Petitions for a “Lost One”
(2/9/23)
[“Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide. We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to (God) alone, God can provide the opportunity for . . . repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2282-3).
“‘(B)ecause this widow bothers me, I will give her legal protection, otherwise by continually coming she will wear me out. . . .now, will not God bring about justice for his elect who cry to him day and night, and will he delay long over them?’” (Lk 18:5,7)]
O Lover,
Of late I have been praying to You on behalf of one of the many “lost ones” in our stressful times. In this one’s fight for purchase on the hazardous slope of meaning he was, in the end, unsuccessful. His friends, acquaintances, and, especially, family members remain variously concussed and wounded. Anger, guilt, second-guessing, paralysis, lamentation, and despair might well be among their responses. Although I know the deceased only via a second degree of separation, his tragedy has quickly entered my prayers to You on his behalf.
While post-Vatican II Catholic teaching is that the ultimate destiny of all of us is known to none but You, the earlier tradition branding all suicides as mortal (damning) sin lingers in the air of the culture. In contrast to all of us mortals including the deceased, only You know in full the cards this “lost one” had drawn or generated which contributed to his folding that hand by his own. Only You possess the full picture of what he could no longer endure. Only You (Tu sólus) know what all hemmed him in and seemingly forced his forfeiting of the gift You had given him.
However, having thus conceded Your knowledge, it is not that to which I am appealing in this prayer. Rather, having long since been seized by the truth of the Anointed One’s words—“He who has seem me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9)—I direct my petition to the core of who You are: Lover. I see no way in which the Christ would have, or could have, condemned one in the straits which this lost one found himself. No way! And thus I must presume the same of You, O Lover. Within Your expansive Sacred Heart’s embrace nothing is lost; no one is, finally, lost. With You there are, finally, no “lost ones.” The destination of all of us—animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman—is Home, is You. I have long found myself among those students of Holy Writ who suspect that even Judas himself (Mt 27:3-5) ultimately failed to escape the gravity of You who are merciful Love (I Jn 4:8,16). Does not Jesus conclude his parable of the lost sheep, to say nothing of lost coins and sons (Lk 15), with these words: “it is not the will of my Father . . . that one of these little ones should perish” (Lk 18:14)? In short, I pray believing that You, the Good Shepherd, will bring this particular lost sheep home!
A final coda: there is the matter of “there but for the grace of God go I” (John Bradford [1510-55]). Just how am I, across a lifespan repeatedly aware of a darkness recumbent in a lower corner of my spirit, so different from this one who, unlike me, was not shielded from the final act by cowardice, by the hemorrhaging of courage? Was the latter weakness an additional crooked piece with which You yet again burned Your straight lines into my parchment? In any event, is not the one writing these words as needful of your compassionate Love as is the one occasioning this post? Might my holding Your feet to the fire of Your Christ-glimpsed identity, surely cheeky and brazen in the tradition of Luke’s persistent widow, be paradoxically an act of faith, however unorthodox?
