"Descended Into Hell" - One Take on World Suicide Prevention Day
It is World Suicide Prevention Day. And I always wonder about whether it makes any difference. It seems so disembodied, like a campaign slogan. Slogans like Stay and Ask for Help just seem to miss the point.
My skepticism comes from my own experience of teetering toward suicide. During that hard, hard time, one of the hardest parts was the isolation, and the fear of breaking that isolation, of talking about it.
But this year’s approach does speak to my experience. You are not alone.
Once I managed to pull back from the precipice, I determined to break my silence. That accounts for the raw self-disclosure of Prozac Monologues, notwithstanding the humor that gave me a sliver of protection.
Anyway, related to all that, I subscribe to a newsletter that sends me daily quotes from Frederick Buechner, a preacher and novelist who has a different take on things theological. Today’s quote is timely for World Suicide Day.
Descended into Hell, a phrase from one of the creeds, describes that dark time for me. Depressive himself, I wonder if Buechner wrote this out of his own experience.
...whichever side of the grave their Hell happens to be on
Something to hold onto. You are not alone. So I quote the passage here:
Descent into Hell
THERE IS AN obscure passage in the First Epistle of Peter where the old saint writes that after the crucifixion, Jesus went and preached to "the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey" (1 Peter 3:19-20) and it's not altogether clear just what spirits he had in mind. Later on, however, he is not obscure at all. "The gospel was preached even to the dead," he says, "that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God" (1 Peter 4:5-6).
"He descended into Hell," is the way the Apostles' Creed puts it, of course. It has an almost blasphemous thud to it, sandwiched there between the muffled drums of "was crucified, dead, and buried" and the trumpet blast of "the third day he rose again from the dead." Christ of all people, in Hell of all places! It strains the imagination to picture it, the Light of the World making his way through the terrible dark to save whatever ones he can. Yet in view of what he'd seen of the world during his last few days in the thick of it, maybe the transition wasn't as hard as you might think.
The fancifulness of the picture gives way to what seems, the more you turn it over in your mind, the inevitability of it. Of course that is where he would have gone. Of course that is what he would have done. Christ is always descending and redescending into Hell.
He is talking not just to other people when he says you must be prepared to forgive not seven times but seventy times seven, and "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden" is spoken to all, whatever they've done or left undone, whichever side of the grave their Hell happens to be on.
-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark