Hope After Suicide, Living for Heaven, and the Morality of Home Renovations

Weekly Notes

Dear Friends,

This week we get back to the Q&A’s. Yay! I have missed doing these. Before I dive into your questions, though, I have two quick pieces of news for you.

First, if you follow me on Instagram, you know this already, but for the rest of you: the Chapmans are moving! Not far. Just 29 miles down the road back to my old neighborhood in Steubenville, Ohio, where I lived for 15 years before moving to Pittsburgh. I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks (maybe next week), but we are very sad and very excited all at the same time. Our house went on the market yesterday, and we have an Open House this Saturday, so prayers for a quick sale (and a bidding war, while you’re at it) would be greatly appreciated.

Second, I can finally announce the top secret project for Word on Fire that I am working on (and which will be consuming the bulk of my writing time between now and the end of January: the Spark Children’s Story Bible. You can read all about it, including the introduction I wrote for it, here. I had sworn I wasn’t going to do a major book project for a few more years, and it took some serious convincing by the Word on Fire team to get me to change my mind, but in the end, there was just no way I could say no to being a part of this once in a generation kind of project. I cannot wait for you all to see it!

And with that, (and a quick reminder that it is full subscribers who keep these free newsletters coming even when I’m selling my house with three toddlers underfoot), let’s dive into your questions.

Question Box

A close family friend had a son that committed suicide. Is there any hope for his soul?

I am so sorry for your friend’s loss and for your loss. I don’t know if there is any worse way to lose a loved one than by suicide. So many of those who die that way are struggling mightily, and we pray they aren’t fully responsible for their actions, but it also can feel just downright cruel to those they leave behind. Suicide often leads those who loved the deceased to feel overwhelmed by guilt and grief in a way different from any other kind of death. It’s just horrible, and my heart breaks for your friend.

As for your question, though, yes, there is absolutely hope for his soul. It’s true that the Church teaches suicide is always, always wrong. There is no morally acceptable reason to ever take our own life. It is not ever the better way. At the same time, suicide is not always necessarily a mortal sin—the kind of sin that kills the life of grace in our soul. This is because three conditions have to be present in order for a sin to be mortal: it must involve grave matter; the person must have full knowledge of the wrong being done; and the sin must be freely chosen.

Even though suicide is always grave matter, mental illness can mitigate both a person’s understanding of right and wrong and their freedom to choose between the two. I don’t know the extent to which your friend’s son struggled with these things, so there is no way I can judge the state of his soul in the moment of death. In truth, though, neither can your friend. No matter how well the young man’s loved ones thought they knew him and his struggles, their knowledge of him—anyone’s knowledge of him—was always imperfect. Only God fully knows us, so only God knows the extent to which this young man’s choice to take his own life was truly a free choice. If mental illness was in play, that mitigates free will, which could mean no mortal sin was committed.

We also don’t the young man’s thoughts in the last moments of his life. Did he repent of what he did? Did he call out to Jesus in his heart and ask for mercy? Did his heart move towards God as he breathed his last? Again, only God knows. But, we can trust that if that happened, God did not turn a deaf hear to the young man’s cries. His mercy is greater and vaster than we can imagine, and He does not deny that mercy to anyone who sincerely asks for it.

This is not to say that your friend’s son went straight to Heaven or is enjoying his eternal peaceful rest, while his agonized parents have to keep going through their days, broken by grief. If this young man had even a shred of understanding about what he was doing, he still sinned, and repentance at the last minute or not, his soul still needs to be healed from the damage of that sin. This is where the Church’s teachings on Purgatory are so consoling. To believe that there is a stage of purification for those who left this life in a state of sin but not in a state of total willful separation from God is a great gift. To believe that we can still help and love that person as they undergo that purification is an equally great gift.

There is a fantastic documentary on the Church’s teachings on Purgatory (Purgatory: The Forgotten Church) that I would recommend watching. It not only illuminates how the Church understands Purgatory, but specifically addresses deaths by suicide and the importance of praying for the souls of those who have taken their own life. I’ve written before about why we pray for the dead. That praying is doubly important in cases of suicide. God, in His mercy, lets our prayers help those who seemed beyond our help in life. He gives us a way to help them find peace.

So, if I were you, I would hold on to hope for your friends’ son and pray your heart out for him. Have Masses said for him. Offer rosaries and chaplets for him. Visit a cemetery this month and offer up your visit for the intention of his soul. Don’t assume he is in Heaven, but also don’t assume he is in Hell. Trust that God, who is outside of time, hears all our prayers, for the living and the dead, and that none of those prayers are wasted. Trust also that God loves him more than you or his parents do and absolutely forgave him for taking his own life if he asked for that forgiveness. Last of all, trust that if the young man ultimately said yes to God and chose Christ before His final moment, God is using the prayers and sacrifices of everyone who loved him to bring ultimate and complete healing to his soul.

Do you ever feel guilty buying a big home and renovating? I have struggled with this from a faith perspective and wonder if it’s the wrong way to spend money when so many people don’t have a home.

So, this question got asked in a separate Q&A I did on Instagram yesterday about our planned move, but I didn’t have time to answer it properly (all the natives were breaking down in a wild flaming fashion while Chris was at Parent/Teacher Conferences), so I thought I would answer it here, since I do think it’s an important question.

