Can you actually HATE God ?

There’s an old Catholic saying that goes, “If you’ve never cursed God, you’ve never known Him.”

But is that God, or only an idea of God, that you hate ?

I’m not sure, the Prophet’s often felt cursed by God and let Him know it, and perhaps this wrestling with God is part of what makes us human.

After all, if God created all this mess, isn’t He ultimately responsible ?

I’ve heard the apologetics : perhaps God isn’t all-powerful, or at least not how we think of power, perhaps God had to divest Himself of His power, maybe God has a morally sufficient reason to allow suffering, maybe there’s an entire level of reality and conflict we can scarcely conceive of, perhaps we ourselves WANT this reality - one where we can act against the Tao of the Universe to do what we wish, but that therefore brings death and decay into the universe, perhaps it’s up to us to sanctify the world with God’s grace, and only our refusal to bring creation to God causes the world to hurl into chaos, how can our small minds comprehend these mysteries, let alone pass judgement on them ? And on and on.

I can only say that Christ is who I worship. I worship the God who hates death, who is scandalized by evil, and who weeps at injustice. Christ came to save us from all that. God Himself became man, died for us, grafting human nature onto Divine nature to raise us up out of this evil world.

This is the inexplicable power that, however rare, we come across when confronted by real acts of love and charity. So often I’ve been about to tilt into the abyss, and cried out in prayer, and a force wells up and rescues me from plunging into utter despair.  We all know this power exists.

We know God loves us, against all the evidence of evil, because He sent a light into this dark world to illuminate His true nature - that He is love. We can know that God is love by participating in His life in the Eucharist and liturgical rituals, shaped and oriented toward this revelation until it lives inside us.

We can trust the experiences of the saints, who have committed their lives over to this Mysterious power. Their lives, abundant in fruitful works of great love, all testify to these truths.

The rest is intellectual theologizing. Why does God allow suffering? What happened in the Fall? No one knows. 

There are stories that point, I think, to something true - that we live in some kind of metaphysical catastrophe, in Genesis with its two creation versions - the first being perfect with no death, that are trying to tell us something, that this world with death was never God’s intention, and the author of evil lies in another Power, an enemy of God.

Christianity is not a philosophy, not a series of propositions to affirm or deny, it is a Way of life. Truth is a person. Christianity is participating in the life of God, getting to know Him, being fitted for a new existence after death to live with Him.

What we do know is this power can rescue us from death, and it lays out a way, the Cross, to accept the senseless affliction of existence, deny ourselves, and put ourselves under judgement.

This is the power I worship - love in Christ, foolishly, against realty, even against God Himself if He refuses to give back my loved ones and wash them of all affliction. I stand by the power that condemns all death and suffering, and if I were to find God is part of those powers then I would condemn Him too.

God is utterly transcendent, every concept of Him inadequate and false. We know very little of just what the hell is going on in this universe. 

 I end with a few passages by possibly the greatest living theologian, David Bentley Hart :

“There lies in this expectation (of the resurrection), necessarily, a kind of ultimate defiance of “reality,” and even of God if he will not raise the dead… "

"If, say, the Jewish child who choked to death in a cloud of Zyklon-B is not restored to a life that is more than life, is not given joy and eternity in his own person, is not given back, then why should we care what private intimations of transcendence Jesus might have experienced on the cross? And why should we want to find ourselves embraced in the arms of the demiurge whose world thrives in the death of children?"

“Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. 

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy.”

What's so bad about Modernity ?

Q) what is so bad about secularisation?



A) John Milbank :

"Secularisation is bad, because the death of man necessarily follows upon the death of God. Without reference to God, our sense of the reality of mind and of the ethical tends to atrophy.



Ordinary language is saturated with assumptions of the reality of the spiritual dimension - good, evil, intentionality, responsibility, forgiveness, grace, prayer, and so on. 

Yet we are increasingly governed by secular, scientific assumptions, which imply that this language is simply epiphenomenal "gossip". 



