by Keith Bassham
As we were going to press, the national news media was reacting to the suicide death of actor-comedian Robin Williams. The announcement brought to the fore conversations about death, suicide, addiction, depression, spirituality, Christian faith (and its diminishment in popular culture), celebrity, and the seeming paradox of a person so devoted to laughter and sadness at the same time. Naturally, social media fairly vibrated with frenzy as any one with an opinion (regardless of quality) had a say.
One thoughtful blogger (at least from my perspective) sought to place a discussion of Mr. Williams’s decision to end his life on a landscape not so much medical but spiritual. This angered not only the devoted fans of Mr. Williams, but also those who wrestle with their own demons, both real and figurative, and insist that a suicide as a result of depression is a fit topic for conversation only in the world of science and those faithful to that view. To them the blogger seemed insensitive and ignorant. He is neither.
A person is not a mere clock that may be fixed when a gear or a spring or a bushing goes awry. To be sure, we have many parts, and when things go wrong in those parts, a surgeon, or a medicine, or a therapy can put them right. But there are other human parts, unseen and undetectable with even the most sophisticated technology, whose malfunction requires a spiritual fix. Those parts, we sometimes forget, will be around for a long, long time after our more temporal parts are laid to rest. That is part of what is meant to be created in God’s image — we have an immortality, and that means we do not rest in peace, no matter what we wish or what the grave marker says.
I have found this paragraph from C. S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory) helpful for a proper perspective:
The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.