COMING alongside the family of someone who has taken their own life, and conducting their funeral service, is both a gracious privilege and deep cut through heart and soul.
Tragically, some people choose suicide due to the darkening of depression, while there are others for whom suicide is a rational alternative to life without meaning and purpose.
The famous atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote: “We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and the emptiness; sometimes a voice answers out of the darkness.
"But it is a voice of one drowning; and in a moment the silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful; the unhappiness of most people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it.”
Russell was a great humanist and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1950). In view of ‘this world’ being all there is to live for, he worked hard for causes like nuclear disarmament.
I admire the amazing passion for living some atheists have, like mountaineer Joe Simpson’s grit and determination (Touching The Void) to overcome incredible odds and crawl back to base camp after a near-fatal fall.
Simpson’s stark belief that there is nothing beyond death fuelled his fight for survival, while belief in an afterlife could have dulled it and resigned him to give up and die.
It should come as no surprise that the humanist society (tending towards atheism) and The Church of Scotland (believing in God) share values and concerns, as in the desire for school pupils to make time for ‘living reflection’.
I’m concerned about the watering down of ‘religious observance’ in our schools but also recognize that we live in a post-Christian society (or pre-Christian) and need to connect with people where they are, not where I’d like them to be.
In Australia, the government helps fund chaplains to work in schools to encourage inner reflection and the nurturing of life-enhancing spiritual values. They are ahead of the UK in secularization and responded to the tragedy of many young people’s suicides. Thus supportive chaplains join with school staff to help young people grow up well.
An increase in the number of humanist funerals is understandable in a Scotland where fewer people believe in God and an afterlife. But, in such services I sense something of Russell’s deep darkness described above. Death is a ‘dead end’ and ‘full-stop’, not the ‘comma’ and ‘pregnant pause’ I believe it to be.
St Paul puts it like this: ”If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:17-20)
Hope is vital for living. “Please God may the light of your hope, for this life and the next, penetrate our darkness and hopelessness and help us to choose life!”
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