Step 2:
The Language of Descent
As with most things that simultaneously share in life and death, descent is the good, the bad, and the ugly.
To enliven our experience and more perfectly mirror that of Christ, we need a renewed capacity to name what He underwent.
Heaven and Hell?
"Divine Comedy" by Boticelli
Christ's dual descent from Heaven and to Hell is neither accident nor coincidence. There is a starkness to descent, while at the same time a tension of purpose and perception. What rightly feels painful or meaningless can well still bring us to the good. Our share in Heaven may be Christ's road to and through Hell, which incorporated the following:
Descent as
Loneliness
Christ's "radical" (or even post-radical, beyond the roots) loneliness is different from aloneness. It's not that Jesus is alone, but that He longs most deeply for a heavenly home that He both shares in and is made to yet anticipate.
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For the suicidal, hope is a foreign concept - but longing lingers, often in loneliness of our own. What is the object and origin of your longing?
Descent as
Lack of Homefulness
Christ's loneliness thus involves an absence of the sense of home - a lack of homefulness. Jesus continues to partake in His home of Heaven by virtue of the Incarnation, but it is not mirrored in the world around Him. Instead, He finds the love and life of Heaven often misunderstood or rejected altogether.
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For the suicidal, lack of homefulness is often the same as homelessness, complete unmooring from a home that seemed to once exist but no longer does. What used to define your sense of home, and are you giving yourself the space to mourn its absence?
Descent as
Non-Belonging
Amidst the lack of homefulness, Christ finds Himself a stranger in His own land - inherently other from those around Him, even His friends, followers, and family, who so often misunderstand Him. His existence is that of intense non-belonging, as He never quite fits in with the people or places that surround Him. His death is in no small part a consequence of this non-belonging, as authorities find His "disruption" threatening.
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For the suicidal, non-belonging is frequently a result of both lived experiences and our own tendencies towards shame and secrecy. What would it mean to invite someone else into your isolation?
Descent as
Complicated Vision
In dying, Jesus' participation in death (suffering from loneliness, lack of homefulness, and non-belonging) reaches its fullness. In addition to the beatific vision, His perpetual share in Heaven, He endures the visio mortis, the sight of death in its entirety, for all its ugliness. Bearing both visions simultaneously is brutal in how it intensifies further Christ's longing for home - for Heaven - for life itself; Jesus bears both all the same, revealing Himself and His fullness of life before death and thereby destroying it.
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For the suicidal, our vision of death often proves bewitching - while Jesus sees death for all its emptiness, we find in it false meaning, which warps our perception of reality. What feelings rule your foundational images of self and what do they base themselves in?
(when properly ordered)
. . . deeply human and (dis)oriented towards fuller participation in divine life.
Lament & Praise
"Circle of Angels" by Gustave Doré
"La Pietà" by Michelangelo
Prayer is central to descent because it both names and gives way to truth - however beautiful, however ugly. As Dr. Christine Valters Paintner describes,
Prayer is about growing more intimate with the sacred and seeing that compassionate presence everywhere, including in places of grief and anguish.
In this way, prayer is not about ideals of perfection; it's not meant to be the thing that makes us feel better or that best uses our time. It's the thing that honors divine reality, whether we enjoy that reality or not. For this reason, it is simultaneously the embodied languages of lament and praise. Dr. Valters Painter explains
To praise without acknowledging our pain is a superficial and shallow response to the realities of the world in which we live. To lament without offering gratitude or praise is to unbind ourselves from hope and become mired in cynicism and despair.
Let's Reflect
Do you know the anatomy of your wounds? Do you sit with and give name to your sorrows, or do you only subdue or unconsciously submit to your emotions? Do you cultivate space for joy - not born of painlessness but from persistence in love amidst pain - in your heart?
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Can you commit to some regular time of lament? Some regular time of praise? Can you see how both are authentic experiences of and expressions of your life, just as they were for Christ in His life?
That's all well and good, but what's the language of descent, really?
Descent makes us want to scream. It demands instead our silence.
We can name much of what descent is - the pain and purpose that it alike involves - but just to speak of or about descent is not the same as to speak in it.
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Here, too, Christ gives us clarity in His refusal to give in to death and let Himself go - spiritually, emotionally, physically. Even when confronted with hellish horrors, Jesus practices silence - a kind of interior stillness. When everything would drive one to run, He remains.
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This silence isn't empty, but instead prepares the way for deliberate speech - Christ as the Word of God revealing Himself. This is the ultimate utterance, and the one that unmakes death. So too for us must our language of descent be our silence for the sake of true selfhood - the divine Word shining through in us!
If you're interested, here's continued reading for you on the road so far For more on the language of descent, patience and presence, or praise and lament, see A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness by Christine Valters Paintner. Quotes can be found from here on pages 32 and xi, respectively. For more on descent as loneliness and non-belonging, yet also being as prayer, see Cardinal Ratzinger in "Descendit de caelis - He came down from Heaven" and Introduction to Christianity. For more on lack of homefulness, see John Swinton's Finding Jesus in the Storm: The Spiritual Lives of Christians with Mental Health Challenges. For an introduction to the concept of visio mortis, look to Mysterium Paschale by Hans Urs von Balthasar - we define it differently here as "the sight of death in its fullness," but the term is properly his. For an acknowledgement of the tensions and discomforts of descent that are challenging to name for those of us who are suicidal, find Clancy Martin's How Not to Kill Yourself and/or Thomas Joiner's Myths About Suicide.