Saint Therese: Case Against Suicide by Ren Blog entry

Blog: Uncovering The Starchild Within
by Ren

Saint Therese: Case Against Suicide

long article regarding Saint Therese and suicide

Date: 3/26/2006 7:23:49 AM ( 18 y ) ... viewed 2630 times

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Suicide: Insights from St. Thérèse of Lisieux

Fr. J. Linus Ryan, O. Carm.

The thought of suicide comes to most people at some time in their lives. For the majority it may be only a fleeting thought that is fairly quickly dismissed. But for others it can be a real temptation that must be strenuously fought. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower (d.1897), would seem to belong to the second category. Even though she was an enclosed Carmelite nun in a French provincial town, who died at the age of twenty-four, she has something important to say to people seeking to tackle the problem of suicide.

The issue of suicide seems only to have come to her towards the end of her life. Her sister, Mother Agnes, said to her a week before she died, what a terrible sickness and how much you suffered! She replied, Yes! What a grace it is to have faith! If I had not any faith, I would have committed suicide without an instant's hesitation. (LastConv 22.9.6). About a month earlier she was in such pain that she spoke of nearly losing her mind (CG 22.8.97). At this time too she said to her sister, Agnes:

Watch carefully, Mother, when you will have persons a prey to violent pains; don't leave near them any medicines that are poisonous. I assure you, it needs only a second when one suffers intensely to lose one's reason. Then one could easily poison oneself. (August 30, Green Notebook).

Her sister repeated this on oath at the process for Thérèse's beatification (PA 204).

In fact, another young sister who was helping to nurse her - Sr. Marie of the Trinity, - also testified the following:

Three days before she died, I saw her in such pain that I was heartbroken. When I drew near to her bed, she tried to smile, and, in a strangled sort of voice, she said: If I didn't have faith, I could never bear such suffering. I am surprised that there aren't more suicides among atheists.

Text in Procès de béatification et canonisation. Vol. 1 Procès informative ordinaire (Rome: Teresianum, 1973) 472. English tr. in C. O'Mahony, St. Thérèse of Lisieux by Those who Knew Her: Testimonies from the Process of her Beatification (Dublin: Veritas, 1975) 254.

These texts make clear that suicide was not just a passing idea, but a consideration that she thought about very seriously. We have some idea of how grave this thought was when we look at her physical, psychological and spiritual state at the time. Her thoughts on suicide are found in the last months of her life.

At this time Thérèse was desperately ill with a terrible form of tuberculosis. The first sign of the seriousness of her condition was a hemoptysis (coughing blood from the lungs) on the night of Good Friday in 1896. From that time her health deteriorated. After a year she was very seriously ill with intense chest pain, frequent hemoptysis and weakness. From July 1897 until her death on 30th September that year she had acute pain, often with suffocation. In time the tuberculosis spread throughout her body, so that around the 23rd August medical people spoke of gangrene of the intestines; there was a collapse of bodily functions. Though best medical practice at the time was morphine injections, her superior, Mother Gonzaga, thought that religious should suffer, and would not allow its administration to Thérèse (later the same superior would refuse morphine when she herself was dying with cancer).

Her psychological and spiritual sufferings were as great if not greater than her physical distress. Within a few days of her first coughing of blood, Good Friday the previous year, she had a sudden collapse of her faith experience. What had been normal to her, like thoughts of heaven, now seemed a fantasy. She spoke of a high wall between her and faith realities. She was in acute darkness of faith almost without remission until her death. The images she used were of darkness, a black hole, a thick fog, a tunnel and a high wall that she could not scale. In the meantime, she kept the best side out as it were. She continued her religious exercises, she wrote charming devotional poems at the request of the sisters of her community. But all the time, she was personally in darkness, with no feeling of faith. She said that she really knew the experience of atheists. She was walking through a dark night of faith.

When we put these facts about her physical condition and her spiritual and psychological darkness side by side with her thoughts of suicide, we find a deeper perspective. For many religious people the thought of God or Heaven can be a reason against suicide, but Thérèse is now without any sense of the Divine Presence, devoid of faith experience, clinging on in darkness. As such her experience is of interest not only for the issue of suicide, but also for the whole area of unbelief. She knew in the depths of her being the crushing desolation of unbelief.
The case against suicide

When people are in profound distress, physical, emotional, spiritual or from circumstances such as an impending court case or financial disaster, the thought of suicide can easily surface. There is any number of possible responses. Many people think of the effect that suicide might have on their family and friends and they may conclude that suicide would be a selfish act. Others think of the fragility and beauty of life and they pull back from the ultimate renouncement. People think of what they might still do. The Austrian psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, when a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, discovered that those who had a why for living tended to survive. Those who had little meaning for life, or who had no strong aims or goals tended to collapse and die.

