Searching for God # 48

 Having struggled with letting go of the dogmatic traditional exegesis of the Original Sin, I have also to acknowledge another struggle, this time with one of the church’s unshakeable, immutable, and perfectly envisioned foundations, the sanctity of life.

In principle, who could fundamentally disagree, oppose or even contest the notion that life, with all of its beauty and confounding turbulences, is not worth herculean efforts to protect, preserve, enhance and explore its limitless opportunities and challenges. Whether, for Christians, considered a gift of God, and thereby sacred, or for others, a high value to uphold, like all other ‘absolutes,’ it seems to beg a more nuanced, less dogmatic, and more serious and critical examination.

Why?

I have struggled, as previously noted, with the male suicides in my community, by men whose character, reputation, sensitivity and sensibility seemed not even remotely deserving of being written off as medically ill, criminally insane, or even psychologically unbalanced. All lay terms, I acknowledge, and certainly, without professional qualifications and certifications, I have no legitimacy to make such a statement when all around me, only the word of the clinical experts, the psychiatrists, almost exclusively, have rendered a ‘medical judgement’ with which the law and society have concurred, mostly without serious debate.

Notwithstanding the recent ‘Medical Assistance In Dying legislation in some jurisdictions, and the rigorous criteria that more than one professional must concur, I am proposing that we look again, even from the perspective of ‘searching for God’ at this question. There are several foundational, yet still potential and unsubstantiated by the professional or the ecclesial communities, thoughts that have led to this both bold and timid place of probing.

We have created a society, especially the West, in which the individual has become a functional ‘thing’. It is not merely Margaret Atwood who can legitimately claim, following her heroic rise to fame and public ‘adulation,’ that she has become a thing. Funneled into careers that bring with them extremely high demands on the human brain, psyche and intellect, many of them designed with highly ulterior motives, millions of men and women, many of them highly educated, and even more highly sensitive and nuanced in their perceptions and observations and critical judgements of many of the tasks for which they have trained, have taken their own lives.

Stretching individuals to a ‘breaking point’ without regard either to where or why that breaking point has shown its face, the culture could not give a fig about that individual. Of course, there are family cries of despair, loss and shock, even guilt and shame that someone whom they love, found it necessary to terminate their life.

And, the public, too, has and does repeat its own shock, shame and degrees of guilt and confusion that anyone of their acquaintance, or even a stranger, would consider that s/he has been placed in a situation from which there seemed to be no other option but self-inflicted death.

Men and women returning from military combat with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, have, even after months or years of professional therapy, also found it necessary to take their own lives. And yet we continue to perpetuate our ‘love of war’ as another instrument in our insatiable quest for power, control, dominance, superiority and national security and what we persistently and hubristically, and with concurrent impunity, call, ‘national pride, honour and reputation and empire.’

The difference between national security and ‘national honour and reputation,’ however has become so blurred that, for many the two are indistinguishable. We pay little if any attention to the paradox that those most trained in military strategy and tactics, especially among the hierarchy, are those most opposed to the commencement of a military campaign. The (Colin) Powell doctrine, ‘you only can be permitted to start a war provided you have a preplanned and pre-conceived exit strategy’ seems to have suffered its own demise through the hands and policies of Putin, Netanyahu and trump.

Let’s look further at how we have, and increasingly are further deepening the angst, stress, anxiety, frustration and hopelessness of millions of people in so many jurisdictions. We strip environmental regulations away from polluting corporations, so that they can generate more profit and dividends for their share holders. We reduce corporate and income taxes on the very rich for a similar reason, to mollify and pander to the rich, given the faux-glory that money, fame and social insider-ship’ have become the near-religious idol of the very wealthy. We defund social programs, a process that did not start with the latest American administration. After all, from the point of view of ‘fiscally responsible politicians’ how can, for example, a government afford to provide free transportation to those who have neither a vehicle to drive or have a handicap that excludes them from driving, as the former Harris government did when it withdrew funding for Wheel-trans in Toronto shortly after winning its election? Sarcasm notwithstanding, that kind of gutting of social policy is not merely short-sighted and recriminatory, it sucks hope out of the system, not only for those directly deprived, but for all the rest who can understand the fundamental need.

