I attended a funeral recently — “untimely,” one might say, because the man who died did so at his own hand. There was so much about it that defied expectation, defied logic. There’s the suicide itself, of course, an act that makes sense only to the person killed, if at all. But there was more about this funeral that messed with my head… and heart, though I’d never even met the man. C. was a physician who specialized in medical ethics and the work of alleviating end-of-life-suffering without assisted suicide. So, there’s that. Plus, one of the readings struck me as particularly odd.
Many of his friends are ministers, priests, and pastors. You can rightly imagine, then, that the service was beautiful, rich, and full… full of song, text, and the wise words of people well schooled in suffering, life, and death. Yet it included what I first thought was a peculiar, even inappropriate choice of a biblical passage — that one from Ecclesiastes, which most of us can recite, if not by heart, then by sheer logic,… or thanks to that song by the Byrds: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die…” Sitting quietly in the pew, I thought, “Really?!” For this of all things, it was not the time! Not the time for a 52 year old man of extraordinary gifts and compassion, four children and a mother to survive him,… and dead not by disease or a tragic accident but only because he made it so.
The logic of the passage is almost numbingly precise, each line a couplet of opposites: to plant, to pluck up; to kill, to heal; to break down, to build up; and so on… until — and this really set me back, threw a wrench in the gears — “a time to seek, and a time to lose.” To lose?! Surely it should be “to find.” I guess I just expected “find” to follow “seek.” You know, “Seek and you shall find” — a favorite Christian passage. Yet the passage didn’t say “to find.” It said the opposite, “to lose.” From the lectern, the reader just kept on as the text resumed its predictable logic: a time to keep, to throw away; to tear, to sew; to be silent, to speak…
I’ve heard or read that text more times than I can count, yet I’d never noticed this, what sounded at the time like a striking aberration. When I got home, I checked it out in its original Hebrew. Even more striking, “to destroy” may be a better translation than “to lose” given the particular grammatical form of that verb. Think on it some more, and it makes a strange sort of sense. As wise persons have frequently observed, sometimes it is in the giving that we get, in the losing that we find. Then this, admittedly awful thought: Maybe sometimes, the opposite of earnestly looking for something (even meaning or life itself) is to undo it altogether… and there’s a time for both. I wonder, did Jesus have this passage in mind when he advised “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”?… as most translations read. Again, a more grammatically accurate translation of Jesus’ saying (this time from Greek) is actually not “lose” but “destroy, ruin, kill.”
Finally, in light of suicide though, that seems like too much — too devastating, too awful. For those of us who survive C., surely for his closest friends and family, for anyone who loves a person who killed himself, we cannot agree. We cannot see the sense in that. And I suppose that’s the way it should be. We the living, who choose it every day and seek to have it as along as is physically possible, cannot and should not completely understand what makes a person kill herself. Nevertheless, nestled in what may be the most clearly logical passage in the Bible, there is space even for this. Its context suggests that even for someone who felt that no one could possibly understand, there is understanding. Those of us who are left are left chastened, then, challenged to accept with sympathy, compassion, and forgiveness that there may actually be reason enough to some deeply suffering soul where it would seem to the rest of us that there is none. Maybe there is both a time for what is concretely logical, and a time for devastating wonder.
