulnerable—like a little bird—and yet who had those bright eyes and that beautiful voice.” And then yesterday I looked again at the verse I read at her baptism, the one Bart read earlier from Matthew 6: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life…. Look at the birds of the air; are you not of more value than they?”
Kat was of so much more value than they. I think about the words of Psalm 139 and how they describe her. The psalmist says, “It was you, Lord, who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” And so was Kat, fearfully and wonderfully made, and yet here we are at her memorial service, and many of us are wondering why. Why did this have to happen, and what could we have done to prevent it? I’m reminded of that story from John 11, where Jesus’ friend Lazarus has died and Jesus goes to the funeral. It was there, John tells us, that “Jesus wept,” because he loved Lazarus so much. Lazarus’ sister, Martha, comes out to meet him and says, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.” A little later her sister Mary comes out and says the same thing: “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.” Can you imagine how that must have hurt? And yet it’s something we all do at a time like this; we all begin to say, “If only.” “If only I had been there.” “If only I had called her.” “If only I had been a better friend.” But I want you to notice what Jesus does in John 11: he says to Martha, “Your brother will rise again.” And she says, “I know he will, on the Resurrection, at the last day.” But Jesus says, “I am the Resurrection, and the life. Those who believe in me, even if they die, will live. And everyone who lives and believe in me will never die.” What Jesus is saying to Martha is that he is not responsible for Lazarus’ death; he is responsible for his life. And I say to you—all of you who are thinking “if only”—you are not responsible for Kat’s death. Kat was responsible for her death. But Jesus Christ is responsible for her everlasting life.
He is the Resurrection.
“So, why did she do it?” you ask. “Why did she take her own life?” We may never know, but our best guess is that Kat suffered from an illness we call “depression.” If she had died of cancer we would still be sad, but at least we would understand, wouldn’t we? We know how cancer works. But depression is different. We don’t understand it all that well, but we do know that there are different kinds and different levels, from feeling depressed because you got a bad grade on a math test to feeling unending, unbearable mental anguish for no reason at all. I don’t understand it all that well, but I understand it better after more than a year of counseling a woman in our church who suffers from severe depression, and sometimes contemplates suicide. She’s been very honest with me about it, and she’s asked all the right questions.
When she asked, “Is suicide an unforgivable sin?” I said, “No. According to Jesus the only unforgivable sin is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.” When she asked, “Is suicide ever an option? I said, “No. Matters of life and death belong in God’s hands, and Gods hands only.” When she asked, “What should I do when I’m tempted to commit suicide?” I said, “When you feel your hand reaching out to do harm to yourself, use it instead to pick up the phone and call me, and if I don’t answer call 911 and say, ‘I need help.'” Not long ago I got that call from her, and I was able to help, and I was so proud of her for calling. But still she talks about pain that won’t go away. She talks about wanting to do whatever it will take to make the pain stop. But mostly she talks about this feeling of being down in a hole, a deep, dark hole, with no way out.
One day I asked her to describe that hole and she said, “It’s deep.” “How deep?” I asked. “So deep you can’t see any light at the top,” she said. “How wide is it?” I asked. “About wide enough to stretch out your arms,” she said. “What are the walls made of?” I asked. “Dirt,” she said. “Do they go straight up or do they angle?” I asked. “They go straight up.” “And what’s the floor like?” “It’s dirt, too,” she said, “And some gravel.” Her answers were very specific. They made me believe she had spent a lot of time in that hole. But then I remembered something I did once when I was a boy and I told her about it. My mother had plucked a chicken (some of you may know what that means), and she asked me to bury the grocery bag full of feathers in an unused part of the garden. So, I went out there with a shovel and began to dig. The dirt was so soft that I soon had a nice sized hole, but it was also so soft that I kept on digging until I had dug a proper grave for those chicken feathers. I buried them, but then I moved over a few feet and began to dig again. I dug most of the rest of that day, until I had a circular hole about six feet across and about six feet deep. When I stood at the bottom I could stretch my arms out and almost touch the walls on each side.
The next day I dug a tunnel out of the hole and up to the surface, and then I covered the hole with some old boards and a tarp, and shoveled loose dirt on top of it until you could hardly tell it was there. I dragged a bale of straw in there from the barn and scattered it on the floor of my hole until it was warm and dry and sweet smelling. I cut a niche in the wall, put a candle in a quart jar, lit the candle, and put it in the niche. And then I took my sleeping bag down there, and a pillow, and a good book, and a snack, and I wish you could have seen me, lying on that sleeping bag, my head propped up on a pillow, surrounded by sweet smelling straw, eating a snack and reading a book by the light of that candle.
When I finished telling that story this woman was smiling at the very thought of turning a hole into such a happy place. I said, “Maybe you could do the same. Maybe, the next time you find yourself in that hole, you could get comfortable, find a good book, light a candle, and have a snack. And maybe you could let that candle be a symbol of God’s presence.” And then I told her, “That’s why we light the candles in the sanctuary. Every time we have a service in there we light the candles to remind us that God is present. And God is present. There isn’t anywhere we can go that God isn’t present. Psalm 139 says: “If I make my bed in Sheol (which is really nothing more than a hole in the ground), you are there. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” As it says in John 1: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never overcome it.” And in Psalm 23: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for God is with me.”
God is with us.
And Kat…is with God.
–Jim Somerville
Recently I preached a series of sermons on “The Seven Most-Googled Questions about God and Religion.” This was Question #2–“Is There a God?”–and I preached it (as I did all these questions) with the help of a “conversation partner,” sitting at a table in the same place where the pulpit usually stands, having a conversation about one of the most important things of all. I hope you will enjoy it and learn from it.
JimsBlog 