Human rights, the prized by-word of the establishment, comprises much more than whether those in power comply with some specific law. Human rights commit both those writing the legislation and those beyond those charged with enforcement, but a culture generally, to grapple with its responsibility for ensuring that each jurisdiction respect, honours and dignifies everyone. And we are eons away from anything that might resemble that kind of aspiration. Indeed, we are drifting quickly backwards from that. Just this week, the American president told a former Somali refugee, now a member of the United States Congress that she should go back to her home country and was not welcome in America.

From a religious perspective, we have inherited a perspective on ‘sin’ that is private, personal and highly reductionistic, without in any way providing the necessary patience, or the tools or the training for the necessary investigations of the frequency and the manner and methods by which very injured people invariably inflict serious physical, emotional, financial injuries on even those they aspire to care for any love. We have also ‘jiggered’ an economy based on the success/failure quotients of individuals based on the ‘shoulders’ of the individual ego. If the ego is strong enough, then the person ‘succeeds’ while if the ego is weak, naturally the person fails.

Conventional wisdom entraps every single person between the two book-ends of private sin and personal ego as the fulcrums around which each human life is supposed to roll. And, accompanying both of those book-ends, there are many institutional edifices charged with enforcing both of those ‘shares’..private sin and personal ego.

Public debate rarely if ever even wonders about how much ‘pressure’ any single individual can sustain. And the question is absurd, given the capitalist, competitive and zero-sum game that has overtaken both politics and governance, and apparently also many ecclesial institutions. In the United States, the derision under which all forms of therapy struggle, in part has emerged from the Paul Szasz’s work:

From academic.oup.com, in a piece entitled ‘Szasz, suicide and medical ethics, by George J. Annas, January 2019,  we read:

Szasz (a trained professional and practicing psychiatrist) objected to the medicalization of suicide, the legalization  of suicide prevention, and especially the coercive role of psychiatry in this realm. He declared that by medicalizing suicide, we banish the subject from discussion.  What is meant by acceptable suicide and unacceptable ‘suicide’? Who has a right to commit suicide? How does suicide implicate freedom? Does it reflect abortion jurisprudence? How do psychiatrists become suicide’s gatekeepers? Current phenomena (e.g., new physician-assisted suicide legislation) illuminate these and other issues (e.g. euthanasia, informed consent, informed refusal, the ‘right to die’) all suggesting how Szasz would react to each. Suicide is legal, but is almost always considered a result of mental illness. Courts approve psychiatrists who want to commit ‘suicidal’ patients involuntarily. Granting physicians prospective legal immunity for prescribing lethal drugs is, at best, a strange and tangential reaction to our inability to discuss suicide (and dying) rationally. Szasz got it right. (https.//doi.org/10.1093/n\med/97801098813491.003.0006, pages 55-56)

And from madinamerica.com, a website whose subtitle is: Science, psychiatry and Social Justice, in a piece by  Keith Hoeller PhD,  September 17,  2022 entitled, “Thomas Szasz Versus the Mental Health Movement,” we read:

Szasz believed that the concept of ‘mental illness’ was a metaphor that became literalized due to the category error of applying disease to social moral and political behavior. The people who are labelled mentally ill do not in fact have not anything demonstrably wrong with their bodies or brains, and the standards from which they differ from others are not biological, but social norms.

From the same article, quoting from another of the author’s writing, ‘No Proof Mental Illness Rooted in Biology,’ we read: Psychiatrists have yet to conclusively prove that a single mental illness has a biological or physical cause, or a genetic origin. Psychiatry has yet to develop a single test that can determine that an individual actually has a particular mental illness. Indee, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders uses behavior, not physical symptoms to diagnose mental illness, and it lacks both scientific reliability and validity…..

As Szasz stated for many decades, ‘mental illness’ is the ideology used to justify a myriad of crimes against humanity in which people who have been afforded due process and convicted in court of law for specific offense and imprisoned for years, tortured against their will, and released only if they agreed to continue to take ‘chemical straightjackets’ once they are out.

Szasz believed that ‘mental illness’ was not possible, that ‘minds’ cannot be diseased only bodies can. If medicine was to discover that some constellation of symptoms were to be caused by bodily disease, then this would be added to our known compendium; it would no longer be treated by psychiatrists, but by regular doctors.