Consequently, the masters of an impersonal discourse concerning sheer material reality taken as the real truth increasingly assume command.

Such a denigration of the sense medium, in which the majority of people "swim", eventually renders democracy and respect for freedom impossible, even though these are the very values that secularity claims to respect most.”

Modernity is not a specific time. Or practical science. And there has always been technology. Modernity is a world view, a story. As Stanley Hauerwas puts it :

The project of modernity was to produce people who believe they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story. Such a story is called a story of freedom – institutionalized economically as capitalism and politically as democracy.

Fr Stephen Freeman notes :

"The so-called breakdown of morality in the modern world is not a moral problem. What has broken down is not morality, but any agreed notion about the nature of the world. Our perceptions of reality itself have shattered into disparate fragments. 

When we lose a common understanding of reality itself, all that is left is bald assertion.

.... In the baseless morality of modernity, those with whom we disagree are not simply wrong: they are evil. This is the only conclusion that can be reached when what is right is established solely through choice. If what is good is only good because I choose it, then choosing otherwise must be seen as evil and named as such.

Macintrye argues that we learn to behave in a way that others can perceive as intelligible only when everyone shares a narrative of acting toward a shared idea of the good. Also, this is gotten to by shared living practices, through, 

“constructing and sustaining forms of community directed towards the shared achievement of those common goods without which the ultimate human good cannot be achieved. 

Liberal political societies are characteristically committed to denying any place for a determinative conception of the human good in their public discourse, let alone allowing that their common life should be grounded in such a conception.”

MODERNITY is, I'd say, in its essence, a project of detaching moral, legal, and governmental reasoning from any authority transcendent of the state or the individual. 



It is the project of an ethics conformed not to divine justice but to human reason and popular consensus; of a politics authorized not by divine ordinance but by the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state; and of a model of freedom based not on the perfection of human nature but on the unconstrained liberty of individual will.



The three legs of it during Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, is when, essentially the supernatural was replaced by 
an ideological, social, political, moral, and metaphysical inventions.

Metaphysically it involves nominalism over scholasticism, - the idea that the universe is composed of mere individuals as opposed to real relations and universals...Petrarch, the invention of the individual, Italian humanism etc

Michael Gillespie notes that,

“...it is vain to think that an alienated, atomized person can create in themselves a personality out of the muck of consumerism and mass media. Modernity tells us that we can form our own personality with tattoos, body modification, consumerist consumption, and status objects like automobiles.

Ultimately, what is created is not human, however, but subhuman: one’s personality is merely a combination of external signifiers devoid of inner content. Ironically.... the end result is a kind of perfect conformity.”

We must “free” (ie destroy) ourselves from all elements of ones-self which are “accidents of nature” to be “authentic.” Everything unchosen - our race, nationality, religion (unless self-chosen, no infant baptisms) ancestry, even sex - the State must step in to free the “individual” (which didn’t previously actually exist) from the contingencies of his birth and community.

Persons, as opposed to individuals, are essentially relational, existing in a web of thick mutually enforcing obligations and loyalties.

“The person differs from the individual by the fact that he does not hold his life as his own, he knows he is the bearer of values which transcend himself, so that he has worth only as their servant and to them he should be willing, if necessary, to sacrifice himself.”

To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.

It matters not if the goals are noble or virtuous, what matters is that they are freely chosen by the individual.

John Safranek, in The Myth of Liberalism notes the difference between our modern notion of freedom, freedom from constant, with the ancient notion of freedom for something :

“Classic/medieval freedom was based on reason, logos, not desire, on what is, not on will. Freedom is based on reason, not desire. 

To understand what is being said here, two more points need to be recalled. The first is that, according to Plato, desire, by itself, is unlimited. This unlimitedness is a good thing in itself for that is what desire, as such, is. 

The second point is that, according to Aristotle, the purpose of virtue is to rule our desires and so achieve our end, not just our desires. 

