Stand at the Crossroads

Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.

— Jeremiah 6:16

***

A few days ago, I attended the funeral of a young Christian man who took his own life. A few days from now, I will attend the funeral of another young Christian man who took his own life. These sentences feel grotesque and offensive even as I type them. These things should not be. Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and spouses and friends should not have to stagger to the front of church sanctuaries to read tear-stained eulogies, to bear witness to, to lament the unfairness of, to rage against, to somehow attempt to drag bewildered meaning from these cruel endings.

The verse above from Jeremiah was at the top of one of the pages in the bulletin for the service a few days ago. It seemed, well, what did it seem like? A mockery? A cruel irony? A hope that ultimately proved unreachable, impossible? Whatever the good way we should walk might look like, it surely does not involve endings like this. And God, these poor, tormented souls who ultimately found the rest Jeremiah speaks of elusive… Are these words simply an indictment of their failure? A sober summons for rest of us who trudge on in the destabilizing aftermath, trying to make sense of the senseless?

I’ve read and written about and reflected often upon the despair that seems endemic to our time, particularly among the young. It has never exactly been an abstract issue for me being the parent of young adults, seeing firsthand how difficult flourishing seems to be for many, watching so many young adults around me fail to do the things that were “normal” when I was their age: partner up, have kids, find decently fulfilling employment, buy a home (or at least move in that direction), cultivate a circle of friendships, generally trust the institutions that were handed down to them. All of this and more seems out of reach for many young adults these days. It feels like a despair is settling in like a fog.

No, it’s never been an issue out there for me, but two funerals in six days sure brings it crashing in here. Christ have mercy.

Of course, there are all kinds of explanations for this fog of despair. It’s the economy, it’s climate change, it’s our diseased and toxic online spaces, it’s brains rotted by “smart” phones, it’s unrealistic expectations conditioned by social media, it’s broken families, it’s polarization, it’s individualism, it’s consumerism, it’s industrial capitalism, it’s secularism, it’s incentivizing victimhood as a perverse status symbol, it’s the blasted out landscape of postmodernism or whatever has replaced it, it’s Gen X parents who want to be their kids’ friends instead of their parents, it’s the failure of churches to proclaim and embody a credible faith, it’s… The list could go on.  At the very least, it would seem that we are not finding the good way to walk. The ancient paths are overgrown, neglected, untravelled, covered by brambles and thorns. We can’t see how to get where we need to go.

It grieves me in a bone deep way that these two restless souls chose to do what they did. My heart aches for those left behind to pick up the pieces. Particularly the parents. This morning, I read an article in The Atlantic about two parents who also lost a young adult child. One sentence summed it up, for me: “It’s completely out of the order of the universe.” It certainly is. I hope and I pray that these families will somehow be able to find good paths and rest for their souls coming out of this shattering loss. But dear God, it will not be easy.

I have no nice tidy ending for this. Suicide is such a profoundly disorienting thing for everyone within the blast radius. It sends everyone reeling, groping, questioning—They didn’t see this coming. What am I not seeing? What’s lurking around the bend for me, for my family, for my friends, in my church? It feels like we are in a cultural moment (at least in the West) where the jury is very much out on whether life is fundamentally good and worth pursuing (or preserving). The fog is settling. We need to return to faith, hope, and love—to an affirmation of the goodness of our lives and the trustworthiness of the God who gave them to us. But even as I write these words, they seem trite, inadequate, undesirable, impossible for many. Despair is such a bleak, lonely room.

I’ve been meditating recently on Jesus’ words in the fifth chapter of Luke’s gospel: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” I think we often imagine, “Yes, and then Jesus heals our sickness, and we gratefully march off into flourishing. I once was blind, but now I see; I once was sick, but now I’m all patched up. Praise Jesus!” But just as we don’t cease to become sinners once we encounter Jesus, we all, at least on some level, remain sick people in need of the Divine Physician. We cannot save ourselves from our sin and we cannot heal ourselves from our disease. God alone can ultimately treat our deepest wounds.

In his book He Held Radical Light, Christian Wiman says:

At some point, you need a universally redemptive activity. You need grace that has nothing to do with your own efforts, for at some point—whether because of disease or despair, exhaustion or loss—you will have no efforts left to make.

As I said, no tidy ending. Just a stubborn hope that the God who calls us to walk in the good way is also the God stands at the end of the road—even when that road is marked by disease, despair, exhaustion, and loss—and offers his irrational grace, a final rest for restless souls.