God gives hope even after suicide

Fr Chris Alar MIC dispels myths about the Church’s teaching on suicide, writes Chai Brady

 

Suicide has a devastating impact, but there is hope for the salvation of those who have died by their own hand and for the people who are left behind according to a US priest who has personal experience, and broaches the topic pastorally and honestly.

Fr Chris Alar MIC is a priest with the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy and serves as the head of Marian Press in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

He draws from his experience and counsels many in this difficult ministry. This led Fr Alar to write a book on suicide with Jason Lewis MIC, entitled After Suicide: There’s Hope for Them and for You.

The journey for him began with the tragedy of his grandmother taking her own life in 1993 when he was aged 23 and the toll it took on his family. It was the inspiration for the book.

Speaking to The Irish Catholic Fr Alar says: “I lost my grandmother to suicide and it was a shock our family had never experienced. I had always learned as a Catholic that if you take your own life you’re automatically going to hell. That there’s no left or right there’s only black and white, there’s damnation and that’s it.

“So, for years our family never talked about it. Our family never addressed it, or even talked about my grandmother because it was kind of like the elephant in the room that nobody wanted to acknowledge.

“I wasn’t practicing my faith at the time of my grandmother’s death and I don’t even really remember praying for her at the time she died.”

It was 10 years later, when he had found his faith, that he had a chance encounter with a priest during Confession that was to change his whole perspective. His grandmother’s death had always “greatly bothered” him and he mentioned this to the priest when he was in North Carolina.

Fr Alar told the priest about his fears, saying that he regretted not praying for her at the time she died, adding that “now she’s in Hell”.

The priest questioned this, leading him reply that it was Church teaching, a statement the priest refuted. The priest asked whether his grandmother was suffering at the time.

“She had a lot of mental illness, a lot of pain, a lot of agony and she struggled and tried to carry on day after day, tried to get through each day, finally she couldn’t,” was Fr Alar’s response at the time.

Citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 22:82, the priest began to change his thinking. Part of that section of the catechism states: “Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.”

Fr Alar says: “He [the priest] said these things could affect free will and you know free will is one of the conditions for a sin to be mortal, you have to have complete free will, and for the first time I realised my Grandma didn’t have free will, at least from what I knew, from what I saw. All of a sudden, things changed in my perspective.”The very next section of the catechism reads: “We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.”

But Fr Alar still had questions. His grandmother had taken her own life with a handgun, so asked the priest: “Father, she pulled the trigger, the Church I thought taught, that’s murder, she killed a life, she took her own and she had no time to repent.

“So, Father the second she pulled the trigger she was instantaneously dead, I mean there is no time to repent.”

The priest spoke of St Faustina’s diary, who said Jesus comes to the soul three times at the moment of death and gives them an opportunity to repent. The priest said that despite there being such a short time between the bullet leaving the gun and the time it hit, God can work a miracle.

“And then he said something even more powerful to me, he said in the diary of St Faustina, when it looks like all hope is lost, He said it is not so, He said the soul no longer reacts to external things, so when it looks like to you all hope is lost it is not so,” says Fr Alar.

“He said I provide the soul with that last moment of Grace, so that if the soul is willing, they can accept that Grace turn back to me and be forgiven of sins.”

“I said Father this is incredible, but then he really blew me away when he said go home tonight and pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy for the salvation of your grandmother’s soul.

“Then I said, ‘now I know you’re crazy Father’, because my grandmother died 10 years ago – because at this time it was 2003, when I was talking to him, and 1993 is when my Grandma died.

“And he said that God is outside of time, there is no past for God, there is no future for God, he sees everything that ever happens, ever will happen or ever did happen at one instant.”

The priest gave two examples, the first was that St Faustina said in her diary that Jesus told her that her prayers were a consolation to him in the Garden of Gethsemane, even though she prayed for him 1,900 years later.

The second was about Padre Pio. Fr Alar says: “Then he told me a story. There’s a documented story that Padre Pio was being evaluated by his doctor and the doctor noticed Padre Pio was praying and he asked Padre Pio what are you praying for?

“And Padre Pio said for the conversion and happy death of my grandfather, the doctor said ‘well I knew your grandfather, he died 20 years ago’.

“Padre Pio replied ‘I know, but God knew 20 years ago that I would be making these prayers tonight and he will apply those graces back to him at the moment of his death’. I was like, this is amazing, and this is a true story of St Padre Pio,” says Fr Alar.

“So, this priest told me, go home tonight and pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy to pray for the salvation of your grandmother’s soul, to help her at that moment of Judgement. When you go before God you’re going to need all the Grace you can get, and Chris you can actually help supply Grace to your grandmother, even though she died 10 years ago.”

“So, this concept of prayers being outside of time, that we can help our loved ones, was the inspiration of the book,” Fr Alar says.