Desires allow no “end,” only more desires. In themselves, desires are good things but they are to be ruled by reason. The difference between modern and classic/medieval thought, then, has to do with where we locate the center of our being: in desire, which is unlimited, or in reason, which limits or rules desire because it knows the end which desires serve.

Modern liberalism seeks, at every essential element of what-it-means-to-be-a-human-being, to substitute desire for reason to explain what a person is.

Once desires or pleasures are upheld as the fundamental good, morality (the self-rule of our desires) seems superfluous…. If morality is dispensable, then so are the political and legal precepts that it grounds.”

Patrick Deenan identifies Liberalism as the philosophy of modernity,

“Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility…contrary to the belief that we are by nature relational, social and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a thick set of moral norms, above all, self-limitation and virtue.

It dismissed the idea that there are wrong or bad choices, and thereby rejected the accompanying social structures and institutions that were ordered to restrain the temptation toward self-centered calculation.

Liberalism thus begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human relationships…becomes increasingly subject to the criterion of whether or not they have been chosen, and chosen upon the basis of their service to rational self-interest....without broader considerations of the impact one’s choices have upon the community—present and future—and of one’s obligations to the created order and ultimately to God.”

It is a subject worthy of reflection that the common “culture” we share even now is largely the product of a culture industry,

“…insofar as liberal freedom is atomistic and precludes the claim of others on the property that is my person, the state tasked with securing this liberty will exist to protect me from God’s commandments, the demands of other persons, so-called intermediary institutions, and, ultimately, even nature itself. The liberal state then becomes the mediator of all human relations, charged with creating in reality the denatured individuals heretofore existing only at the theoretical foundations of liberalism.”

- Micheal Hanby.

Ultimately the State is the final arbitrater of reality. It can define marriage, redefine what sorts of things a “man” and “woman” are, or even if such things exist.

Stanley Huawras questions just what sort of freedom this has brought :

“The left and the right are joined by the common project of increasing personal freedoms, even if the result is the atomization of our lives which makes impossible any account of our lives as having a narrative unity. Ironically, societies committed to securing the freedom of the individual end up making that same individual subject to impersonal bureaucratic procedures."

Colegro studied Giambattista Vico and found that he identifies three customs of all nations:

All have some religion

All contract solemn marriages

All bury the dead

These, therefore, are the basis of the first three principles of his New Science. He points out that they are reinforced by their religious practices. The consequences of not doing so are, according to Vico:

Otherwise, the world would return to a brutish state and again become a wilderness. Now the facts of human societies can be reformulated as principles:

Divine Providence

The moderation of passions through marriage

The immortality of human souls attested by burial

Just to be clear, Vico again emphasizes:
"These are the boundaries of human reason and transgressing them means abandoning our humanity."

Of course, modernity in its fullness is the exact opposite:

Man to be fully human requires freedom from God, the free expression of passions, and, especially, sexuality, is for the modern man human liberation.

Faith. What is it ?

"God is not exterior evidence, but the secret call within us.” 

 - Olivier Clement 

Faith. What is it ? There’s the perspective from Biblical theology, Matt Bates puts it like this :

“saving allegiance includes three basic dimensions: mental affirmation that the gospel is true, professed fealty to Jesus alone as the cosmic Lord, and enacted loyalty through obedience to Jesus as the king”

And I can see that, faith being basically loyalty, as Paul says, “I have been true to the vision” - and indeed, when wracked by doubt, I think, this is such a beautiful vision, that there is a God madly in love with us, desperate to embrace us and make us whole that, even if it turns out to be false in the end, it is a vision worthy of being true to.

One must, little by little, believe God, trust His word, rely upon his presence, depend securely on his promises.

But, if I had to recommend one book, it’d be Rowan Williams Tokens of Trust :

“[Knowing God]... call it love, yes, only that can sound too emotional, or call it faith, and that can sound too cerebral. And what is it? Both, and neither... [its] the decision to be faithful, the patient refusal of easy gratifications... of Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane and on the cross, that bloody crown of love and faith. 

