Before I am going to going to talk about Job I need to do a little bit of defining. Suicidality is now a technical term: it means in effect, that you have contemplated suicide. Questions about suicide are routine at work, and part of outcome scales for depression, and this is taken as a proxy measure for what we are interested in, which is the death rate from suicide in people with depression, and reducing it.
The classic teaching of the church is that suicide is wrong. This is from one of the two great catechisms of the reformed church, the Heidelberg catechism.
What is God’s will for you in the sixth commandment?I am not to belittle, hate, insult, or kill my neighbor — not by my thoughts, my words, my look or gesture, and certainly not by actual deeds — and I am not to be party to this in others; rather, I am to put away all desire for revenge.
I am not to harm or recklessly endanger myself either. Prevention of murder is also why
government is armed with the sword.
The Romans, in their casuistic scholarly manner, expand on things much further.This is from the Catholic catechism.
Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.
Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.
If suicide is committed with the intention of setting an example, especially to the young, it also takes on the gravity of scandal. Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law.
Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.
We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.
Now, Job did not suicide, but he was in pain and despair. The Bible teaches us that our emotions are legitimate, as are our thoughts: one can think, but one cannot plan. Job is expressing a hatred for what he has become.
If you gave him the Hamilton Depression Scale
, you would note that he wishes he was dead. and call this suicidiality (defined as scoring over two on item three of the scale, which is a working definition in many clinical trials) and miss the point.
Despair is not suicide.
After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. And Job said:
“Let the day perish on which I was born,
and the night that said,
‘A man is conceived.’
Let that day be darkness!
May God above not seek it,
nor light shine upon it.
Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.
Let clouds dwell upon it;
let the blackness of the day terrify it.
That night—let thick darkness seize it!
Let it not rejoice among the days of the year;
let it not come into the number of the months.
Behold, let that night be barren;
let no joyful cry enter it.
Let those curse it who curse the day,
who are ready to rouse up Leviathan.
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it hope for light, but have none,
nor see the eyelids of the morning,
because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb,
nor hide trouble from my eyes.“Why did I not die at birth,
come out from the womb and expire?
Why did the knees receive me?
Or why the breasts, that I should nurse?
For then I would have lain down and been quiet;
I would have slept; then I would have been at rest,
with kings and counselors of the earth
who rebuilt ruins for themselves,
or with princes who had gold,
who filled their houses with silver.
Or why was I not as a hidden stillborn child,
as infants who never see the light?
There the wicked cease from troubling,
and there the weary are at rest.
There the prisoners are at ease together;
they hear not the voice of the taskmaster.
The small and the great are there,
and the slave is free from his master.“Why is light given to him who is in misery,
and life to the bitter in soul,
who long for death, but it comes not,
and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
who rejoice exceedingly
and are glad when they find the grave?
Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,
whom God has hedged in?
For my sighing comes instead of my bread,
and my groanings are poured out like water.
For the thing that I fear comes upon me,
and what I dread befalls me.
I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;
I have no rest, but trouble comes.”(Job 3 ESV)
Job is in deep pain. He is injured. He is on a dung heap, scraping his ulcers with a broken pot. His wife has told him to curse God and die, and she is not with him.
Saying to him that one should not think these things, is at least insensitive, and more likely to be stupid. Sitting with him would be hard, hearing this more so.
We believe that all scripture is inspired by God, and useful for teaching, correction and training in righteousness. Job therefore, is part of our textbook. One many of us avoid. We do not want to go near the depths of these emotions, for we know where our demons lie, and despair is one of them.
But the thought is not the act. Job teaches us that virtue will not always end in happiness, less so prosperity.
When we look at the most recent events in the world, the correct response is indeed anger, rage, horror. Seventy years after the Nazi scum killed Jews, Catholics and Protestants at an industrial rate, we have the one bunch who reliably allied with them killing, and boasting of it.
The human piece of excrement appearing in the video of the (not entirely proven I gather, but extremely probable) execution of the American journalist James Foley spoke with a strong British accent and is being identified as I write. From London, apparently. Finally, Londonistan is introduced to the world. In HD execution video.
One wonders how many of them are now learning their ropes – or rather their swords, knifes and firearms – in the quasi-statual ISIS territory, a reality that must at all costs not be allowed to consolidate into an established State.
To those of us who have always said that “inclusiveness” of “diversity” is a dream, and the only possible inclusiveness can only be the including of those who want to be like us, the recent events are no surprise at all. Rather, they are the obvious result of such an obviously stupid behaviour, that it can only be dreamt of by brainless liberals who hate Christ and Western Civilisation.
It is, certainly, possible to integrate people coming from outside. Italy – a country that has invaded, or has been invaded by, almost everyone else – always did it beautifully. But it generally did so by insisting on – and favouring the ingress on those inclined to – the assimilation of the newcomers to the ways of thinking and living of the locals. Wisely, more recently the Italian government encouraged for decades the immigration from the Philipines or the Green Cap (the latter mainly black; Italians aren’t racists) as the strong Catholicism and the limited language barrier would make it natural for them to want to become like us. It was only with the growing Socialist (atheist and anti-Catholic) influence that a limited door was open to the citizenship of non-Catholic Arabs from the Maghreb; and even they had to be rose water Muslims to accept to live in a Country that did not accept veiled women, and did not give any possibility to raise a family of seven children at taxpayer’s cost whilst plotting terrorist attacks.
Britain did. It welcomed the many Abu Hamsas – with or without the hook – and told them they did not need to make any effort to become like us, celebrating an inclusiveness and tolerance with which the people object of the celebration did not agree in the least.
Several decades later Mohammed is the most frequent name given to boys, and a number of violent nutcases – around four hundred very probably already abroad, which allows to presume a reservoir of several thousand “ripening” in the next years – are preparing themselves for a “war” that to them is indistinguishable from massacre.
Mundabor may talk about rose-water Muslims, but we should not wear rose-tinted glasses. There is gross evil in this world, and it affects those of Christ deliberately: our brothers and sisters are killed, raped and tortured as I write. We can rage against this new Shoah, and the relative impotence of the current technocrats who think leadership is management, and that the right words will appease all.
But in this we need to listen to Job. Even in his despair, his arguing with God, his wish that he was at peace, his longing for the surcease of death he did not lose his faith with God. His friends did not feed him full of SSRIs, nor (and worse) euthanize him.
Emotions are not acts. Our faith, praise God, does not demand that we are happy all the time, but instead that we are human.
.