A Priest Chooses Death

AI-generated illustration

The parish priest of my neighbourhood committed suicide this morning. His body was found hanging from the ceiling. Just a week back a Catholic nun chose to end her life in the same manner at a place about 20 km from my home.

In a country where about 500 persons choose death every day, the suicide of two individuals may not create ripples, let alone waves. But, non-believer as I am, I was shaken by these deaths.

Christianity is a religion that accepts suffering as a virtue. In fact, the more the suffering in your life, the better a Christian you can be. Follow the path shown by Jesus, that’s what every priest preaches from the pulpit day after day. Jesus’ path is the way of the cross.

I grew up in an extremely conservative Catholic family in an equally conservative village in Kerala. I had a rather wretched childhood. But I was taught to find consolation in the sufferings of Jesus. The Passion of Jesus, that’s what it is called in Catholic theology. That Passion [with a capital P] stands for all the pain that Jesus the Christ endured towards the end of his life: the temptations, tortures and the crucifixion. All those pains are supposed to be the inspiration for every Christian to accept the pains of life without complaint. I was taught as a little boy that all the pains I had to endure [walking 8 km every day for schooling, being caned mercilessly by both parents and teachers, and other usual accoutrements of a helpless childhood in a rustic society] would reduce the Passion of the Lord. I was sharing the agonies of Jesus, in other words. That was a very noble way to accept suffering. Your suffering becomes a redemptive force that aligns with a divine mission. When you accept your suffering in the name of Jesus, you are partaking of the Lord’s redemptive sacrifice.

I internalised that theology as best as a young boy could. It helped me to cope with the inevitable terrors of my childhood gifted by circumstances as well as the adults around.

As I grew up, however, that theology lost its sheen for me. My parents continued to pray on their knees to the Lord of Suffering. Their suffering never ended especially because they had ten children including me and I must have been a severer pain in their aging knees as I distanced myself from their unrelenting theology and finally bid adieu to it altogether.

If I hadn’t chucked that theology, I would have ended my life on a noose like the priest and the nun mentioned above. The priest was born in the same year as I was. The nun was a few years younger. As we move into our old age, we need to feel a sense of self-integrity, a sense that our life has been meaningful, a sense that we did achieve at least quite much of what we wished to achieve. On the other hand, if we feel that our life was a huge failure, the noose begins to descend from the emptiness of life’s twilight.

How can a priest or a nun who spent their entire lifetime worshipping a God who taught them that life was a protracted continuum of suffering and also that the suffering has a redemptive value ever think of ending their life on a piece of rope? It means that their entire life was fake, absolute fake. What did the sermons that this priest preached for over three decades mean? Nothing at all! His suicide is the proof.

I gave up Christianity precisely because its theology of suffering failed to make any sense to me. I know that to exist is to suffer and to survive is to make sense of that suffering. Christianity is arguably the best religion that can help a believer to make sense of suffering. It helped my parents immensely. But it couldn’t help me simply because my very chromosomes rebelled against it. I wanted what Albert Camus called ‘intellectual honesty’ in the answer to suffering. Not theological dogmas.

A few years ago, when the Covid pandemic gave me much pain, I wrote a book on suffering. Here’s the link: Coping with Suffering - in case you’re interested in what I think of suffering and how I coped with it.

We, each one of us, have to discover our own meanings – even in religion. I think the priest and the nun failed to do that. They lived by some borrowed truths of simple church catechism. And the hollowness of borrowed truths stared them in the face at one point of time, inevitably. Such a stare can be devastating because it will pitch you face to face with your own inner emptiness. Even your God won’t be able to save you then because you had not understood that God in the first place!