That is how I learn finally of a God who will not be fitted into my catergories and expectations... the living truth too great for me to see, trusting that He will see and judge and yet not turn me away... That is the mercy which will never give us, or even let us be content with less than itself and less than the truth... we have seen the truth enacted in our own world as mercy, grace and hope, as Jesus, the only-begotten, full of grace and truth..” 

“At the heart of the desperate suffering there is in the world, suffering we can do nothing to resolve or remove for good, there is an indestructible energy making for love. If we have grasped what Jesus is about, we can trust that this is what lies at the foundation of everything.”

Rowan Williams Tokens of Trust

It’s a great risk of love, but no relationship can start, and then deepen, until we put more and more trust in the other…

It’s also to take refuge in God, not idols, food, books, idea’s, dogmas, Priests…

And it’s also to anchor the meaning of our lives in Christ - if we get sick, or fall in love, are we interpreting these things through the person of Christ ?

In this short article Rowan Williams says, 

“Faith is not about what public opinion decides, and it is not about how we happen to be feeling about ourselves. It is the response people make to what presents itself as a reality - a reality which makes claims on you. Here is something so extraordinary that it interrupts our world; here is something that makes you "turn aside to see," that stops you short. Faith begins in the moment of stopping, you could say: the moment when you can't just walk on as you did before.

But even more challengingly, it is something whose claims involve change and even loss. If this is really what it seems to be, ideas, habits, hopes all change, and it is a change that is going to be painful…

When people respond to outrageous cruelty and violence, with a hard-won readiness to understand and be reconciled, few if any can bring themselves to say that all this is an illusion.

The parents who have lost a child to gang violence; the wife who has seen her husband killed in front of her by an anti-Christian mob in India; the woman who has struggled for years to comprehend and accept the rape and murder of her sister….in their willingness to explore the new humanity of forgiveness and rebuilding relations - without for a moment making light of their own or other people's nightmare suffering, or trying to explain it away - these are the ones who make us see, who oblige us to turn aside and look at Jesus, who asks of us initially just to stop and reflect, to stay for a moment in the light that allows us to see ourselves honestly and to see the world differently.

That is the heart of it: seeing ourselves honestly; seeing the world differently. That is where faith begins, beyond the answers of a system, or the disciplines of a ritual, or the requirements of a moral code. These have their place; and those who spend time in the company of Jesus will find themselves working out all these things in the light of the scriptural witness to the new life. But it all starts with that turning aside to see.”

Of course, for this faith to make sense, it must be
connected with the practices that make it intelligible: prayer, the sacraments, and the virtues. 

In a chapter entitled “Why Theologians Must Pray for Release from Exile,” the theologian Dr. D’Costa suggests that “prayer is the necessary condition to secure the objectivity of theology, because theology cannot be done with intellectual rigor outside the context of a love affair with God and God’s community. The formal object of theology is God, and, like other disciplines that require practices and virtues constitutive for knowing the object of their investigation, theology requires prayer.”

Dru Johnson says :

“our knowing is connected to what we do with our bodies. We don’t know as disembodied minds; without bodies and the tools by which we extend our bodies, we couldn’t know at all. Further, we don’t come to know in isolation but in community—specifically, in communal rites. We practice rites to know.”


James K.A.Smith has asks the important question :

"What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers? What if you are defined not by what you know but by what you desire? What if the center and seat of the human person is found not in the heady regions of the intellect but in the gut-level regions of the heart? 

Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us.”

Which is why I had to go to an Orthodox Church with “thick practices” to shape me, to orient me towards knowing God, in a community. I had to preform faith. It’s relational knowledge, you have to act your way into this knowledge, live it.

Sometimes God drowns with us

Like the Movie star Hero diving into the water, we expect God to rescue us. Sometimes, though, He leaps in, clutches our flailing body - and sinks down to the watery depths along with us... 

