Step One:
"Being Dead with the Dead God"
If you feel more dead than alive - counting yourself amongst the corpses - congratulations! Your "situationship" with death affords you an unlikely companion, none other than Jesus Christ Himself.
You may be like huh? After all, in some sense, you two seem on opposite paths. Indeed, just as you find yourself bound to death while yet remaining alive, Jesus Christ is bound to life amidst His mission to and through death. We all know the story:
Jesus is born.
Christians celebrate the Incarnation, Jesus' taking on humanity so as to save it - all without giving up His divine nature.
Jesus dies.
Christians also commemorate the Crucifixion, Jesus' death on the Cross and the ultimate self-sacrifice.
Jesus rises.
Lastly, Christians find meaning in Christ's conquering of death in His Resurrection and Ascension, returning Him to glory.
If death's been conquered, why do I wanna die?
Excellent question! Before Jesus' Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, death was the end of all human potential for relationship - even relationship with God. When Christ conquers death by bridging these three moments in a process of descent, He eliminates this finality as the fundamental condition of existence and makes possible instead life that persists through and beyond death. This enables our divinization, our becoming one with God, and thus the hope of eternal life.
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This is a gift - a promise in which we can trust - but not a given; it's not an inevitability of our lives. For many reasons, we may find ourselves unable to embrace eternity. Although death no longer has the authentic power to dictate our relationships with self, others, and God, we sometimes continue to experience the effects of that power and thus suffer from it. This is true for those of us who are suicidal, we who find that death determines our lives.
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In principle, death no longer owns your person; in practice, we can feel beholden to it. Those of us who experience suicidality still face a living death - a death that demands something of us and thus still has the potential to prove truly deadly.
That's
where we find Jesus!
"Christ on the Cross" by Rembrandt, 1631
Wanna know why?
Jesus doesn't just die - He actively faces death in its entirety.
Just like for us, He does this not as a mere moment but as part of a whole journey, that of descent. Descent, also called descensus, is more so a spiritual movement than a physical movement. This change in our interior self can be the source of great personal growth in an ultimate sense, even as it necessarily involves pain and purging of personhood in an immediate sense. Descent is thus the journey of dying to self, which both Christ and us experience in a certain sense.
What do we mean that Christ descends?
According to the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds
Descendit de caelis
He came down from Heaven
From His Incarnation, Jesus takes on human form. He brings perfect relationship (divinity) into imperfect relationship (humanity) and holds both together. He's forced to recognize the absence of His heavenly home in His earthly reality. His human life is thus one of radical loneliness and alienation as He longs for the fullness of Heaven. His dying to self is a process of humility in enduring humanity for the sake of our salvation.
Descendit ad inferos
He descended to Hell (the dead)
Through His Crucifixion, Jesus enters into the fullness of death. His very presence is its undoing, and Christ thus brings the message of death's defeat to the dead who have been awaiting a Savior - the righteous souls who by His welcome can now enter Heaven. His dying to self is His deigning to meet the prisoners of death as their triumphant King.
Descendit ad inferna*
He descended to Hell (the hellish)
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*In early versions of the Apostles' Creed
In engaging death in its fullness (demise, actually dying), Jesus bears witness to something that is fundamentally destructive. He responds with His greater destructive power, not only defeating death but deliberately deforming it into nothing, thus excising its deadliness. His dying to self is His enduring the vision of death and unveiling His true self before it.
So, how is being suicidal like that?
It's not, exactly - our dying to self is not quite like that of Jesus - but it could be. The reality is that we are descending; we are dying to self, but we're doing so in a way that destroys our personhood, rather than defending it. At no point in His journey does Christ abandon what it is to be Himself (both God and man). Indeed, His sacrifice of self is made possible by being true to Himself. This freedom and openness doesn't keep Him from being wounded, but it means that His wounds can remain open to divine glory in the subsequent journey of ascent.
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We're sharing in a kind of descent. We are -
- moving downward.
We are being broken down and broken up - an excavation of self. This harrowing (often the word we apply to Christ's actions upon His descent to Hell) leaves us hollow, though it can be put into more proper order. In this way, we not only know of death, but actively relate to it.
- dynamic being.
Meanwhile, that movement downward comes to define the trajectory of our lives - for us, certainly in spiritual and psychological terms. We cease being independent of our descent and instead become that very dynamism of movement, thus bringing it to concrete expression.
- engaged in confrontation.
Lastly, we're driven to respond; our dynamism is that of confrontation or conflict, namely of self with self - us versus our own selves. We fully challenge the realness of our existence, using death as the means of doing so. Our internal movement thus works towards an absolute and decisive end.
Our invitation now is to recalibrate our descent - to better align it to that of Christ - to sit with our wounded self and so share in the hope of the Resurrection and Ascension (the return road of ascent).
It's not enough to be half-dead (or even whole-dead); it's about "being dead with the dead God" and joining Jesus on His journey, making it our own.
This is not spiritual or psychological advice, which would require further individual insight and care, but an ongoing invitation - one we can accept or reject.
If you're interested, here's continued reading for you on the road so far For a foundation in the life and death of Christ, turn to The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 456-483, 606-623, and 632-637). For core concepts on the descent of Christ from His Incarnation and throughout His death, find Joseph Ratzinger's "Descendit de caelis - He came down from Heaven" and relevant sections from Introduction to Christianity. For input into the evolution of the Creeds' definition of descent, check out "Descensus Christi ad Inferos: Christ's Descent to the Dead" by Martin F. Connell and "Jesus' Descent into Hell" by Preston Hill and Catherine Ella Laufer. For a better understanding of solidarity with Christ in descent ("being dead with the dead God"), turn to the idea's source - Mysterium Paschale, by Hans Urs von Balthasar. For an articulation of the non-living of suicidality that helps us understand it as a descent, explore How Not to Kill Yourself by Clancy Martin.