Dear Pastor

(trigger warning: suicidal ideation)

Dear Pastor,

Last Christmas you asked how my time at university was going. I didn’t feel safe giving an honest answer then. But now—a couple months later—I’ve decided we would both benefit from the truth.

In the spring of my freshman year I stopped doing schoolwork, then stopped attending classes. I’d open an assignment only to be filled with such dread of failure I couldn’t bring myself to start it. I would put on my coat to go to class, only to be overcome with fear and instead curl up in the fetal position on the beanbag in the living room of my dorm apartment, convinced that if I just lay still enough nothing bad that happened could be my fault. Eventually, I stopped getting out of bed altogether. After failing all my classes I went home and spent most of last summer on an armchair in my bedroom, trying to be absolutely still for as much of the time as possible.

Friends and therapy roused me from my stupor. I went back to school with a brand new attitude and a color-coded schedule. I got off of academic probation and passed most of my classes, even if I did almost hang myself over Thanksgiving break while my roommate was out of town. When you asked me at Christmas how I was doing, I was a little optimistic.

Now it’s February and here in Chicago we’re just coming out of a cold snap. A couple weeks back it dropped below -20 degrees at night. I had planned to get drunk and then go drown myself in Lake Michigan. I was hoping to pass out from hypothermia, die in peace. Suicide was the natural continuation of my self-negation. First you lie very still, and when that doesn’t make you safe, you try killing yourself.

In the end though, it was a lot easier to just keep drinking rather than take the long, cold walk to the lake. The next morning I started writing this letter.

I’ve been thinking recently about Joseph Hawley II—Jonathan Edwards’s uncle—who slit his throat at the height of the First Great Awakening. Since Edwards is your favorite theologian, you probably already know this story. Edwards writes in his “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God” that Hawley had been “a gentleman of more than common understanding, of strict morals, religious in his behaviour.” But since the beginning of the great revival he had “been exceedingly concerned about the state of his soul.” And out of fear of Hell, he killed himself.

Hawley was only one prominent example of a wave of suicides and attempted suicides that summer. Edwards blamed the devil for the sudden feeling in the town. He reminded his alarmed congregation that only God’s mercy and ‘restraining grace’ kept them, wicked souls that they were, from doing likewise. As George M. Marsden sums up in Jonathan Edwards: A Life: “The awful lesson was, as always, that people must not trust in the least in themselves.”

It might seem absurd, being so afraid of eternal damnation you commit the sin my fifth grade teacher told me was unforgivable. But I know the impulse well.

In tenth grade I made my first gesture towards ending my own life. I took a pocket knife with a bible verse printed on the blade and tested it against my wrists. The pain and the likelihood of failure stopped me, but I did get the first draft of my suicide note out of the experience. I wrote “I’m so fucking sorry.” And while the drafts I’ve written since are more elegant, the basic sentiment remains true. I am sorry. Sorry for the sin of being born broken and evil, deserving only of wrath. Sorry that nothing I do is ever worthwhile.

How many nights have I told myself, “You are scum, your foot shall slide in due time, your finest works are as filthy rags, your heart is deceitful and exceedingly wicked. And nothing can change that.”

But that’s bullshit, obviously.

Pastor, why did I believe such despair-worthy bullshit?

 “Whatever you do don’t follow your heart. You cannot trust your own desires—you must not trust yourself.” Not a quote about Edwards this time, but from one of your sermons. The refrain: your finest works are filthy rags, you are wicked and worthy of hatred, rings throughout your preaching. “You deserve to be punished. You deserve a great many bad things to befall you.” On every occasion I have sat planning my death, that refrain has rung through my head: you deserve death, you deserve this, you are evil and never will be anything else. You told me that “even my best efforts are no good. Even my best religious efforts will be fake.” And I believed you.

Jonathan Edwards had wanted his congregation to know how vile they were in the sight of God, how helpless they were to do any good. And when his congregation believed him and took logical steps, he blamed the devil. But the devil plaguing that town—the devil that killed Joseph Hawley—was Edwards and his Great Awakening.

The day before I planned to drown myself, I was chatting with a good listener on r/SuicideWatch. He asked me why my life was so worthless to me. The more I consider his question, the more I return to Jesus’ parable of the pearl. Jesus praises the merchant who, upon finding a perfect pearl, sells all that he has to obtain it. But what happens after that parable is over? The man, now destitute except for this gorgeous pearl, sits down and looks at it for a while, marveling at his good fortune. But eventually he gets hungry, eats the pearl, realizes he has nothing, and throws himself into the sea.

Pastor, you sold me a pearl of great price, a gospel: believe that you’re worthless, but that Jesus can save you and will grant you eternal happiness. And I bought it. But after I sat looking at it for a while, I started to get hungry. I began to wonder: what did I sell for this pearl? What did I give up?
Every time I start an endeavor I do so with the foreknowledge that the original sin—the worthlessness with which my nature is imbued—will make it junk even if I bother to finish it. I am sad, apathetic, isolated, and afraid, and have been for as long as I can remember. And I’ve realized, finally, that I would gladly give up an eternity in Heaven for a few minutes of feeling all right with myself.

But the problem is, Pastor, I can’t do that. You can’t take something you’ve been taught all your life and toss it out, even if you want to. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” I want to depart. I don’t believe. But something deep inside me won’t let go. No matter how many times I tell myself I was born without sin, a beloved creation of a God who would not let their holy child see corruption, I still end up writing another draft of my suicide note. You planted a seed inside of me, Pastor, and it has grown to be the biggest of all the flowering plants in my garden.

Some days the only thing stopping me from killing myself is rage. Rage at you for doing this to me and hundreds like me. But most days, I feel sorry for you. Because as much as you’ve hurt me, Pastor, I know you’ve been also been hurt. I know you still believe the bullshit too.

I remember, back when I was convinced most humans were going to be eternally tortured just for being born, I wanted to save everybody. I was terrified for my non-Christian friends, whose intrinsic value I saw, but whom God in hatred held over the fires of Hell as if they were loathsome insects. I’m sure you’re even more scared than I was, the strangling vine of your gospel has had decades longer to grow in your heart. That’s probably why you became a pastor, to save everybody.

I’m going to close this letter by sharing with you the words I pray to protect myself from self-hatred and fear of damnation:

“Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

“Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free.
He has destroyed it by enduring it.
He destroyed Hell when He descended into it.
He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh.

“Isaiah foretold this when he said,
‘You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below.’
Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.

“Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.

“O death, where is thy sting?
O Hell, where is thy victory?”

– from John Chrysostom’s Paschal Sermon

Pastor, I still want to kill myself almost every day. I don’t know if I will ever stop hating myself the way I used to believe God hated me. Nevertheless, I know that when Christ harrowed Hell, he brought apocatastasis for the whole world from the bondage of sin, even from the darkness of the self-hatred you preach. All creation will be healed and made holy by the grace of God whose love knows no limit. Even Satan themself, even the powers and principalities of this world, even you, even me.

You gave me your gospel, now let me give you mine: Christ came to guide and save his beautiful creatures, born holy and without sin, born to be heirs, born to follow the way of life. And Christ will save them, for neither death nor Hell nor the greatest evils of this world could deny him.

God will not let me, God’s holy one, see corruption.

I am beloved, and so are you.

Sincerely,
Paul Stanton