I know I’m in hell. Christ is there too, I believe. He is drowning with me... dying with me... within me...and if within me, then His resurrection, I hope, will be born within me as well.

...Until then, I carry a tiny corpse of Christ in my heart..

Art by myself - Cosmic Death Whale

Suicidal ? A free book on God's path to Sanity

I’m dying. That’s how it feels. I need help. There is none. You know, the are monks on Mt. Athos that say the Christian’s afflicted with depression are martyrs. After Robin Williams committed suicide, many said he chose it. He chose to foist that pain on his family and friends. I doubt that’s how he saw it. David Foster Wallace, the brilliant writer of the novel Infinite Jest, who ended up hanging himself after going off his anti-depressant medication, has an insight into suicide :

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

     The Christian response to the wish to die is shocking: You’re right. You ought to wish to die. Don’t listen to people who say, “You have so much to live for!” Most likely, if you’re suicidal, you don’t. You are probably horribly isolated in the hell of a tormented awareness unable to make meaningful contact with another human being. You’re in hell. Trapped. Spiritually speaking, you’re already dead.

There’s an incredible book that’s inspired many Christian circles, especially the Orthodox, by Dee Pennock - God’s Path to Sanity. I urge anyone to get it; here is her take on suicide :

      Suicidal urges can occur in individuals whose willfulness has carried them into such painful depression and hopelessness that they become enveloped in bitterness and a persistent hatred of life. They see no escape except death. So they desperately want to die. I met a young woman like that, hours after her second (and last) attempt to commit suicide had been thwarted by some of her children. All she wanted, she wailed, was to die. “Do it,” I urged her. “It’s the greatest of all adventures! I can’t tell you what a marvelous thing it is when you do it in the right way. And I know, because I’m into it myself.”   

     Laughing through streams of tears, she said, “You’re some kind of friend, telling me to go ahead and kill myself.”   She showed intelligence in disagreeing with those who argued that her life as she was living it was worthwhile, and that she should go on like that. The wish to die when life is full of pain from our passions is always intelligent—provided, of course, that you die in the right way. (As people used to say, “You have to wake up, and die right.”) That’s what Paul meant by sorrowing unto repentance—die to your old life by repenting your way into a divine lift out of its misery.

     
     With some exceptions, suicidal urges are a sign that a person is spiritually dead. What does it mean to be spiritually dead? It means to be carnal, like Esau. It means to be concerned with everything that’s temporary and nothing that is eternal, as the fathers say. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace (Rom. 8:6). Dying, through repentance, to the passions that cause spiritual death is the God-given course that suicidal persons (and the rest of us as well) are meant to take, and can later rejoice in taking.   People who are suicidal aren’t trying to move into what death really is. They’re already in that death. It’s a preview of hell, and they can’t bear it. Death, rightly speaking, is being separated from God, explains Maximus the Confessor. What they’re desperate to do is die out of that death, and into Life. They’ve mistaken spiritual death for Life; it’s that spiritual death that they can’t stand.   

       
     Feeling a need to die to it somehow, to make some sort of change, is profoundly right. The saints recognize an instinctive intelligence in it. It would not be intelligent to want to stay in our fallen state and remain deadened by passions. John Chrysostom, in fact, rebukes people who haven’t the sensibility to despair when, being spiritually dead, they ought to despair. “If, therefore, present existence is but darkness, let us flee from it, let us flee by retuning our mind and our heart. Let us have nothing in common with the enemy of God”

      
    So those who are thinking of suicide want to wait just a minute—long enough to learn about the great adventure of repentance. An adventure? Yes, because of the soul-changing discoveries ahead. The first step is praying, for long periods of time, to be delivered from the ignorance of Pride and to receive self-knowledge. This prayer very soon brings some relief by clearly revealing errors in one’s thinking—like the errors of self-importance and thinking we know best about everything. Then we’re moved to pray for deliverance from those proud thoughts that have been shown to us. To climb out of the blindness and ignorance of the old fallen self that have led us into confusion and willfulness, and frustration and anger and depression, we want frequently to pray:   Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from Pride and give me self-knowledge."

