. . . . . but I
don’t know.
Within hours of finding out about Matt’s death it became
very clear how suicide demands unrelentingly to be answered—asking its nagging
questions--did I do enough? Did I
do it right? … Did I say the right
thing? What if had…. ? What
if I hadn’t?
So, that I said to Matt once--- while we were walking
together on an early summer day entirely like this-- what I’d like to say now--
this is something that I am thankful for….
It takes a weight off, but it also places another weight on
my soul.
Matt had recently shared really heavy parts of his childhood
history…
… and as we were walking on that early summer day, he was
telling me what a failure he was…..
and how there was no hope and he kept trying to do better and couldn’t and I said something like:
You know I really think you are one of the best people I
have ever known.
His love of Rachel had implanted in him a deep love of
theology and apologetics and at this moment I appealed to a passage of C.S.
Lewis’s in Mere Christianity. In it Lewis is making a case for our great
surprise on Judgment Day.
Lewis goes on to argue that
Some people that we take to be the very best kind of people.
Our extraordinary moral athletes….
They will shown to be morally average.
Their virtues really more the product of good luck, good
upbringings, and good temperaments—more God’s gift to them than their gift to
God.
I re-read the passage that I referenced that day this
morning.
Lewis goes on to write:
But if you are person-poisoned by a wretched upbringing
in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels-saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual
perversion-nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex
that makes you snap at your best friends-do
not despair. He knows all about
it. You are one of the poor whom
He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you
are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One
day (perhaps in another
world, but perhaps far
sooner than that) he will fling it on the
scrap-heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us
all-not least yourself: for you
have learned
your driving in a hard school. (Some of the last
will be first and some of
the first will be last.)
On the day I told Matt that the rest of us at Junia House
were really pretty morally average.
And that he was pretty morally
extraordinary and that was just the fact of the matter.
We all have to pick ourselves up after some devastating loss
or another….
….pick ourselves up after some failure that makes us doubt
that we have much to offer the world….
In the brief time that I knew Matt I witnessed him rising
from such devastations 20-30-70 times.
Sometimes it seemed almost daily.
I simply don’t know anyone who tried so hard or struggled so
much.
I can’t really blame him for not being able to pick himself up
one more time.
But, I really, really, really wish that he had.
He was such a good friend.
Matt was with me every single day in the months after my Mom
died. We planted a small tomato garden and he helped me take the kids to
Simeon's soccer games (pulling Jo and Sim in the wagon).
We frequented the local thrift shop. Matt would buy so many clothes. I can’t even estimate how many pairs of
Black shorts he owned.
He was fabulous with our kids. When he played with them—-- he always reminded me a wee bit
of the Cat in the Hat.
It is hard to imagine that this world is no longer blessed
with all that wonderful, anarchic energy.
That Matt will never approach our kids with another good
game that he knows. ….
Or Doug with some new scheme.
That he won’t ask me one more time what I think about the
“problem of evil”
Or some other theological question dripping with so much
real world pain…..
God, I hope that is all resolved now for Matt and better
than either Matt or I could have imagined….
better than Lewis imagined.
That he has been flung into a world pulsating with endless
possibilities, pulsating with that incredibly thrilling gift for newness and
new beginnings that he had.
The kind of world that Matt so desperately needed and so
deeply deserved.
