Your Astonishing Light
National Suicide Prevention Month à la Sanctuary Mental Health
I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness
the astonishing light of your own being.
Hafiz of Shiraz
Trigger warning: suicide. Reader, please be advised.
If you’ve followed my work for long enough, you know that much of it centers around mental health. I’ve worked with my friends at To Write Love On Her Arms since I lost my dad to suicide in 2011, writing songs, authoring blogs, and partnering with them for annual campaigns.
Heart Support—“mental health for music fans”—is another great resource I’ve gotten to partner with, as well as Hope For The Day.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know the folks at Sanctuary Mental Health—an organization equipping churches and faith communities to support mental health and well-being. I first discovered them through Hillary McBride’s Holy/Hurt Podcast, and have appreciated the way they collaborate with theologians, mental health professionals, and people with lived experience of mental health challenges to offer solid resources to folks who—at least when I was starting out as a performer/advocate—often lamented the lack thereof.
I wrote what follows for them. A truncated version is live, now, on their website, where you can get a better feel for all that they do and whom / how they serve in faith-spaces, and is available to read or listen to in full, here.
Norm MacDonald has a comedy sketch in which he says, “People [die by] suicide and other people go, ‘I don’t understand why…’ and I go, ‘You don’t?’ What, do you live in a cotton-candy house or something? You don’t know about life? How it only disappoints and gets worse and worse until it ends in a catastrophe?”
Yes—as comedians do—he’s making an “off limits” joke, but before offense sets in, consider: laughter is medicine, and maybe particularly for those most acquainted with the suffering at its brunt... especially if their suffering is off-limits in common discourse.
It’s why I love dead-dad jokes so much. I mean, I love them. A good, *“Man, sure wish I could argue with my dad…”*when a friend is complaining about his father’s politics, or a solid, “I accept your apology,” when someone tells me how sorry they are for my loss. It’s pure gold. Kinda mean? Maybe, but… glittering.
I’m a missionary/pastor’s kid (shout out MPKs everywhere) who lost my dad to suicide when I was twenty-one years old. His official diagnosis was cyclothymia—a chronic mood disorder characterized by alternating periods of mania and depression—which he’d struggled with for most of his adult life. I didn’t know what was going on as a kid: only that every five years or so, my dad would sink into eighteen months’ worth of hell, and once described his antidepressants as “life-saving, second to Jesus.”
Back then, “mental health” was an even squigglier conversation in church communities than it is now, and even the fact that he had to take medication for what some considered his lack of faith fell under scrutiny. Therapy was suspect—often “worldly,” even. And death by suicide? I remember receiving a Facebook comment on my memorial letter that read, simply: “I’m sorry that your dad’s in hell, now.” After he passed, I started writing our family’s story into my poetry, and have been some kind of mental health advocate ever since. My mom wrote a book about it—Counting It Joy: The Macallister Story—to which my sister and I contributed.
I’ve been talking about this for a long time. Often, I’m not sure what else there is to say, or if saying anything could ever be more helpful than sitting quietly (or finding laughter) with a human amidst their pain.
The American Institute for Boys & Men (AIBM) reports that men are up to four times more likely to die by suicide than women. Males make up 50% of the population, but account for 80% of suicide rates. While the death rate for women is not as high, the attempt rate is two to four times that of men, and finality is low in some part due to the fact that men simply choose more lethal means of self-ending. The CDC reports that—in 2023—elderly persons 85 years and older had the highest rate of all. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death in young people aged 10-23, and of them, LGBTQIA+ youth are nearly five times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their heterosexual counterparts—a rate that increases to eight times as likely among those who come from highly rejecting families.
While reviewing statistics, a particular word caught my theological eye: AIBM suggests that “separation” is—for men—among the leading indicators of increased risk of suicide. While they’ve got the data to prove it in reference to lost relationships, I might suggest that separation—or a sense of separateness—umbrellas every demographic listed…
Which brings me back ‘round to communities of faith. I struggle to think of a way in which this leading indicator is more hammered into a person’s neural network than via the inherited theologies many of us receive[d] in the church, where separateness from the very Source of our aliveness is often doctrinally stamped and holy-fied as the primary, ontological truth of our being.
How familiar are you with Attachment Theory? It’s a psychological framework that explains how our emotional bonds (or lack thereof) with a primary caregiver in early life shapes one’s ability to form relationships throughout life. Ideally, you have a secure connection with that caregiver, a sense of inherent connectedness, which allows for curiosity and exploration, and can safely include failure, because you know that you’re safely held, and have a sturdy-enough foundation from which to begin becoming yourself in the world. If the relationship to that caregiver is *insecure—*if, say, their love for you is in question, or the threat of punishment and mistreatment ever-looms overhead, or you suffer abandonment, etc.—all sorts of problems ensue: fear, anxiety, avoidance, suppression, depression, confusion, addiction, despair...
I’m particularly interested in the way that religious and spiritual hurt affect people’s mental health, which leads me to ask: what have huge numbers of us internalized in relationship to our capital-P, capital-C Primary Caregiver? Every time I learn more about Attachment—or me in relationship to my particular styles—my first thought is rarely about my parents, but about the god concept I—and so many like me, thousands upon thousands whom I have met and cared for in clubs throughout the world—inherited: the god from whom we were inherently separate.
