The Lifesaving Church

Faith Communities and Suicide Prevention

Rachael A. Keefe

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780827221833
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"There's so much silence around suicide in the church that it is quite literally killing us." --Rachael Keefe

Would you know how to respond if the person sitting next to you in your pew was contemplating suicide? Every year, millions of people engage in suicidal activity, including those in our faith communities. Yet the Church remains largely silent around the topics of mental health, depression, and suicide prevention. How can you and your faith community be prepared to recognize and respond to those struggling for their very lives in your church?

In The Lifesaving Church, pastor Rachael Keefe shatters the taboo of suicide by sharing her own painful story of life-long depression and suicidality--and how her various faith communities responded, for better and for worse. Opening a window into her suicidal behaviors as a young person, Keefe helps us recognize the signs and struggles of those who suffer silently. Reminding us of the Church's call to be the Body of Christ for each other, Keefe empowers us to recognize the hurting in our communities and recover the lifesaving message of the Gospel-- forgiveness, acceptance and love--that helped her to heal.

With chapters on how to educate your church in suicide prevention, group study reflections around the common questions surrounding suicide, and specific resources, scriptures, and prayers for clergy, suicide loss survivors, and those struggling with suicidality, The Lifesaving Church is critical reading for faith communities seeking abundant life for all of its members.

Chapter 1: The Body of Christ Is Suicidal

My God, my God why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from helping me, from the

words of my groaning? —Psalm 22:1

On February 13, 1983, when I was 15 I tried to kill myself. It was the next day before anyone knew that I had swallowed a potentially lethal combination of medications. Later, people assumed that my actions were mere adolescent drama—perhaps because I had no date for Valentine’s Day, or had broken up with a boy, or the usual things said to minimize adolescent pain. It wasn’t any of these things. No, it wasn’t dating drama that made me want to die. It was the rest of my life.

My problem was not unusual. I lived in a very unhappy household and I saw no way out. My mother had her own struggles and she simply did not know what to do with a sensitive child. Her motto was “No Blood, No Tears,” and I was a child who cried very easily. By the time I was 15, though, I had learned not to cry so much, if at all. And I had begun to fear that if I started crying I would never stop, for the pain I was carrying within me was bigger than everything else in my experience. Given that this pain was also a secret, then my desire to die, to end the pain, was no surprise to me. In seventh grade, I had gotten into a physical fight with another student. Everyone was shocked because I was the model student: I never missed a day of school, I completed all of my assignments, and I never caused any problems. That day, in seventh grade art class, I finally acted on my feelings. I was always being picked on, made fun of, and bullied. Unlike most students, I liked art class and I was pretty good at it. Then one kid said something mocking me to another kid and, without thinking, I walked up to him and shoved him. He responded by punching me in the face. That was it. I was hurt, and horrified by what I had done.

After that I was referred to the guidance counselor. I told her about how my mother drank from Thanksgiving until New Year’s, and about the hours I spent alone with my older brother who was abusive. I told her how I essentially had no friends in school and how everyone teased me about my clothes, the way I looked, and how weird I was. After meeting with the guidance counselor a few times and trying to tell her about all the pain in my young life, she essentially told me I had PMS and should pay more attention to my feelings around “that time of the month.” She left me feeling more guilty and ashamed than I had been before I met with her. It was several years before I tried to tell anyone else what was happening in my life.

The shame that took hold of me in my middle-school years grew stronger in high school. On the outside, I did everything I was supposed to do. I went to school and did well. I was active in church. I had a steady babysitting job. I made a few friends. The rest of it, I kept to myself. I pretended that none of my home life was real. I figured that the years my brother tormented me by locking me in the closet or in the basement “with the spiders” or out in the snow barefoot or the countless other things he would do for his own amusement weren’t real if I didn’t acknowledge them. The ways in which my mother made me feel stupid, ugly, and unwanted didn’t matter if I got As in school and no one else knew what my life at home was like. Somehow, I started to believe that if I didn’t say something out loud, it did not exist.

I played this game of pretend with myself until my sophomore year of high school. I desperately wanted to be in the drama club. In my freshman year, I had a crush on a boy who was one of the stars of the club, and I determined that I would get to be in it, too. In my sophomore year I managed to get a part in the fall musical even though I truly could not sing or dance. I quit my regular babysitting job so I could be in the play. I stayed after school to work on the sets and that would meld into evening practice. It wasn’t long before I made the strange discovery that I did not need to eat.

I’d long ago stopped eating much, if anything, for breakfast. By middle school, I had stopped eating lunch in school and would just buy milk. In elementary school, my mother packed me a lunch—which I did eat, without thinking much about it. However, in fifth grade I started to be aware that I was bigger than my classmates. To my ten-year-old brain, being bigger, weighing more, meant that I was fat. This sense of being fat increased over the next few years. So as my eating habits were changed by peer influences, my underlying perception of being fat became much more dominant. I stopped eating lunch in sixth grade, which didn’t seem problematic to me. We qualified for reduced lunch, which meant that I bought lunch at school but was made fun of for eating the school food. The simplest course of action was to stop eating, since I already thought I was fat. In ninth grade, I would eat something at lunch, but not exactly a meal. When my schedule changed and I didn’t know anyone who shared my lunch period, I just went to the library instead of the cafeteria. By the time I got to tenth grade, I seldom ate breakfast and never ate lunch. I would eat cookies while babysitting and I would eat dinner. However, when I had drama club, I didn’t even have to eat dinner. Sometimes I would go with a friend and get a sandwich or a donut, but there were often days on which I would eat nothing at all.

