The Life You Save or Something Like It

I've been thinking about suicide lately.  Not in a way that should worry you.  I basically blame the Fray for being on every radio station all the time.

It's my normal radio station's yearly fundraiser, and I already give every month, and it's painful to listen to people try so hard, so I've been getting some variety in my commute.  These new radio experiments have yielded dubious results, such as the transition from "It's Raining Men" to "How to Save a Life."  Mind-melting, really.

Anyway, it made me think of a great song by the Newsboys called "Elle G" from their 1994 album Going Public.  I think I loved that song even before I knew what it was really about, before I realized the clever play on words, maybe even before that boy in my class committed suicide.  That was a rough year; several people I knew died of illnesses or accidents, but that was my first encounter with suicide.

"Elle G" somehow perfectly captures that gaping emptiness regret stamps into you even when you never did anything less than kind to the person who committed suicide.  It seems to capture that huge hole left behind in the people who really had a relationship with the person who took that premature exit.  It captures the way you miss the person, similar but altogether different from the way you miss people who die in some tragic accident.  It also captures a bit of the raging theological argument surrounding suicide in the church. 

Did you know that traditionally suicides weren't buried in the consecrated parts of the cemetery (along with mothers who died in childbirth)?  As if where you were buried had any bearing on your eternal destination.  My anger is for the people who thought it did and did their own preliminary division of sheep and goats that arrogantly.

I remember encountering this in the movie Luther; I think it was one of the things that really cheesed Martin Luther off.  It also seems to cheese the Newsboys off.  Normally, the Newsboys can be fun and twisted, sarcastic and constructively snarky about things in the church that cheese them off.  They put the spotlight on the stupid in clever but obvious ways (a la Steve Taylor, someone they worked with a lot in the early years). 

It's surprising, really, how gently they treat the issue in the song.  Oh, they wrestle with the anger of those left behind, but they plead with those who would condemn people who commit suicide by asking the simple question, "How can we return that which we never did earn?"  They talk the longing to see the person, ask them why, ask them what they could have done.  They grasp God's promise to overcome evil with good and acknowledge that they don't know the answer to any of these questions.  "We haven't a hope beyond Your grace," they say.  The song is a lament, full of pain, and it ends oddly, sort of inexplicably hopeful and with a sort of "It Is Well with My Soul" conviction in the wake of devastation.  (The story behind that hymn is pretty powerful, too.)

It's a beautiful and powerful elegy.  It gets stuck in my head every time I hear it, and it makes me think.  Not bad for a pop song.