Wednesday, September 8, 2021

On Avicii, Suicide, and Romanticizing the Wrong Things

If you have been on Google today you have probably seen that today is a day of remembrance for late Sweidsh DJ Avicii, real name Tim Bergling. Tim died a couple of years ago of suicide by glass shards, aged 28. Having become internationally famous, his success didn’t stop him from his constant wrestlings with questions of life, purpose, and absolutes. In a seemingly heartless age, it is somewhat touching to see how many people participate in remembrances of the young man. 


On the other hand, I am struck today by two thoughts that I’d implore my readers to consider with me: 

First, in a modern day that has done everything that it can to strip itself from subjection to any undemocratic absolutes (that is, absolutes that don’t depend on public opinion), we cannot be surprised at the darkness that enshrouds even the most gifted minds. Many of us were stunned at Robin Williams’s suicide several years ago. How could someone with such gifts of humor and laughter be so sad and lost? 


I think that one reason is that the spirit of our late modern age is not built for happiness or peace. The modern mind has set itself up for confusion, restlessness, and subjectivism, the sum of which is unsustainable for those with questions and natural skepticism. Some of us skeptics look for and find some answers that give us satisfaction. Others of us are so skeptical that we see through everything, finding, to borrow from Lewis, nothing on the other side. It seems that Bergling was never able to find answers within a culture that says, “Look inside of yourself and express yourself. That is who you are: What you say about yourself (if what you say agrees with the general consensus).” There are so many problems with this self-expressive individualism, but I’ll just mention two: First, you could be wrong in your self-expression, because you could have habits and ways of living, thinking, feeling, etc. that are not good for you. Second, the rest of us could be wrong in our affirmation of your self-expression, because we could have similar wrong habits (ie, Rom. 1:32). I wonder if Bergling wrestled with this? 


While people look at the Middle Ages as a time of “darkness,” at least there was a sense of absolutes that could be depended upon. I’ve been reading about Thomas Aquinas recently, and have grown to appreciate that the history of Christian philosophy shows a consistent witness to there being God-ordained universals which, once known, give peace. Thus, after the Psalmist wrestles through his own dark night of the soul, he concludes God-ward, “Whom have I in heaven but you?” (Ps. 73.25)  Jesus said “This is eternal life, to know the Father, and the Son whom He sent.” (Jn. 17.3)  When I say “God-ordained universals,” I do not mean that God decides what is true, but that God’s very nature is truth, and that there is therefore a grounding on which we can identify our personhood, our purpose, and the nature of reality. Maybe the so-called Dark Ages weren’t so dark after all? What if a democratically controlled definition of absolutes is the real darkness, seen in what it is doing us and the world around us? 


My second thought is this: Why are we romanticizing suicide? I want to say this with the utmost sensitivity, because I, a depression sufferer and frequent visitor to Bunyan’s slough of despond, understand the darkness. Like Spurgeon, I understand that there are “dungeons beneath the castles of despair.” The Psalmist understood it as well: “Darkness is my only friend” (Ps. 88.18), as did Abraham Lincoln: “If my misery were evenly distributed to every person on earth, there would not be a single happy face.” If you’ve seen darkness then you know, it gets darker. 


But hear me out: The amount of well-wishes and almost celebratory language for the supposed intellectual liberation of our suicide-taken loved ones (forgive me if you think I'm overblowing the degree of romanticism; but explain it another way) is indicative of a greater problem. The worldview of our current day cannot handle questions of the absolute, because there is a latent fear that to accept—or at least imply—absolutes might mean that we have to acknowledge a God in heaven in whose mind those absolutes exist. Put more simply, to ask, “What if I have a purpose but I can’t find it by looking in the fickle world, but by look outside of the world?” begs the existence of God (a la C.S. Lewis’s conversion story). And this is a problem for us because we naturally do all that we can to marginalize God from our thinking (Ps. 2:3, 10:11, 73:11, 94:7). Then when the media incessantly brands Christians with laughable caricatures (some of which are warranted), we find ourselves entrenched in fears of being perceived as “religious,” so we leave God alone, and just suffer silently.
 

But the need for God is not a need to be religious before it is a need for truth, and truth that can set free (Jn. 8:32). It seems to me that the current popular opinion about suicide is that it sets sufferers free. I don’t think it does, but it might not be for the reason you think. It doesn’t set free because to take one’s own life is to follow functional atheism—a functional atheism that says “There is no God who can lead me out of this suffering”—all the way to its end, which is death, the wage of sin (Rom. 6:23). I’m not trying to say that all suicide sufferers are under God’s judgment. I'm not the final Judge, of course. But I am saying that to refuse to acknowledge a God who promises to reward those who seek him (Heb. 11.6) is the genesis of death itself. I think it is at most atheism and at least a cousin of atheism to take one’s own life. It is not selfish (as Christians often say), but Godless. We should not celebrate suicide. Instead we should weep, and seek the God who gives life-giving truth.


We should also weep even more for the mental fog which we’ve created by acting as though we’re so smart today. We act as though all that we need are our talents and self-expression, and science will tell us the answers to the important questions of life. That might make for good movies and sitcoms, but it doesn’t make for rich real life. That way of living crushes people, like Avicii. In fact, that way of living isn't real life. Like Rich Mullins sang all of those years ago, “We are not as strong as we think we are.” Why? Because we’re not God. 


But there is a God. And if you long for reality, you have to know that it starts with him. You can either live on your own and hope for acceptance by society, until society finds a reason to cancel you (did Bergling assume that his own cancellation was looming?). Or you can turn your attention to the God who cares and reveals. Like it did to King Nebuchadnezzar, your reason will begin to return to you then (Dan. 4:34). If we keep going in our godless epistemology until we’ve deconstructed everything, even deconstruction itself, what will be left? 


The God who was there all along, with life in his hands. Only let us not wait until the end of deconstruction to find out. There's too much life to live with the God who cares. 

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