The statistics tell us that 45,000 people kill themselves in America every year; that is 123 per day! According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (which obviously isn’t doing a very good job), for every successful suicide, 25 people try to kill themselves. If my calculator is correct, somewhere around 1.125 million people every year (over 3,000 a day!) so hate their lives that they attempt to snuff them out. What’s scary is that the rate of this happening has increased 24% since 1999.
This relatively quite epidemic vaulted into the headlines this past week with the suicides of two high profile celebrities who killed themselves in the prime of their lives. Kate Spade first on June 5. She was a fashion designer and businesswoman who founded a billion dollar business. She was known to suffer from depression and took medication for it. The other shocking suicide was Anthony Bourdain in Friday, June 8. He was a celebrity chef, author, and television personality. He was also known to suffer from depression.
Both of these accomplished people had everything our secular culture tells us we should strive for: wealth, fame, significance, they had it all. Yet, for some reason life was so horrifying for them they couldn’t stand to live any longer. For me this is much bigger than these two individuals, or the 123 who successfully end their lives every day. As a Christian I could never judge any of them. I, nor any other follower of Jesus, is any better than they are or were. We are all sinners, as is every human being who ever lived; each of us is worthy of hell, and not one attains heaven because of who they are or what they have done, but exactly in spite of it. Christianity is based on grace, or unmerited favor, and mercy, so there is zero justification for pride; as God says in his word, so that no one may boast.
This, however, does not leave us without the responsibility to make judgments. Everyone does. For Christians, we heed the words of Jesus when he said that after we’ve taken the plank out of our own eyes we can “see clearly to remove the speck from” other’s eyes. In other words, we can discern, assess, make distinctions, evaluate, etc. It’s called wisdom. The problem with American secular culture in the 21st century is that it has zero wisdom. It has chosen the idols of its own brilliance and prosperity. It has chosen the illusion that we can make our own fulfillment, or own meaning, or own right and wrong. Sadly, the iEverything culture is reaping the consequences of its obsession with the self, and its rejection of a living, Creator God, and as Christians believe a Savior who died for us.
To put this tragic situation in a different, non-secular perspective, I’ll use my favorite metaphor for universals (God is the ultimate universal) and particulars (everything else that is not God): puzzles and puzzle pieces. Without the puzzle, the pieces makes no sense! Secular Western cultural elites have completely embraced the assumptions of materialism (the material world is all their is). If this is true, then life is a series of puzzle pieces with no puzzle to which the pieces ultimately belong. This is very simple. Puzzle pieces can only give us a distorted picture of reality without the puzzle into which they fit. If you hold 10 pieces of a 500-piece puzzle you have no way of knowing what the completed picture looks like. But pieces is all the secular culture tells us we’ve got. It’s taught in our schools, is ubiquitous in our entertainment, and obsesses our media. And it is why 45,000 people a year in America kill themselves.
There has been much discussion this week of depression, most assuming and asserting that it’s a disease (i.e., it has a physiological cause). And in typically American fashion, we’re told we’ll find the solutions to this epidemic in medication, with some (secular) psychology or psychiatry thrown in. I can’t speak to the possibly physiological reasons for depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts, but it never occurs to the secularist commentators to question the worldview assumptions upon which our society is built. Can people become psychologically and emotionally healthy when their view of reality is truncated? When they believe there is no spiritual, eternal dimension to reality? Most survive and get along fairly well, but not the most vulnerable among us. I would argue that’s how you judge a culture, and our grade is not good.
On the other side there is the life of God in Christ, where we find ultimate hope, fulfillment, significance, and purpose. Where this life is preparation for eternal bliss with the very author of life. We, as we continually teach our children, should never turn good things into ultimate things. The puzzle pieces of life (particulars) more or less (we live in a fallen world) fit into the puzzle (universals) quite nicely. We don’t try to figure meaning out of just pieces because God in Christ has revealed to us the Truth, who is Christ himself, the Word made flesh. These words of C.S. Lewis’ are always apropos, but especially in light of the heart-breaking reality of beautiful, successful people (and those who are not) who think their only answer to the conundrum of life is to end it:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.
Only in the light of the Son of God made flesh, died for us, does this crucible called existence make any sense. We have bequeathed to our kids what I wish for all the troubled souls who end or try to end their lives each day, this in the words of the prophet Isaiah:
He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge; the fear of the LORD is the key to this treasure.
Every other foundation is sand.
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