This here is the cure to feelings of suicide: this prayer. 

I know, it sounds ludicrous! Beyond absurd. I’m serious. Ask God to deliver you from depression and despair, and expect Him to, because He most certainly will. This isn’t theory, when someone is depressed it takes an incredible amount of strength to turn outward toward God, and not just think about it, but TO ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY PRAY THESE WORDS.

I know it works because I say this prayer. I bought a prayer rope and when I’m driving instead of listening to the radio, out loud I repeat the above prayer. If you found this page it was no coincidence, please, I beg you, say : 

  Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from Pride and give me self-knowledge.

 Another good one is the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner. You will heal. Christ can take hold and rip you right from the gates of hell and hold you in His arms.

  Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from Pride and give me self-knowledge.

Here is the book FREE :

God's Path To Sanity HERE

Or you can download the PDF from the file section from this facebook group :

DEE PENNOCK'S God's Path to Sanity Facebook Group


Here is a Podcast with Dr. Rossi discussing the book

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/healingpresence/path_to_sanity 

The Cure to Suicidal Depression, Free book God's Path to Sanity

This is not the most spiritually loving book I’ve read (that would be Ascetical Homilies of St Isaac the Syrian) or the most insightful, or profound, but it is the book that most helped me with suicidal depression. It is simple, plain prose, from a Christian psychologist, and I offer it here free

God's Path to Sanity

Or you can download the PDF from the file section from this facebook group :

DEE PENNOCK'S God's Path to Sanity Facebook Group

This book made clear my desire to die was correct, but that my suffering was my refusal to be born anew,  openness to relationship was a burden I would not take on, from the book :

"Suicidal urges can occur in individuals whose willfulness has carried them into such painful depression and hopelessness that they become enveloped in bitterness and a persistent hatred of life. They see no escape except death. So they desperately want to die. I met a young woman like that, hours after her second (and last) attempt to commit suicide had been thwarted by some of her children. All she wanted, she wailed, was to die. “Do it,” I urged her. “It’s the greatest of all adventures! I can’t tell you what a marvelous thing it is when you do it in the right way. And I know, because I’m into it myself.”   

     Laughing through streams of tears, she said, “You’re some kind of friend, telling me to go ahead and kill myself.”   She showed intelligence in disagreeing with those who argued that her life as she was living it was worthwhile, and that she should go on like that. The wish to die when life is full of pain from our passions is always intelligent—provided, of course, that you die in the right way. (As people used to say, “You have to wake up, and die right.”) That’s what Paul meant by sorrowing unto repentance—die to your old life by repenting your way into a divine lift out of its misery.

    
     With some exceptions, suicidal urges are a sign that a person is spiritually dead. What does it mean to be spiritually dead? It means to be carnal, like Esau. It means to be concerned with everything that’s temporary and nothing that is eternal, as the fathers say. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace (Rom. 8:6). Dying, through repentance, to the passions that cause spiritual death is the God-given course that suicidal persons (and the rest of us as well) are meant to take, and can later rejoice in taking.   People who are suicidal aren’t trying to move into what death really is. They’re already in that death. It’s a preview of hell, and they can’t bear it. Death, rightly speaking, is being separated from God, explains Maximus the Confessor. What they’re desperate to do is die out of that death, and into Life. They’ve mistaken spiritual death for Life; it’s that spiritual death that they can’t stand.   

