Weekly Sheet 28th February 2010 Lent II

The saddest point in our week at St Paul’s was the funeral on Thursday of the outrageously influential fashion designer Alexander McQueen. But that Johnny Depp was staying next door at The Berkeley, and that as a result Wilton Place was swarming with paparazzi hoping to photograph him, we might have succeeded in holding the simple private funeral for close family and friends everyone wanted; as it was there was lots of photography and media coverage – tho’ much of it sensitive. Good to see the paparazzi lower their cameras and stand quietly when the family arrived just before noon – vestiges of decency and respect, even in our frenzied media age, and recognition that his death was not just a story but a tragedy.

A suicide at any age is a tragedy, but the death of someone so greatly respected and prodigiously talented at only forty is a deep shock and raises again for us deep questions about the meaning and value of life, and about how it can be that individuals find themselves so at odds with the idea of life as a ‘gift’ that continuing in it becomes untenable for them and they choose to return that gift to God, as it were ‘unopened’. A funeral in church after a suicide?, some have asked… well, yes, of course. The traditional view of the Church that those who took their own lives were expressing rejection of God has given way to a more informed and pastoral view that those who take their lives are often expressing dissatisfaction with the life they are experiencing, and are – in some way or another – uttering a cry for help. We pray for all his departed children, and commend them to his love and mercy.

No moral condemnation, then – but what moral stance are we to take in the midst of widespread current public debate about suicide and assisted dying, death and life? All around us societal views are in flux. What are we to think, as Christians, about ‘choosing’ death?