About a month ago, a young friend of mine committed suicide. She was the 19 year old daughter of a couple I’ve known for over 30 years. She began to have symptoms of schizophrenia during her first year of college, made a suicide attempt, and after a few weeks in the hospital she was released. She then went to a cliff above the ocean near Santa Cruz and leaped to her death.
All of us who knew her were shocked that such a vibrant, positive, and beautiful young person could make such a choice – could be so tormented that suicide seemed the only option for relief. She didn’t deserve the misery and death she suffered.
Another of my old friends from Santa Cruz was particularly disturbed by this terrible news. He cried on and off for days, and then, on a Sunday morning, he walked to Quaker meeting in Ottawa, Canada, where he now lives. He’s an occasional visitor to “Meeting”, sitting in silence as others, one by one, rise to speak when the Spirit moves them. There is no sermon, no liturgy, in Quaker worship. Only the simple words that the Spirit inspires Quakers to share.
My friend had walked a long way to the Meeting House, thinking the exercise would calm his soul. So as he sat in the silence, he was getting thirsty. Finally the Spirit moved him to speak – something he’s only felt a few times in many years of visiting Quaker meetings. He’s a big guy with a booming voice, so his utterance must have been impressive.
He got up and said he was thirsty. He said that most places that have speakers have podiums, and that on the podium is usually a glass of water. But Quaker meetings have no podium, no glass of water. He said he wanted to see a glass of water on the table in the middle of the Meeting House, next to the Bible and the guest register, in case anybody needed it. He said he could imagine the water, he could imagine how it would feel to drink it, in his thirst.
The glass of water that wasn’t there was like God, he said. You can’t see God. He’s not there on the table waiting for you. You want God. You can imagine what it would be like to know God, to have God. It’s like being thirsty for a glass of water. He told the meeting that our young friend Kelsey must have been thirsty, too – so thirsty that she got desperate and jumped into the ocean.
And then he sat down.
Silence. He was afraid he had frightened them, or confused them. But then, from behind him, there was a tap on his shoulder, and he turned. An elderly woman offered him a glass of water.
He told me this story, surprised at himself for having been moved to speak at that meeting. He felt that his words had somehow not been his own.
My friend doesn’t read the Bible, so he was surprised when I recited to him a series of stories from scripture that reflected what he had said in the Quaker meeting. The Psalmist prayed to God: “my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is” (Psalm 63). Jesus asked a woman at a well for a drink of water, and then offered her a kind of water she could drink and never be thirsty again. Jesus told his followers that if they offered even a drink of water to the least of their brothers and sisters, they would have offered it to him. And Jesus, on the cross, cried: “I thirst”.
“Did I hear all those stories without remembering them?” my friend asked me. “I bet not,” I said. “I think that the Spirit that moved you to speak at Quaker meeting was the same Spirit that moved the writers of the Bible to come up with these stories in the first place.”
We yearn for depth-psychological and depth-spiritual relief from our thirst – our thirst for God, for meaning, for purpose, for wholeness, for completeness. A thirst for living water to soften the dried tongue. Living water to revive the parched soul. Our dear young friend in Santa Cruz leaped toward it, and, by some mysterious and unearned fate, she died. My friend in Ottawa thirsted for it, and, by some mysterious and unearned grace, he lived. May our young friend’s death be a paradox that gifts us with an awareness of our deeper thirst. May her death open the wellsprings of our tears, so that living water may flow, so that those she leaves behind may drink.
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