When Life doesn’t seem to be Worth Living

Since I’m not a professional counselor, I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I’ve talked to who were actively thinking about killing themselves. On the other hand, hardly a month goes by when I don’t have a serious conversation with someone who really can’t get very excited about being alive.

If Henry David Thoreau’s observation that “most people live lives of quiet desperation” is accurate, then that may explain why I have so many of these conversations.

It’s relatively easy to understand why some people may feel this way.

• They feel like they are serving a life sentence in a prison created by their disabilities.
• They maybe lonely – and not always because they didn’t reach out to people. It’s amazing how many people simply lose all their friends and relatives and are literally the “last leaf” on what was once a very fruitful tree.
• They may be in considerable physical or emotional pain.
• They may have failed at what they considered their most important life task so much that there is little hope of redeeming their lives.
• They may be facing death anyway, and getting it over with quickly may be more appealing than prolonging the process.

Some of these people may suffer from depression, but the truth is that the objective circumstances of many lives really are depressing.

Before you decide to jump off a bridge just from reading this, let me say that the good news is that many people have worked through these kinds of situations and have much to teach us.

One of them, believe it or not, was the Apostle Paul. He spent the last few months of his life – maybe up to two years – under house arrest in Rome. If the chronology of his letters goes the way most scholars think, Paul enjoyed many of the comforts of modern day politicians who are sent to federal prison for defrauding the public of millions of dollars. The difference is that Paul hadn’t done anything wrong and he had to pay for his incarceration out of his own pocket. But Paul enjoyed many visitors and a wide correspondence, at first.

The New Testament says nothing about Paul’s death, but tradition says that he was beheaded by order of the Emperor. At any rate, it looks like, as time ran out – so did Paul’s friends.

Paul’s letter to the Philippians was almost certainly written during this period of imprisonment – maybe when the executioner’s shadow was hanging over him. The tone of most of the letter is pretty joyful, but at the beginning the joy seems a little forced. Paul is experiencing all of the things I listed above that make people, if not suicidal, at least willing to consider the advantages of dying. This may be especially true of people who actually believe in life after death.

Paul says, “For me, living is Christ and dying is gain”.

He goes on to weigh – on the one hand – the advantages of dying “to be with Christ” or to hang on to life because he might still be of some use to someone out there, and he finally concludes that the latter is reason enough to go on living.

What I find helpful in this inner conflict that Paul shares with us is that it uncovers a conflict that many of us have at some time in our lives. It comes down to, “What am I living for?” or “What is the meaning of life in general – and of mine in particular?”

I just read a thoughtful column by Todd May, a professor of Philosophy that wrestles with this question from a secular standpoint.

Dr. May points out that the “meaning” secular society offers us generally boils down to whether we are good consumers or good investors. But, he isn’t sure that a eulogy that says,  “She always found the best bargains” or “He made a fistful of money” is really the description of a well-lived life.  He is not willing to say it’s God who gives life meaning – and I’m OK with that, because too often the pious answers are just intellectual and spiritual laziness.

He also recognizes that “meaningfulness” does not necessarily mean “happiness” or “fulfillment”.   It has to do with whether our life story, as we reflect on it, means anything. Charles Dickens probably comes closest to what he means by “meaningfulness” when he has David Copperfield begin his story by wondering, “Whether I shall be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by someone else.”

I’d like to suggest that Paul offers us a clue to meaningfulness that some of the wisest people I know – or know of – have also discovered for themselves.

A friend of mine once told me that his therapist had said, “If you can’t say ‘no’, you can’t say ‘yes’”.

Maybe this feeling that can sneak up on us – the question about whether life is worth living and whether we even want to go on – is a way to see that life is not non-negotiable. We are not sentenced to life. Paul certainly wasn’t. Whether you buy his conviction that there is a life after death – and that whatever comes next is good – or not, you have to admire his final “yes” to life. He is clearly considering the other alternative – and he rejects it – not because he is afraid to die, but because other people need him to live – even if they can’t communicate with him, they somehow need to know he is there and he is acting courageously. 

The Prince with the Big Nose and Personal Transformation

There is a “factoid” going around about American education. The factoid says, when the performance of American students is compared to the performance of students in other industrialized countries, they come out near the bottom in every area except . . . self-esteem. We lead the world in self-esteem. In other words, Americans may be dumber than dirt, but we feel good about ourselves.

Having spent a lot of time with people who were crippled by their low self-esteem, I have always felt that it doesn’t hurt to help people feel good about themselves. But I’ve recently begun to wonder if positive affirmation is really the path to living your best life now?