From the same Nazi camps there is another reflection that relates to suicide. One of the greatest theologians in the period between the two World Wars was the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. At one stage things were so bad that the prisoners began to discuss suicide seriously. Bonhoeffer replied that suicide was wrong, because only God knows when we have reached the perfection He has planned for us. Three weeks later Bonhoeffer was hanged; within a few months Hitler was dead and the war was at an end. He had reached the holiness and perfection that God had planned for him.

This argument of Bonhoeffer is one of the strongest that we can find. It reflects the Christian conviction that life is a gift: God gives and at the right time God withdraws life and brings us to Himself. We are not entitled to decide on suicide or euthanasia. The argument has several variants. Some appeal to the Divine Command not to kill. In all cultures we find a widely held abhorrence of suicide, which reflects deep truths about our human nature: one of our deepest instincts is to preserve life. Others think of the after-life with reward or possible punishment.

In the end the religious argument gives the strongest case against suicide. The problem for our society is a fall-off in faith. It can be argued that we have a crisis not so much of faith as of religious experience, a crisis of spirituality. The Mass attendance is well down; more and more people fill up census forms in a way that indicates that they are either non-believers, or that they are not observing Catholic morality. Yet the visit of the relics of St. Thérèse showed that there is huge spiritual hunger and belief still remaining in Ireland. The Jesuit theologian, Michael Paul Gallagher, speaks of God being missing but not missed; people have drifted away from faith. In this situation they will very often not have the support of faith or value religious arguments against suicide when they come into serious problems. It will be very difficult to stem the rise of suicide among young people in Ireland if they have lost contact with their faith, if they do not have some living contact with the living God.
Back to Thérèse

When we look at the final illness of Thérèse we do not see an effortless response. She was not borne along on waves of religious feelings so that she could easily slip into a few prayers or devotions and get over her suicide thoughts. She was being tried at the depths of her being. She was so frightened about losing her faith that a few months earlier she had written out the Apostles Creed in her own blood and pinned it to her religious habit. She was struggling at two levels. One was a fight to believe in the face of darkness and the threat of despair. At another level she was drawing on the same threatened and seemingly fragile faith to reject thoughts of suicide.

If Christians in some time of deep trouble think that their situation is hopeless, they can always look to Jesus who has gone before them to death on Calvary (see Heb 12:2). His message can give meaning even to the most desperate human situation. In a much lower key we can look at Thérèse who walked a lonely path. All through her life she spoke of God's love for her and of her attempt to love God in return. This love relationship gave meaning to the whole of her life. It led to a supreme confidence that was not shattered even by the deepest human torment and a profound sense of God's absence. It is this kind of strong spirituality that can lead people through difficulty.
Those left behind

There is a final point that can be made about St. Thérèse in the context of suicide. It concerns the relatives and friends of the person who has taken his or her own life. There is immense pain and some people never get over the fact that their son or daughter, brother or sister, or close friend, has done this act. Today there is a greater readiness to believe that one who commits suicide is unhinged or psychologically disturbed at the time. And this is probably true of most cases. But nonetheless there remains the awful question of why and a sense of guilt or failure on the part of relatives or friends that they did not spot the underlying deep distress and that they failed to prevent it.

We do not have an easy answer to this enormous pain that is left for relatives and friends. One can point to something of a parallel in the life of Thérèse. We know that fairly soon after Thérèse left home her father, whom she loved almost to the point of idolatry, became quite deranged and a danger to himself and others. She had entered Carmel in April and her father began to act strangely about June the same year (1888). The following February he was committed to a most depressing mental asylum holding 1600 people at Caen where he would remain for three years. There were those who blamed his daughters. Pauline, Marie and Thérèse had gone off to the Lisieux Carmel leaving their highly sensitive father. Léonie had returned from a second unsuccessful attempt at religious life. Given that she was a person whom we would describe as having special needs, her apparent failure was an added stress for their father.

In intimate letters to her family Thérèse lets us see her torment at her father's illness. She wrote that words could not express the anguish felt by the family. Thérèse describes this infirmity of her father as the greatest suffering of her life. We can sense too the embarrassment of such an illness at the time for a foremost citizen of a provincial town. Her response is to hold on in faith. She continued to pray for her father. Thérèse did not attempt to answer the tortuous why question. She transformed her pain to a profound trust in God's love for her father and in a Divine Plan that God would fulfil. For those who have faith the answer of Thérèse to her father's insanity may also be best in the event of suicide. We may never know why but we will find some comfort if we can turn to God.

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There is no easy answer to the problem of suicide. We can see that strong religious faith provides some protection for the distressed person and for those who are left behind if a suicide takes place. Merely secular values and answers do not seem to bring us very far. There are some valuable insights from St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whom people for too long thought of as a sweet or sentimental saint. She shows the strength of purpose and conviction as well as the faith that is needed for this problem and many others that beset our age.