        
     Feeling a need to die to it somehow, to make some sort of change, is profoundly right. The saints recognize an instinctive intelligence in it. It would not be intelligent to want to stay in our fallen state and remain deadened by passions. John Chrysostom, in fact, rebukes people who haven’t the sensibility to despair when, being spiritually dead, they ought to despair. “If, therefore, present existence is but darkness, let us flee from it, let us flee by retuning our mind and our heart. Let us have nothing in common with the enemy of God”

      
     So those who are thinking of suicide want to wait just a minute—long enough to learn about the great adventure of repentance. An adventure? Yes, because of the soul-changing discoveries ahead. The first step is praying, for long periods of time, to be delivered from the ignorance of Pride and to receive self-knowledge. This prayer very soon brings some relief by clearly revealing errors in one’s thinking—like the errors of self-importance and thinking we know best about everything. Then we’re moved to pray for deliverance from those proud thoughts that have been shown to us. To climb out of the blindness and ignorance of the old fallen self that have led us into confusion and willfulness, and frustration and anger and depression, we want frequently to pray:   Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from Pride and give me self-knowledge."

Here are the other prayers she gives :

LORD JESUS CHRIST, DELIVER ME FROM PRIDE AND GIVE ME SELF-KNOWLEDGE

LORD JESUS CHRIST, DELIVER ME FROM BELIEVING AND OBEYING IDOLS.

LORD JESUS CHRIST, DELIVER ME FROM SELF-IMPORTANCE AND THINKING I KNOW BEST, AND GIVE ME SELF-KNOWLEDGE.

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from self-justification and show me my sin

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from anger (and hatred), and give me love.

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from willfulness, and bring me into accepting reality.

Lord Jesus Christ, forgive me and deliver me from willfulness, and bring me into living my life according to your will.

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from willfulness, and bring me into accepting and doing your will.

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from Vainglory and give me natural affection.

This here is the cure to feelings of suicide: this prayer. 

I know, it sounds ludicrous! Beyond absurd. I’m serious. Ask God to deliver you from depression and despair, and expect Him to, because He most certainly will. This isn’t theory, when someone is depressed it takes an incredible amount of strength to turn outward toward God, and not just think about it, but TO ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY PRAY THESE WORDS.

I know it works because I say this prayer. I bought a prayer rope and when I’m driving instead of listening to the radio, out loud I repeat the above prayer...


I’ve also appreciated Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung’s insights in her paper Acedia’s Resistance to the Demands of Love: Aquinas on the Vice of Sloth , you can read HERE :

“Acedia’s resentment, listlessness, sullenness, and apathy stem from perceiving oneself as ‘stuck’ in a position (the new) which one does not wholeheartedly endorse but also cannot fully escape 

...acedia as sorrow at the thought of being in relationship with God because of what I will call “the burdens of commitment.” In fact, a symptom of acedia is that one perceives being in a relationship and maintaining it as burdens to be borne. Love and friendship are felt as making demands on us, and acedia resists them as such....

Acedia sorrows over being in a relationship of love to another. The claims of the other, the transformation of the self required, the commitment to maintain the relationship even when this requires sacrificing one’s own desires

...acedia prefers alienation to what it sees as the burdens of commitment.

Acedia, then, is a profound withdrawal into self. Action is no longer perceived as a gift of oneself, as the response to a prior love that calls us, enables our action, and makes it possible. It is seen instead as an uninhibited seeking of personal satisfaction in the fear of “losing” something.

The desire to save one’s “freedom” at any price reveals, in reality, a deeper enslavement to the “self.” There is no longer any room for an abandonment of the self to the other or for the joy of gift; what remains is sadness or bitterness within the one who distances himself from the community and who, being separated from others, finds himself likewise separated from God.

Aquinas traces our surprising, negative response to God’s love— he goes so far as saying we can feel “dislike, horror, and detestation” toward it!—to

“In their reluctance to die to the old self, those with acedia choose slow spiritual suffocation tothe birth pains of new life. They cannot fully accept the only thing that would ultimately bring them joy. They refuse the thing they most desire, and they turn away from the only thing that can bring them life.”

Noting that “acedia is a disdain for that life inside of one that would participate with God,” Michel pinpoints the vice as “a failure to celebrate the image of God in one’s human nature.”

Here is a Podcast with Dr. Rossi discussing the book

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/healingpresence/path_to_sanity