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                                      "O Come, O Come Emmanuel,
                                          And ransom captive Israel   
                                    That mourns in lonely exile here."

Pivotal moments in human experience don't respect the seasons our calendars prompt us to observe.  The birth of a child doesn't match the "due date", interrupts our much-needed sleep , and demands a frantic drive to the hospital in the wee hours of the morning in spite of a "mandatory" morning meeting at work.  An unexpected illness lands us in the hospital and our trip to a foreign country must be cancelled.  And then there are deaths.  They never come at a "convenient" time.  They interrupt our schedules, our plans, our easy daily certainties that we unconsciously buttress with denial about our finitude. 

At no time are these pivotal moments more distressing than when they take the form of death during the Christmas season.  There are the deaths we anticipate, as when a person advanced in age and with a life well-lived behind them dies peacefully in their sleep, having made their peace and said their goodbyes .  No death is experienced only as "good," but those come closer than most. 

What I want to tell you about now is a darker and disturbing death.  A number of years ago, when I was at the beginning of my ministry, I received a call late on December 21 from a local funeral director.  A family who had no connections to any faith community was in his office.  They wanted a pastor to do the funeral for the husband and father who had committed suicide earlier that day.  Would I do the funeral and could it take place on December 24, Christmas Eve. 

I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't at first annoyed.  "Why me?  Why'd the director have to call me?  Why not someone else?  Doesn't he know that this is the worst possible time of year for me to have to do yet one more thing . . . that I'm already behind schedule and half-way to being burned out?  And such a thing!  A funeral?  On Christmas Eve?  Suicide?  Really?"  But another voice in me spoke more persuasively.  "Why not me?  Maybe there's some good reason he thought to call me.  Perhaps there's something I'm supposed to learn and might, if only I would say 'yes.'"

Even though it seemed half-crazy to do so, I agreed to do the service.  The next day I met with the family.  Before the mystery of the suicide of one they had loved so much they were nearly dumb-struck and that was a problem.  As the poet Maya Angelou accurately observes,  "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you."  So I expressed both empathy and curiosity . . . and tried to help them tell their stories.  For in telling one another our stories we begin to assemble our life's mosaic of moments into a coherent narrative.  We need our stories, for they are how we give meaning to our lives.  Without our stories we would not know who we are.  We would  not be able to navigate our days.  In fact, said another poet, Muriel Rukeyser, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

Gradually, they began to tell their stories about the man they had lost.  I learned of his life-long battle with depression, his struggles to keep his job, his self-respect, his physical and emotional health.  I observed their utter speechlessness when it came to comprehending that this man who, even though he had struggled so much and so well, would take his own life.  They remembered that he had seemed to be making headway with his struggles and even smiled more often in his last days with them.  How could he have done what he had done?  How could he have committed suicide, though they weren't yet able to use that word.  How could he have left them?

Of course, I had no answers for their questions.  None of us do.  But their questions, at that point were not really questions in search of an answer as much as they were cries of pain from the heart in search of compassion.  So I sat with them and joined them in their pain as best I could.

Eventually, I shared with them some of the things we do know about persons who take their own lives.  For example, I told them that persons who end their lives can become so immersed in the terrible pain  they are feeling and trying to manage, that a sort of  "tunnel vision"  can set in, causing the person to lose their usual sense of perspective.  At such times the person may no longer be able to focus on the things they normally would have remembered, like the consequences to others of their actions.  (For more helpful information for understanding and mourning a loss through suicide, see "Some Thoughts About Suicide To Help You And Your Children Through This Difficult Time")

As useful as that information is, it will become much more useful later on after the initial shock has diminished.  So in my meeting with the family, I rather quickly moved back to the telling of other, larger stories. 

A problem cannot be solved from within itself.  One must go outside of the problem to find other resources.  That's what "thinking outside the box" is all about.  (As an example, recall the familiar puzzle that features a square grid of nine dots that you see printed on the paper place mats in some restaurants.  The challenge is to connect all nine dots with three straight lines, never lifting the pencil from the paper.  Hint:  You have to go very far outside that grid/box in order to do so!)

So I began to tell them some stories our ancestors told themselves to make sense of their encounters with both tragedy and the Transcendent . . . stories they eventually wrote down in that compendium we know as The Bible.  These are some of the larger stories that certain communities tell themselves.  When we place our smaller stories alongside these larger ones, new meanings can eventually surface, and along with them some solace.

I told them the story of Saul's death by suicide (I Chronicles 10:3-4).  "The battle went sore against him" says the King James Translation.  Sore against him just as the battle with depression had gone against the father and husband who took his own life.  Appreciating somewhat the pain such a person had to have been in can make their actions a little bit more understandable.  Not a lot, but a useful, little bit.

And then I told them some of the Christmas story . . . not the Santa Claus version which, apart from the "jolly old elf's" generosity, is about as far from Christian theology as you can get, what with his record-keeping and strong bias only toward the "good" little boys and girls.  I told them that the Christ of God came precisely to those whom others rejected . . . to those who were lost, hungry, needful and hurting.  I reminded them that the meaning of the season is that God is not far off, but here with us . . . and that God weeps with us when we weep.  I suggested that God was with the father and husband, even in his last moments and even now . . . just as God was with us at that very moment.  That's what Christmas is really about.  It's a larger story to help us make sense of our smaller ones.
Christmas Eve day came all-too-soon and the funeral took place.  All of us shed tears, felt our helplessness, wrestled with so many conflicting feelings.  And we did so not in shame-filled isolation nor in a vacuum of meaning, but in the trusting hope that we are ultimately not alone . . . and that beyond the furthest reach of our imaginings, was One who moves within and between us, making all things new.

The journey through the loss of a loved one by their own hand is very long, recursive, and complicated . . . and it was a blue Christmas of the most profound sort for that family.  But it was also one, I think, tinged with just the faintest amount of pink light that one sometimes sees just before dawn breaks.  The Christmas story reminds us of that light.