Today (10 September) is World Suicide Prevention Day and on Tuesday the Christian church will celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Today’s post incorporates a personal reflection by writer Adrian Scott, as we try to bind these troubling stories together.
Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash
Adrian’s memories of his Mother touch on both suicide and the cross of Christ. He writes of a day that went down in family legend, on pilgrimage with her in Jerusalem in 1989:
“We crossed the threshold of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, having wound our way through the ancient market streets of the Via Dolorossa, way of sorrows.
The ornate church sits over the site where, tradition holds, Jesus died. Visitors climb a stairway to an altar and kneel to place their hand in the socket that held the cross; then descend to the slab where Christ’s body was laid and the tomb from which, Christians believe, he rose.
My Mother beckoned to me urgently and whispered, gesturing, distressed, “What is this?” I told her it was the most sacred church in Christendom, the site of Calvary according to St Helena (mother of Emperor Constantine).
My Mother, however, was unimpressed: “I don’t like this, I don’t like it at all!’” stomping out into the sunlit courtyard.
I dutifully trotted after and she exploded:
“‘There is a green hill far away without a city wall’! Where? It’s not good enough, I’m going shopping”.
She had expected three crosses on a hill, the Easter card scene, and to take home a stone from the earth.”
For Adrian, the themes of the Holy Cross and suicide prevention coalesce in his mother. She was a woman of strong opinions and character, who shockingly succumbed to depression after his father died and ended up addicted to tranquilisers.
She tried to take her own life twice. Adrian, a teenager at the time, writes:
“She ended up in Middlewood Hospital, a place that has ominous connotations; a Victorian sanitorium complete with towers and rooks that reminded me of the film Psycho.”
Surprisingly, in later life, she said the three-month sojourn in the hospital was the best thing that ever happened to her. One of the most upsetting periods of Adrian’s youth was life-changing for his mother in a very different way. He reflects:
“When I had a mental health crisis seven years ago and my therapist told me this could be the best thing that ever happened to me, I remembered what happened to my mother and took heart.”
The exaltation of the cross is a paradoxical feast. Tragedy is lifted into astonishing release.
Suicide prevention is often achieved when someone intervenes to help a sufferer speak of their predicament, to keep speaking and then find help. The Samaritans are literally life savers because they offer that opportunity.
It is the silence of the suffering that is most dangerous, especially it seems, among males - suicide is the most common cause of death amongst males aged 20-49 according to Mental Health First Aid, England. It is always better to ask and not think, “They will be okay” The moment of crisis could change - could save - a life.
It was after her crisis that Adrian’s mother made her characteristically hilarious and meaningful pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
We invite you to reflect on all this if you wish, as you listen to a song by Martyn Joseph, called A Strange Way. The words of the first verse are:
Strange way to start a revolution
Strange way to get a better tan
Strange way to hold a power breakfast
Strange way show your business plan
Strange way to test if wood would splinter
Strange way to do performance art
Strange way to say, "I'll see you later"
That’s a strange way to leave behind your heart
Strange dissident of meekness
And nurse of tangled souls
And so unlike the holy
To end up full of holes
What A Strange way.