It wasn’t long before people noticed that I had lost some weight. Many would tell me how great I looked, how grown up. The funny thing is that I was never overweight, and people had already thought I was four or five years older than I was. But it didn’t matter. I liked the power I felt over my body. I liked the feeling of control. The thought of disappearing was one that pleased me. Until the fear and guilt set in.

When the play ended and I had to return to my “normal” life, I discovered that I had become very afraid to eat. But I also had the need to hide my internal struggle. As a result, when I had to eat dinner with my mother, I would. And then I would vomit. Then I would feel ashamed. I knew that what I was doing was wrong, but I could not stop it. I loved the sense of power and control over my body while I knew, with startling certainty, that starving myself and purging was very wrong. Somehow, though, what I thought of as control over my body had suddenly taken control of me. I was powerless to stop engaging in the cycle of starvation, binging, and purging.

Now we get to February 13, 1983. I was miserable. I felt trapped. Everything seemed at a distance. I lived in a fog in which nothing felt real except the pain I was in. Some days I wasn’t even sure how real that was. It was a Sunday afternoon. I had come home from church and determined yet again that I would stop starving, or eating and purging. So I ate what was probably a normal meal but seemed overwhelming to me. And then I purged. When I opened the bathroom closet to get a towel, I saw all the medication bottles. There weren’t a lot of them and I didn’t know what they all were and I didn’t know which were current and which were not. I just took several from each bottle. I didn’t want to take all of any of them because I didn’t want anyone to know what I had done before I died.

Then I went through the rest of the day as usual, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. I’m sure I went to youth group that night and came home to finish my homework. Then I went to bed feeling really sad and angry because I couldn’t even kill myself right. I was worthless. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t not eat. I couldn’t even die. Maybe God wanted me to suffer…

I woke up the next morning, earlier than my alarm. I was going to be sick. I managed to get down the stairs to the bathroom, even though everything was distorted. The walls were at weird angles and my arms and legs were ten feet long and everything was moving. I somehow managed to get to the bathroom to throw up but there was nothing in my stomach. The last thing I remember is thinking I should tell my mother that I was too sick to go to school.

The next thing I knew, I was in the emergency room at the local hospital. Doctors and nurses were yelling at me, asking me what I had taken and where I had gotten it. I had a vague notion that they thought I’d overdosed on illegal drugs. I wanted to escape back into the darkness, back where it was quiet and I didn’t have to face the anxious, angry faces hovering around me. (If you or someone you know is feeling like this, see Appendix D: “Resources for Those Struggling with Suicidality.”)

Saving Church

The day I tried to kill myself was a turning point. It marked the end of my passive acceptance of pain. As difficult and as complicated as it was, I began the journey of recovery the week I spent in the hospital following my overdose. It was by no means a smooth or easy path, and it was not short: it has taken me a lifetime to undo the lessons of my childhood. However, from that day on, I knew that I was not walking the path alone.

John, who was the associate pastor of the Federated Church of Hyannis, my childhood church, came to visit me in the emergency room. He came that first day and he kept coming back. I felt no judgment from him. He wanted to help. He listened and did not leave me alone. Even after I was discharged, he came to see me regularly. Somewhere along the way, I promised that I would not try to kill myself again, a promise I kept with some difficulty.

For years I have said that John saved my life. He was the first person who embodied Christ’s love for me. He didn’t want anything from me except, perhaps, that I not die. He cared without the expectation that I would give him anything or do anything for him. There was no condition on his showing up. I needed that more than he probably knew, certainly more than I knew.

It wasn’t John alone who saved my life, though: it was the whole congregation. I had been going to the church since I was in third grade. However, it was only after the overdose that I began to feel a real sense of caring from the congregation. Before that, I was accepted, sure. I was the kid who was dropped off early for Sunday school and worship, and picked up late. The same for choir practice and youth group. I was always dropped off early and picked up late, so much so that it became easier for the youth leaders to drive me home than to wait for my mother to come and get me.

My mother wasn’t a fan of church. She had been raised Catholic and held a lot of anger toward the church for reasons she never chose to share with me. She thought religion was a “crutch for weak people.” On the other hand, she didn’t see how she could say no when her eight-year-old daughter asked to go. In the mid-1970s on Cape Cod, most kids still went to church, catechism classes, or Hebrew school. I stood out enough for being taller, wearing handmade clothes, needing glasses, having divorced parents, and so many other things. I thought church would make me normal, or at least enough like my classmates that life would be easier.

At first, I went to church with my mother’s friend who had two children around my age. They would pick me up and take me to church for Sunday school and children’s choir. After a while, they moved and started attending another church, so my mother begrudgingly drove me. I made friends and people accepted my presence. I liked church. My mother did not, but she had enough Catholicism in her that she couldn’t say no to my going. She did make it a point on many occasio...

Table of contents

• Praise for The Lifesaving Church
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Body of Christ Is Suicidal
• Chapter 2: The Body of Christ Holds Secrets and Shame
• Chapter 3: The Body of Christ Is Fearful
• Chapter 4: The Body of Christ Is Resilient
• Chapter 5: The Body of Christ Is Beloved
• Chapter 6: The Body of Christ Is Broken…and Whole
• Chapter 7: The Body of Christ Is a Lifesaver
• Epilogue: The Big Questions
• Appendix A: Signs of Suicide Risk
• Appendix B: Resources for Clergy
• Appendix C: Resources for Laypeople
• Appendix D: Resources for Those Struggling with Suicidality
• Appendix E: Resources for Suicide Loss Survivors
• Appendix F: Scripture Verses and Stories That Emphasize Hope
• Appendix G: Prayers
• About the Author