The Purpose Driven Death

While watching NCAA Final Four basketball last night, where the trivial is elevated to the near ultimate, I checked Twitter and read that Rick Warren's son had committed suicide. Warren, the Southern California pastor at Saddleback Church and author of the best-selling book The Purpose Driven Life  is a godly and good man. He is not a tyrant who acts the devil when out of the pulpit.

This is no Freudian-like renunciation of a son to a father, Oedipus-complex turned inward rather than outward.  

It is said that into every life a little rain must fall. But, the storm of suicide of a son has tsunami-like character. A torrent of grief from the spigot of sorrow that will never cease. It can't be drunk and drained, for to try to do so one would drown.

I am well-acquainted with the temptation of suicide. At 17, I had a repeating dream that was as on replay. Me dying by going headfirst through a car windshield. An existential accident illustrating the splintering of hope into a thousand fragments. I was convinced that my number was coming up next at the deli counter of death. I was a former high school basketball player with big dreams whose knee collapsed in my faltering attempts to be an athletic Atlas. My knee, searing in constant pain, joined in a duet, to a mind that could not counter the pain and reject it and return to sender. Instead the knee acted as a spike, a thorn. I had to take it. Like getting dunked on, over and over again. Suicide seemed like the only way out. Blow the damn court into rubble.     

One thought I could not shake was that life seemed purposeful, for the great pain was an indication of this. If life was meaningless, it would seem that my brief dandelion-like yellow flower would soon turn gray and blow and scatter into the winds of meaningless. In the song Stubborn Love by Mumford and Sons there is a line that sings, "It is better to feel pain than nothing at all." 

I really wondered why if nothing was my destiny, why did it feel like life was something? Suicide seemed to me to be a statement of purpose, not purposelessness. Where pain pins a man to the mat versus letting him die by degrees of apathy. A violent choking rather than a slow asphyxiation. The very act was life affirming, not in consequence, but in meaning gone tragically astray.

I had a supernatural revelation where God showed me that I would be me forever. For ever. That  made me rethink whether I wanted to usher in eternity which I deduced would be much more complex than whatever this life was. A beginning going badly rather than a tragic ending. That experience sustained and sustains me.

My knee and head still consistently ache for the Atlas in me still tries to bear the burdens of the world at times. I look forward to the day where God calls me home and I can finally put the world down. I recommend this book by Os Guinness "Long Journey Home: A Guide to Your Search for the Meaning of Life."