In the passage from Romans that I began commenting on last week, Paul talks about transformation. He even uses the word “metamorphosis” in the original Greek to emphasize the radical nature of this transformation, which begins with a “renewing of you mind” (Rom. 12:2).

In the “motivational literature” section of your library, the books will tell you that you need to think of yourself as capable of great things. That may be, but that’s not what Paul says. He says that real transformation comes when we “do not think more highly of ourselves than we ought, but to think with sober judgment”.

The Greek word, translated as “sober judgment” is often contrasted with Greek words for “crazy”. It implies a deeply sane and realistic approach to life. And when we adopt that approach to life, our lives really do change. But it isn’t always easy to get real – especially about ourselves.

This truth is illustrated by a French fairy tale. I invite you to leave this blog and read it yourself, but in case you don’t have time, here is the thumbnail version:

A king overcame the spell of an evil sorcerer in order to win the love of his future wife. The sorcerer then pronounced a curse on the king. The child that would be born to this couple, he said, “will never be happy until he discovers that his nose is too long.”

Well, as curses go, this beats being turned into a frog, or sleeping for 100 years after piercing your finger on a spindle. The king thought, “How would he not know his nose is too long? At the very least, I will tell him as soon as he is able to understand.”

Unfortunately the king died just before his son was born. In many ways, he was a beautiful child. He had his mother’s eyes and his father’s strong jaw, but he had a schnozzle that covered half his face. His mother who did not know of the curse because the sorcerer forced the king to keep it a secret, was taken aback, but her ladies-in-waiting assured her that it was simply a strong Roman nose. All the best people have large strong noses, and his mother began to see it as an asset rather than a liability.

Nevertheless, no one was admitted into the young Prince’s presence who did not have a very large nose – although even the largest didn’t come close to the Prince’s in size. Portraits of his ancestors were “touched up” to emphasize their noses. He was also pointedly taught by his instructors that Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and other heroes all had very large noses. Cleopatra was an object of desire because of her nose.

At the age of 21, the Prince’s mother commissioned paintings of all of the eligible princesses in the lands surrounding their own, so the Prince could make a suitable choice for a wife. The Prince immediately fell in love with one princess, who, although she had a small nose, struck him as the most beautiful one of all.

The Prince set off to win her hand, but as he passed the boundaries of his own country, people began to laugh and point and hold their noses as he passed. He noted that all of them appeared to be nasally challenged compared to the people in his own retinue, and he assumed that they were jealous.

When he arrived at the home of the princess with whom he had fallen in love, the king, her father, welcomed him. The Prince had the resume of a fine potential son-in-law, but the king was taken aback by the size of his nose. He decided to let his daughter make the decision and summoned her, but before she arrived at the throne room, the sorcerer who had cursed the Prince before he was born, kidnapped the Princess and ran off with her.

The king told the Prince that if he could rescue the Princess, he would give her to the Prince as his wife. The Prince rode off in pursuit – a pursuit that was slowed every time he had to stop and ask people if they had seen a sorcerer carrying a princess pass by. Every time he asked for help, people would laugh so hard they could not answer for several minutes. This cost the Prince valuable time and he fell further and further behind.

Finally, unable to follow the track any farther, the Prince was in despair. Right then he met a good fairy who had been a friend of his father’s and who was willing to help. She could not, she said, absolutely defeat the Sorcerer, but she could get the Princess out of his hands by encasing her in crystal. All the Prince needed to do was kiss her hand – the one part of her that was not in crystal and the Princess would be set free to marry him.

The Prince followed the Good Fairy’s directions and found the Princess – encased in crystal, with only one small hand sticking out. He raced to her and bent to kiss her hand, but he could not. His nose got in the way. Turn which ever way he might, the Prince’s lips could not touch the Princess’s hand.  Finally, the Prince said in exasperation, “My nose is too big.” At which point his nose was immediately changed to a normal size, he kissed the Princess’s hand and she was set free.

They not only lived happily ever after, but the Prince turned into an exceptionally fine king because he had such a realistic view of himself and his faults as well as his strengths.

We often don’t see our own “big noses” and how they are getting in our own way, partly because the people who love us try very hard to tell us that our noses really aren’t that big – and besides, a lot of good people have the same characteristic.

However, nothing is as transforming as seeing the truth about ourselves. It may be painful, but in the end, it can be amazingly freeing to own a fault, a habit, or a particular way of looking at life that has been getting in our way.

One way to do this is to listen closely to our “enemies” who, unlike our friends, are often only too happy to tell us the truth about ourselves. Or they may, indeed, be friends who love us enough and have too much integrity, to not tell us the truth. At any rate, this may be why Jesus tells us to love our enemies (Matt. 5:44).