Suicide

Suicide has been on the rise again, world over. The country of Japan, where I live, has a rather long tradition of making it a heroic act and the suicide rate here is through the roof. Despite government measures to reduce the numbers, they yet grow. In 2007, nearly 100 people a day (33,000 people a year!!) committed suicide – a 3 percent rise from the year previous.
Last month some of our YWAM friends and a few missionaries went to the famous suicide forest at the bottom of Mt. Fuji to pray over the place and cast out demons. It is rumored to be a dark place, where the roads and paths change, compasses don’t work and cellphones go dead, a place where the bones of the dead literally cover the floor as 300+ people a year go there to end their lives. Some stories of the place say that volunteers stand around the roped off forest to dissuade potential accidents and that if you wish to venture forward they require you tie a rope around your waste before you go inside.

My friend found nothing of this. He said it was a beautiful forest and the paths were very clean and the trees as beautiful as he had ever seen. So much for myth. But, stories like this entice the gothic minds of would-be suiciders and continue to bring several a year into the woods. Its like Blair Witch or something.

Why, am I writing on this dark subject? Well, the truth is, suicide does tempt some of us. Many in fact. What teenager hasn’t thought about it, particularly those artistically inclined? It is a lie of Satan from the darkest depths of hell itself that says suicide is an escape. It is not; it is a prison. Here in Japan, it is not even seen as a sin (there are no “sins” here, only crimes against society).  As for Christianity, particularly within the Catholic tradition, it is viewed as the ultimate sin – one of the few unforgivable ones. Why is it so? Let me quote G.K. Chesterton here:

“Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings; it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning … there is a meaning in the burying the suicide apart [from those who die other ways]. The man’s crime is different from other crimes – for it makes even crimes impossible.

“About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some freethinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. …The martyr dies that something else may live. The suicide is a destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy p.65)

I pray this has helped if you have been tempted by this lie. It is of Satan, who was a murder from the beginning.

Addendum.
Recently someone I know apparently committed suicide. We don’t know what happened really. It looks that way. She was not well. She was manic-depressive and possibly even a bit psychotic. She was a believer in Christ when she was healthy and when she was off her medication she saw horrific things.
I think she thought she was doing what was “right” when she did what she did to herself and went out saying (on Facebook) “Thank you God for everything.”
I do not know what happened, but I know I have hope. God is good, He loves best and He is a righteous and merciful judge. If angels and demons cannot separate us from the love of Christ, then certainly mental illness cannot.

On the other hand, if you can rationally understand this argument, then you probably do not have any excuse and should therefore kick the devil right where it hurts if you are ever tempted by suicide. (It hurts him when you put your faith in Christ, laugh in his face and quote scripture to him.)