Embracing the Windstorm

By Christine M. Smith
Psalm 104:1-5,10-13
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in one of her books on death and dying, speaks about the power of embracing our greatest fears and the sculpturing marks that death leaves upon our lives:
To love means never to be afraid of the windstorms of life: Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings. I hope this [sermon] encourages people to expose themselves to these windstorms, so that at the end of their own days, they will be proud to look in the mirror and be pleased with the carvings of their own canyon. (1)

When anyone in the human family takes her or his own life, we are left with a deafening windstorm. The multitude of emotions that sweep through our hearts and spirits are fierce and brutal at one moment and hauntingly sad at another. If we are distanced bystanders, the windstorm only holds us for a moment and then flings us quickly back into life. If we are those most lovingly connected, the windstorm will leave us forever changed. Suicide is one of life's most overwhelming storms. It is mysterious beyond all our analyzing, all our searching, and all our naming. In the face of its profound message, we stand utterly vulnerable before each other and God.
The psalmist knows in an intimate way these mysterious moments of life and boldly declares God's presence in the midst of all.
You fixed the earth on its foundations,
for ever and ever it shall not be shaken . . .
In the ravines you opened up springs
Running down between the mountains,
Supplying water for all the wild beasts. . . .
From your high halls you water the mountains,
Satisfying the earth with the fruit of your works.
          Psalm 104:5, 10-11, 13 NJB
Yet in strangely contrasting images, when compared to the pastoral scenes of peace and harmony, the psalmist quietly proclaims: "appointing the winds your messengers, flames of fire your servants." Surely God's people throughout time have known God's movement in swift transforming fire and God's presence in fierce swirling wind. Sometimes fire will serve us an unknown gift, and the wind, even though a storm, will carry a message.
Suicide is shocking! We are a people who want to forget that the threads of life and death are tied at every turn, part of the same fabric, woven into the very cloth of existence. And each time we forget, death shocks us as some intruder or enemy of life. We feel in these moments that death has taken hold of us against our will. We cannot fathom any human being willfully taking hold of death. But in reality this is what happens, and their numbers increase each year, in each generation. In the face of such a message, such an act, such a choice, where is the God the psalmist praises, the creative and sustainer of all we know?
I have little to say about God's activity in the contemplation and taking of one's own life. It is a mystery I am content to leave an ultimate mystery, but I do know something about what that action does to the rest of the human community. When suicide happens, we all must speak about some of the profound questions raised, the faithful responses made, and the affirmations of faith that are renewed. We need not look outside ourselves for God's redemptive activity; rather, in the face of suicide we are called to look within us and around us to see and feel how redemption is manifest among us. For those of us who do not shield ourselves, this event leaves carvings on the canyon walls of each of us that take on a peculiar beauty and hope.

If we are able to move beyond the "whys that we will never be able to answer," let go of the "what ifs that we will never be able to know," and set free the "if onlys" that keep us locked in the past, we will clear our minds and hearts to perceive and ask the larger questions of our own lives and life itself.
How are we to respond when a 15-year-old boy walks slowly and silently behind a school building and shoots himself? How are we to cope when a brother hangs himself or a mother overdoses on too many pills? These moments feel like such an assault on life, we are paralyzed with grief. If God's redemptive activity is present and alive within these human horrors, we have a difficult time discerning it. God seems cruel in silence, powerless in the finality. If redemptive activity is only understood by us as God's capacity to control human choices, or our Creator's willingness miraculously to restore to life that which is dead, then God is painfully absent. Yet if redemptive activity involves bringing forth life from death, rebirth from letting go, and canyons of depth from terrorizing storms, then God is very much at work. Don't most of us ask deeper questions from life in the face of deaths that seem so lonely and despairing?
In the Christian community we must all ask ourselves where we have failed to nurture and sustain life for each other, and where the power of death has strangled the fire of life in the deepest recesses of our own being. The psalmist speaks God's praises and sings unceasingly the steadfastness of life's goodness, yet on another day a lament will pour forth from this same persons' heart.
"Yahweh, my God, I call for help all day; I cry out to you all night. May my prayer come to you. Hear my cries for help, for my soul is trouble." (Psalm 88:1-2, NJB).
We are so much like the psalmist. Life for us moves between a hymn of praise and a lament of despair. Life is difficult to live, and far too often we collapse into one death or another in the midst of its demands. The windstorm deaths of teenagers, alienated lovers, despairing parents, and hopeless adults violently turn us around to face life again.
When we perceive suicide to be an act of hopelessness, we turn to the question of our own faithfulness and the sureness of life itself. In those searching times we pause to ask whether or not life finds a home in us and in the places and communities where we live. As we ask these questions and seek their answers, we find that God's redemptive work happens within and among us in ways more mysterious than we can comprehend or say. These windstorm deaths often become wings of transformation and flames of rebirth for those of us who remain.
 Somewhere between the winds of death fully and clearly chosen and the fire of deaths tragically and desperately perceived, there are sandstorms that leave us with swirling challenges and beckoning glimmers of hope, political suicide that protest injustice and give witness to a new vision, self-giving deaths of middle-aged adults who firmly believe that life has run its course. These deaths, too, are oftentimes messengers and servants that we do not fully understand, and yet they are not easily dismissed. When we take every death seriously, it will always call all that we do and all that we are into question.
The psalmist stands beside us and proclaims anew God's eternal presence and asks us to embrace our Creator, one who comes to us as a spring gushing forth in the valleys, as a drink that quenches every thirst, as one who is clothed in majesty. But the psalmist's claim upon us is never that simple, for we are also charged to bless and celebrate the God who comes to us as wind and loves us as refining fire. When we plummet to the depths of what suicide really means, for a moment our simplistic answers are diminished, our religious piety is silenced, and our moral certainty is shaken. In these moments God moves in redemptive ways, calling us to throw our arms around the windstorm and let it cut grooves and holes and carvings into the very canyon walls of our souls.

(1) To Live Until We Say Good-bye, p. 155.
http://www.fiercegoodbye.com/?P=130