“Everybody is so amazed that God’s mercy is so great that he would even allow me, a knucklehead, who didn’t even pray for my grandmother 10 years ago, that he would allow me the Grace to still now help her even though it was years later and I just now found my faith, he’s that loving.”

This experience in Confession left Fr Alar feeling on “cloud nine”. He realised this concept didn’t just apply to suicide but to all death, from a road traffic accident to cancer.

The first half of his book is about understanding Church teaching regarding suicide, that there is still hope for the person that takes their own life, but Fr Alar stresses this does not mean it is ever the answer.

“We’re very clear to point out that suicide is never the answer, we tell people who read the book, don’t say: ‘Oh, well Father says I can still get to heaven so therefore I’m going to kill myself now’”, he says.

“Never, ever test God’s mercy, only God knows the heart and you never want to ever risk that, so we tell people suicide is never the answer, but for those who have succumbed like my grandma, who couldn’t fight the fight anymore, there is still hope for her salvation. This is why we wrote the book, because there’s still hope for their salvation.”

The second part of his book focuses on there still being hope for those who have lost people to suicide, who can be particularly at risk. Fr Alar says what he found was those who lose people in this way are also at a high risk of suicide themselves.

Giving an anecdotal example, Fr Alar says last year someone in his neighbouring small town of 2,000 people took their own life. The next day that person’s best friend did the same, the following day the first person’s girlfriend took their life.

He says: “So, in three days we had three suicides. There’s a high risk of suicide among those who have lost someone to suicide.

“In the second part of the book we give a spiritual roadmap on how to get through, you’ll never get over a loss but you can get through it. We give the spiritual principles of how to get through it and they’re kind of based a little bit on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous which is Christian based.

The first step is to acknowledge you’re powerless, he says, “we can’t change the fact that they’re gone, we have to recognise the fact that there’s nothing we can do, we’re powerless, only those who recognise that can move forward”.

The second step is to trust that Jesus can restore our lives to manageability, that with God’s help a person can get back to some form of normality. He adds that the third step is then to “entrust yourself, your life and your loved ones to the protective care of God”.

“These spiritual principles apply not just to suicide but to any kind of suffering and loss, of how to get through it.”

The success of the book, which was well-received in terms of sales and hit the top 100 Catholic books on Amazon at a time, is “bittersweet”, according to Fr Alar, as it’s “very sad it is a subject that is now so prevalent”.

“The statistics are shocking, most people don’t know, that there are more people in the world die by suicide every year than all the wars or homicides combined. That is a shocker. Suicides rates have been going up every year for a decade, 33% just in the last few decades.”

He adds that there are now more US veterans who have taken their own lives than who died in the Vietnam war.

“We talk about that in the book too,” Fr Alar says. “There are three main reasons, the world, the flesh and the Devil are the traditional Catholic viewpoints and we do talk about that but the biggest reason is the lack of God because there’s no purpose.

“The number one reason you quit any activity is there’s no purpose to it. If you feel you’re wasting your time you don’t do it.

“And the same applies to the concept of life, if you feel there’s no purpose to life, you don’t do it, you don’t continue it, you end it, and so that’s what’s happened with the loss of God in our society.”

The current coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is a time that people can take a look at what’s truly important Fr Alar insists.

“Our stock market and the economy are going to crash, sports are cancelled, entertainment is shut down, people are realising very quickly that this stuff is not really everlasting, this stuff could end in a second,” he says.

“People don’t have a purpose, they don’t feel that they have a purpose in life and therefore they’re adrift and what we try to show them is that you do have a purpose, God has a plan for you.

“And this is very much the ill of our society today, that we turn to all these other things, materialism, consumerism, sex, money, power, this is what we seek as our god and not the real God.

“In religious life since the very beginning, religious monks and brothers and priests take three vows, poverty, chastity and obedience and people ask why those three?

“The answer is the three gods of the world are sex, money and power. So, to overcome the god of world of sex we take the vow of chastity, to overcome the god of the world of money we take the vow of poverty, to overcome the god of the world of power we take the vow of obedience.”

Upon doing that, he says, there’s a realisation that the world by itself can’t exist without the “loving merciful hand of God to guide it”.

The true purpose of the book, Fr Alar explains, is to get to the route of what’s causing “that woman to go out on the ledge, what’s causing that man to jump off the bridge”.

“The root cause is loneliness,” he says.

“We are the most connected people in human history with our cell phones, our texting, email and our video chat, but we’re so disconnected. We’re more disconnected than we’ve ever been in human history.”

Fr Alar says that people write to him all the time saying that the coronavirus is God’s way of punishing humanity.

“God in his ordained will does not want this, but in his permissive will he allows it, the reason he allows it is because this time of isolation is going to get us to spend time with our families and time with him,” he says, “so we have to realise this is time God is allowing us to see only he is truly God.

”After Suicide: There’s Hope for Them and for You can be ordered using this link. It is also available in Veritas bookstores.