When Life Becomes More Than a Body Can Bear
By Al Staggs
[Dr. Al Staggs is a performing artist specializing in historical monologues about Bonhoeffer, Rauschenbusch, and Clarence Jordan. He lives now in Hurst, Texas.]
Shortly after relocating to Ft. Worth, one of the neighbors came over to our house to introduce himself. I had previously noticed this young man with his two preschool children. In the few times I had seen them together, there was never any sign of a wife and mother. My neighbor introduced himself and explained to me that his wife had taken her life just a few months back. He told me that she had only been diagnosed with depression for just one month prior to her suicide. He said that she had been taking Prozac since her initial visit to her doctor just weeks before she died. This young widower and single parent explained to me that he and his two children were in counseling. He talked to me about his relationship with his church and how his faith had helped him during this crisis. As he turned to walk back to his house, he said, "You know, God doesn`t put on us more than we can bear." It was only weeks later that I began to think seriously about that statement. What about his wife? She must have been convinced in her own mind that she had more than she could possibly bear.
My mother took her life on March 4, 1978, following months of psychotherapy and drug therapy. She had been hospitalized at the Arkansas State Hospital following a number of unsuccessful attempts at taking her own life. She seemed resolute about ending what to her seemed an awful and dismal existence. The faith that had been her foundation through an abusive marriage of nearly fifty years was in those dark days nowhere to be found. The faith that was so evident to her five children during our early years was nonexistent for her then in her greatest time of need. On one of my last visits with her in the hospital she said, "Alfred, I`m-not sure I`m really saved." My response was, "Mom, if you`re not saved, then none of us are." Despite all of my attempts at reassurance, despite all of the love showered on her by all her children, and in the face of all that medical science could do with drugs, psychotherapy, and shock therapy, Mom gave up on life on a cold, cloudy, drizzly March day in Arkansas.
Life has a way of changing our theology. I know that my mother`s suicide caused the beginning of a massive readjustment of my own personal working theology. Here, the finest Christian I had ever known was left helpless in the pit of life. Her spirit was defeated by the clouds of depression. Life had become more than she could bear.
Mother`s tragic death forced me to reconsider some of my faith presuppositions. One of those presuppositions was that if we are dedicated Christians we will likely not ever be in a situation where we will feel emotionally and spiritually powerless, helpless, and hopeless. If we are committed, dedicated Christians we will never find ourselves in a context where we will feel all options are closed to us. Mother`s exemplary Christian life and tragic death shouted a resounding, "Not true" to this assumption.
Days following her death I discovered that the concept of the Cross had new meaning for me. This symbol which had been up to that time a "religious" symbol of something that occurred long ago, suddenly began to take on a present tense, existential meaning. This symbol that had before represented a shield from defeat and illness and the promise of triumph and success in life, now came to mean understanding and Divine presence in my personal despair at the loss of my mother. I heard in a new way what Jesus said from the Cross, " My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!" At that moment Jesus felt forsaken as my mother had felt forsaken and as I now felt forsaken. Jurgen Moltmann spoke of this concept in his book, The Crucified God. Moltmann, who was conscripted as a very young man into the German army in World War II, found himself as Prisoner of War in the hands of the British army at the end of that war. It was in this hopeless, helpless condition that he began to understand that the Cross was in a very real sense a defeat, a tragedy, and not just a theological concept. Liberationist Theology coined the phrase, "The view from below", that is, the place of powerlessness and suffering and even death.
I believe my mother felt guilty for feeling hopeless. That`s why she could continue to feel that she had let God down by her despair. That`s why she could say to me in her last phone conversation, "Son, you wouldn`t be proud of me, for what I`ve done." In her despair she had tried to kill herself on several occasions by hanging. My mother felt that God expected her to always be good and positive and not ever give in to thoughts of despair.
In rereading my Bible following mother`s death, I rediscovered the anguish and despair of the psalmist and the prophets. The spiritual and emotional hells of Job, Jonah, and Jeremiah were particularly meaningful and comforting. These were real emotions expressed as a result of real tragedies. This was no magical, sugar-coated spiritual pill that inoculated one from all that life brings. These emotions were cries of anguish and even protest that God had left them without hope and without help. These prophets were having to endure more than they could bear.
Another assumption that changed as a result of mother`s suicide was the assumption that God can`t deal with our honest emotions and our anger, even our anger at God. The protests and cries of the prophets and the psalmist certainly carried anger at God. It does seem that the Jewish faith gives more credence to this notion of "wrestling with God", this idea of "contending with God." I recall that my brother, Tom, exclaimed in his grief about mother, "You made a mistake this time, God." A shocking statement, yes. Also an honest emotion and even a prayer.
I appreciate particularly the position of the author and Holocaust survivor, Eli Wiesel, in his contention that we both worship God and continue to question God. Wiesel cannot understand why God did not intervene during the murder of six million Jews including one and a half million children. He says that to become an atheist is not a possibility, that we can`t let God off that easily. Carlyle Marney was noted for saying, "God has a lot for which to give an accounting."
This idea of expressing anger at God was a totally foreign idea, an unthinkable notion, when I was growing up in the Baptist church in Arkansas. One felt that to express strong negative emotions toward God would mean to risk being struck dead. Yet any healthy, loving, long-term and committed relationship includes the exchange of negative feelings as well as positive ones. I prefer to think of God as a loving parent who is not put off by my anger and that this parent can and does love me in spite of my hostility. These are normal dynamics of relationships at their authentic level.
I still believe my mother had a total breakdown in her brain chemistry, a reversal that would render her powerless to make rational decisions. I don`t believe she was responsible for her actions due to this betrayal of her body chemistry`s fragile balance. Her putting a pistol to her head in the midst of a mental hell can hardly be called the exercise of one`s free will. The idea that all humanity`s problems are called by the misuse of our free will is a gross oversimplification. On the contrary, I am prone to want to ask God how we humans can be held responsible when our minds betray us.
In the wake of the terrible shooting tragedy at Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, reports have surfaced that the shooter, Larry Gene Ashbrook, was under a doctor`s care and taking Prozac for paranoid-schizophrenia. If Mr. Ashbrook was suffering from this terrible disease and had failed to maintain his dosage intake, we may be able to determine that he was acting on a delusion or a series of delusions precipitated by his illness. Certainly any explanation offered for this man`s horrific actions do not lessen the sense of profound grief and loss that all of the victims` families continue to feel. Yet saying that this was the work of Satan or that it was simply a misuse of a man`s "free will" does not do justice to the mystery of our incredibly complex human minds.
Life does seem to hammer some people in merciless ways. Sometimes the only appropriate response is fully to feel our grief and pain without having to endure a misguided guilt for being fully human. In those hours and days of helplessness, we should feel the freedom to express our honest feelings with God, instead of having to contrive a posture of false piety and positive emotions. There is a measure of comfort in the most difficult of times when we remember that we are loved by the Lord wherever we are and however we feel.
