The Journey Back to God

A Hard Look at Suicide and Addiction

In 2020, my youngest brother died by suicide. His death rocked the world for me, nearly wrecked my life, and could have easily ended up in my taking my own life, too.

However, the Spirit moves in mysterious ways, and here I am alive. Not everyone seems to be so fortunate. Many others besides me have been profoundly shaken by suicide at some point. Maybe you, reader, have been affected or have even felt suicidal yourself.

My little brother wasn’t the first person in my life I saw go that way, and he wouldn’t be the last. Early last year, I lost another friend and fellow army veteran. His death wasn’t officially ruled a suicide; he’d had a long history of struggle with drug addiction, seemed to be clean and healthy, and then relapsed and died of an overdose. I’ve heard it said that addiction is basically a slow form of suicide, and that sounds fairly accurate.

Now I’ve come to see both addiction and suicide as two intertwined symptoms of a deep spiritual injury, a growing woundedness in our souls, both as individuals and as a society. And it’s no wonder, really, when we seem set on collectively inflicting more and greater moral injuries on ourselves.

“Drug and alcohol addiction is a crucial social concern that feeds the parallel problems of crime, poverty, and welfare,” David Hawkins wrote decades ago in his influential 1995 book Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior. He went on to ask, “But what is the essential nature of addiction, and what is the addict really hooked on?” To that question, I would add, “What is the essential nature of suicide, and what is the person really seeking to escape from?”

Some good churchgoers might answer both questions with a simple, “Those people just need Jesus.” But which Jesus do they mean? A modern American version? A proud authoritarian Jesus who wants a “Christian nation” to do things like reject, threaten, and persecute immigrants? It seems to me that most churches, although good at talking about the Bible, are too spiritually dead and out of touch with the living Spirit of Christ to offer our culture any redemptive power for restoration or healing. 

Last summer at the annual sessions of North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative), I met Jennifer Elam, an accomplished psychologist and committed Quaker, who after traveling and experiencing many cultures is also involved in interfaith leadership. Upon conversing with her and reading some of her writings, especially Dancing with God Through the Storm: Mysticism and Mental Illness and Dancing Through the Fires of Grief and Trauma with Co-Creativity, I came to see more clearly a sort of two-fold journey that saved my own life. Furthermore, I’m coming to feel that the same two-fold journey could have saved my younger brother, could have saved my other friend who overdosed, and can restore fullness of life to many others.

After digesting some of these thoughts, I sent the following message to a counselor and mutual friend of the veteran we lost last year:

I know what might have saved [our friend’s] life and does save others: two things in combination. (1) Absolutely free and uninhibited creating of something with deep personal meaning in an ongoing habit of creation or co-creation. Might be some art form, or whatever comes that heals. (2) Absolutely free and uninhibited raw human connection, untainted by machismo or bravado, but either a communal or one-on-one deep communion of total acceptance and full open connection. Those two things saved my life a couple years ago. I now see they can look different for different individuals, but it’s the same two-fold journey that has power to save any desperate soul.

For me, it was essentially a journey back to God. The “creating” side of the journey looked like writing poetry and growing an orchard, while the “human connection” side of the journey took the shape of a relationship breakthrough with my wife and then finding our spiritual home in the Quaker community, among other things. For you and others, heaven only knows what that two-fold journey would look like. It would be as uniquely colorful and diverse as we are divergent from each other.

In both addiction and suicide, a hurting person is escaping from traumas or other lower-energy states of being, levels of awareness characterized by things like rejection, fear, resentment, suspicion, and anger. In the case of addiction, people sometimes find in their “high” a taste of higher realities, such as love without fear, pure joy, peace, and fulfillment—something like heaven.

Instead of using drugs as a dangerous shortcut to filter out lower energies and experience higher ones, what if more of us learned to surrender and let go of those negative forces, trusting God and turning heavenward for the experience of divine love in this life, or “co-creating with our Creator,” as Jennifer Elam puts it? And instead of spiraling down into the ultimate escape of suicide, what if—long before our loved ones get to that point—we became real creative communities of open human connection? In reality, this two-fold journey is actually a unified growth back into fellowship with the Divine, growing into living the life we’re meant to live with each other: the life Jesus taught.

Such a path may sound both simple and impossible, but it was once said, “Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matthew 7:7 KJV). Jesus also gave the simple clue, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), which from his native tongue could just as easily translate to “the kingdom (or nation) of God is among you.”

Some of us do feel and see that every human is, as it says in Genesis, “created in the image of God,” and that the divine spark is within like a mustard seed, waiting to sprout and flourish in creativity and blessed community. It’s tragic that too many Americans have lost sight of that deeper reality and that addiction, violence, and suicide are symptoms we all now live with as a result.

If nothing else, I hope this article helps some of us have more sympathy and understanding for suicidal people or those wounded by others’ suicides. I also hope we can find within us more grace and compassion for any people living with addiction we may encounter in life, and for ourselves, too.

My prayer is that we, individually and collectively, move away from isolated dependency or escapism and more toward the higher states of being that come with giving up our inhibitions and giving in to God’s love, which is waiting for us to surrender to it through paths like active creation and better community living.