At this point in my life, it feels like a sandy foundation. I remember my dad telling me—on the day that I removed his guns from the house—that I was “taking away his last chance at a moment’s peace before he went to hell forever.” It’s terribly sad and—to me—makes terrible sense. “You will know a [fill in the blank] by its fruit.” The point is, it doesn’t take long for those separate-as-foundational apples [which Jesus never ate, nor had he ever heard of (Matthew Fox’s book Original Blessing is a great resource on this)] to become their own self-fulfilling prophecy toward the torments we imagine await us in the light of this insecurity… and, of course, the ways in which we pay our sense of separation forward.
It’s awfully hard to love others as you love yourself, if you’ve learned that you shouldn’t, or that it’s not safe to, or that you can’t trust what your experience of love is like, or that even God might not love you, or that even God doesn’t. Not really. Not fully. Not wholly. And, not unconditionally, however many times we use the word.
A brash question: Why wouldn’t self-ending make sense if the hell you believe you’re likely destined for is the one you’re already living? Certainly this has been the most tempting, life-destroying belief at the root of my own rumination.
I agree with the folks I learned from—”your theology matters”—and in the words of Catherine Keller, “if theology is not for you a bubbling process that helps your life materialize [here, think: ‘remain living’] differently and gladly, its propositions have lost their life. Its metaphors have become frozen and brittle. Toss your theology on the waters… It may come back—manifold.”1
I’m not saying that we don’t, or shouldn’t, or won’t experience a real sense of separation and loss in our lives. Parents leave. Relationships end. Pets die. People move. Friends drift apart. God feels far away in the dark nights we endure. My father is no longer here. I never got a chance to befriend him. 49,000+ people in the US are no longer here for the same reason, every year. Even Jesus felt abandoned by his Father, and I think that the winding love-story I have with him is rooted, primarily, in the empathetic with-ness that is his incarnational revelation. A felt sense of separation is a part of the human experience, but it is not our basis. I believe sufferers know this, somehow, with merciful clarity. In the words of Pete Rollins, “The veil is torn back to reveal… nothing! You were never separate from anything.”2 Science confirms this. Biology. Ecology. Psychology. Physics. The changing of seasons. Your umbilical chord, and your mother’s before you. (What must birth feel like, anyway? The end? Exiting a garden?) “Christ is all, and is in all.” Every time I think the story’s over, it’s just one more resurrection on the other side of what I thought was death.
I don’t know what you’re experiencing today, or what your thoughts have to say about who you are. If they’re as tyrannical as mine can be, you’re not alone. I’ve been banging that drum for years, in large part because I need to hear it as much as anyone I say it to. You. Are. Not. Alone. And if you think you are…? Well… only as alone as everyone else who thinks that, too. The mind’s the only place that thinks itself disconnected, but where things are Real, everything touches everything.
You are not some damnable thing. And I’m not damning anyone who did or does the best with what we have. I just want to say that I believe there is a truly intrinsic and gentler voice speaking a better word about the nature of you than the one you may have internalized, or the ones you’re constantly bombarded with. To hear it is to remember what has always been true more than it is to learn something new. It’s an Already, and it’s yours, and nothing can take it away.
The truth of you is a Love that Albert Einstein—in a letter written to his daughter “maybe too late to apologize”—describes as the very force and fabric of the universe, the body of you that is the body of God, which Thomas Merton beautifully describes:
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is… the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak [God’s] name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship [and daughtership, and childship]. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely… I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.3
I hope you stick around to see it. I hope our worlds learn to set aside the coloring books we’ve filled with images of God—our relationship, and our relationships to ourselves and to one another—that “make them sad,”4 and pull instead from thirstless water-wells, brimming with the delight of a woman known and seen and loved there.
I hope this point of Love becomes the foundational universal from which our churches and faith communities draw better pictures of the One Who Is from Whom We Are, in Whom we live and move and have our being.
I think it’d be good for our mental health. I think my dad would agree. (I mean I’d quote him directly, but… dude’s dead.) 😉
Levi
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If you are experiencing suicidal ideation, or if you are concerned for the safety of someone you know, it is important to seek help immediately. The following crisis lines are available 24/7:
Australia: 13 11 14 (Lifeline)
Canada:
988 (National Suicide Prevention Lifeline three-digit dialing code)
1-833-456-4566 (Crisis Services Canada)
New Zealand:
1737 (National Mental Health and Addictions Helpline)
0800-543-354 (Lifeline Aotearoa)
United Kingdom: 116 123 (Samaritans)
United States:
1-800-273-8255 (National Suicide Prevention Lifeline)
988 (National Suicide Prevention Lifeline three-digit dialing code)
If a critical situation arises, attend your nearest hospital emergency department or call your local emergency number.
If you are looking for local mental health services or information in another location or language, we encourage you to search online or reach out to your local churches and health care providers.
Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).
Peter Rollins, The Divine Magician: The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith (New York: Simon & Schuster/Howard Books, 2015).
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1972).
Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West (New York: Penguin, 2002).
Profound. Thank you for sharing your heart with us here. I wish this topic weren't so taboo; there is much to explore here. Love the dead dad jokes.