What we do not understand, and for which we have no empirical explanation, we, historically, assign a god or goddess or, as James Hillman does, an archetype which might ‘have us’ in its grip, and which may be having us reenact a narrative for which today’s cultural norms are both ill-prepared and quite ready to assign some ‘label’…..and for Hillman, those labels have been clustered under the broad title, “abnormal psychology’. Hillman argues that such academic developments are, at least in part, designed to enhance the profession of psychology. Prescribing pharmaceuticals as part of the treatment ‘naturally’ follows.

In a world awash with science, empiricism, positivism, and STEM educational and training models, in order to feed the economic needs of a capitalist, corporate culture and ethos, it hardly seems surprising that the ‘mental health field’ is exploding measured both on ‘aberrant behaviour’ as well as more and more labels and interventions to subdue, medicate, mediate and tolerate such ‘abnornal behaviour.’

As complicity in operating within the norms of the North American culture, the established churches have, for the most part, adopted the ‘mental illness’ model of perceiving and regarding individuals, both laity and clergy.

And suicide, for both social and theological reasons, qualifies in the church as an especially noxious, nefarious and sinful act, with which and from which the sole response is to ‘disown’ both the act and the perpetrator.

What if, as a consequence, or at least a corollary, to the ‘sanctity of life’ theology and the application of that dogma to ‘abortion,’ suicide has become victim to a distaste, detachment, and disavowal of acceptable  norms within ecclesial circles? And what if the church, and ensuing from that organ, millions of devout and even skeptical adherents learned and were indoctrinated into such a framework of normalcy, now whether overtly or imperceptibly, haloed by God, as another of the legitimate applications of the ‘sanctity of life’ foundations, and perhaps may, or already are foundering on the shoals of that underwater escarpment?

And what if, for hypothetical purposes at least, and for serious consideration at best, we were to listen to some of the words of James Hillman in his elucidation of the notion of the human soul, that ‘aspect’ of the human individual the churches have both laid claim to and have attempted to direct it to an everlasting life in heaven for the ‘saved’?

Taking a soul history means capturing emotions, fantasies, and images by entering the game and dreaming the myth along with the patient. Taking a souls history mean becoming part of the other person’s fate. Where a case history presents a sequence of facts leading to diagnosis, soul history shows rather a concentric helter-skelter pointing always beyond itself. Its facts are symbols and paradoxes….Soul history emerges as one shed case history, or in other words, as one dies to the world as an arena of projection. Soul history is a living obituary, recording life from the point of view of death, giving the uniqueness of a person sub specie aeternitatis. As one builds one’s death, so one writes one’s own obituary in one’s soul history. Case history classifies death by car crash differently from death by overdose of sleeping tablets. Death from disease, death from accident, and from sujicide are called different kinds of death—and so they are, from the outside. Even the more sophisticated classifications (unmeditated, premeditated, and submeditated death) fail to give credit to the involvement of the psyche in every death. These categories do not fully recognize that the soul is always meditating death. In Freud’s sense, Thanatos is ever present: the soul needs death and death resides in the soul permanently. (James Hillman, suicide and the soul, pps. 62-63)

“Building one’s death” seems like a phrase that would be considered heretical even to contemplate, let alone to utter within the confines of a church sanctuary. And yet, what if perhaps unconsciously, we are in some unknown and unmapped ways, envisioning a needed image of our own death, and that energy is so potent, individually and so reprehensible theologically and thereby ethically and morally, that our ego’s and our spirit are stripped of our dark ecentricities, our demons, our personal underworld, which, for Hillman, is the realm of the soul. For Hillman, spirit looks skyward, aspires to heaven, and risks being in danger of detaching from the soul.

Injecting ‘soul’ into the dialogue, discussion and reflection of theological issues, from an archetypal psychological perspective, may to some seem both frivolous and heretical, even an apostasy. Men and woman have been hanged for being heretics and for espousing apostacies……until they weren’t’ either heresies or apostasies.

………….

Next, we will attempt to look at some of the ways suicide might be perceived, assessed and still remain within the domain of Christian theology. And we will do so at our own risk!