My quick answer is “Not at all.” This is because I am an insane person, who only buys really old houses that need tons of essential work (like new roofs, new wiring, and major masonry repairs) and that would crumble down into a pile of rubble, taking their neighborhoods with them, if left unloved. Which is to say, my madness has a mission, and I think it’s an important one, from both a cultural and environmental perspective. It is a good thing for communities to have owners who work hard to keep houses from becoming crack dens. It is also far, far less wasteful to take care of solid existing housing stock than to keep building homes of cardboard and joint compound that fall apart a decade after construction. Spending money to keep homes safe, functioning, warm, welcoming, and all around pleasant places to be is just plain old fashioned good stewardship, and we’re all called to do that to the extent that we’re able.

Of course, like any good thing, you can take this idea too far. If you’re spending all your money on your house and not giving generously to the poor, that’s a problem. If your intent is not to exercise good stewardship, but to keep up with the Joneses and impress random strangers on the Internet, that too is a problem. And if you’re ripping out perfectly pleasant and functional kitchens and bathrooms that were completely renovated a few years ago, but not trendy on Instagram anymore, that is, at the very least, wasteful, if not downright sinful. There absolutely can be a culture of constant renovations that is morally questionable.

As Christians living in the world, we have a line to walk. We’re not habited monks, who’ve renounced all personal possessions with a vow of poverty. But we also don’t want to be the infamous rich man, storing up treasures for ourselves on earth while neglecting the things of Heaven. We need to figure out how to live in the world, care for our families, and renew the temporal order all at the same time. Which for most of us is a bit of a trick.

But that trick gets less tricky when we have a Catholic worldview.

To see the world as a Catholic is to see the goodness of the material universe. It’s to see grace working through matter to heal broken hearts and wounded souls. God’s life is poured into us through water and oil, bread and wine, the laying on of hands and the bodies of husbands and wives. And the whole created world—from wind and rain to mountaintops and sparrows—bears the mark of its Creator, teaching us something about who He is and how very much He loves us.

Seeing the world as a Catholic also means seeing that we are made in God’s image. We are like our Father, who made a beautiful home for us in this world, so it’s entirely natural and normal for us to want to make a beautiful home for our loved ones. It’s also good. It’s good to create a home where people can be welcomed and loved, where they can feel safe and comfortable, where they can encounter beauty and truth. You don’t have to spend a fortune on a home to do that, but you do have to spend something. Leaking roofs don’t fix themselves, and even the nicest of kitchens will take such a beating over time, that counters and cabinets have to be replaced.

Also, keep in mind, that for the better part of the past 2,000 years, the Church has built (and maintained) beautiful homes in which God’s people could worship Him. There have been those who have criticized her for it, saying the money would be better spent on the poor. But what they don’t realize is that the Church is spending that money on the poor. She is giving them a place where they can encounter God through beauty, because the poor need beauty too, not just all the other more practical services the Church provides.

What’s true for the universal Church is true on a (much) smaller scale for the domestic Church. It’s good to surround ourselves and our loved ones with beauty. It doesn’t have to be the beauty of $100,000 kitchen renovation. It might just be the beauty of a freshly painted room. But beauty, in right measure, is an act of evangelization and love. It’s a window, through which we catch glimpses of God.

So yes, don’t spend money on your house that belongs to the poor. Don’t get caught up in a cycle of endless renovations because Instagram says your color scheme is so 2021.But also don’t fall into a gnostic mindset that rejects the goodness of the material world. Consider your needs, the needs of your family, the life to which God has called you, and the tasks He has set before you, then feel free to do what you can to your house to make it lovely and functional for you and those God sends your way.

Do you have an Advent devotional you like?

If you are looking for a good daily devotional, the annual Advent devotionals Blessed Is She puts out are very good. If you are looking for something a bit weightier, I also like the Advent devotional that is part of the In Conversation with God series, based on the writings of Saint Jose Maria Escriva.

If a daily devotional, sounds like too much for you, though, every year I do a mini-devotional of sorts here. This will be the third year I’ve done it. It is super simple—just a short(ish) reflection on the Sunday readings, with questions for reflection. It comes out on each Sunday of Advent. You can get those just by becoming a full subscriber.

How do I live in this world, but not be of it, keeping my eyes on Heaven?

There are many ways to answer this question, and a great many saints who have given advice on it. Depending on who you ask, you might get a dozen different answers. You also might get a different answer depending on the vocation of the person you ask. Priests and consecrated individuals, for example, might give you a different answer from a married laywoman.

For this particular laywoman, I think it starts with something C. S. Lewis once wrote. In The Great Divorce, he says that the blessed in Heaven will look back upon their life on earth, and see that it was all Heaven, even the hard and grieving parts. “Heaven,” he says, “will work backwards, turning even agony into glory.”

For the lay person, to live in the world but not be of it is, in a sense, to start recognizing that now. It’s to strive to see the world as God sees it, with eyes of faith.

More specifically, it means seeing God’s hand in creation—seeing the beauty of the world and the way it reveals something about Him and looking at it all with wonder and awe. It also means seeing His image in every living person—recognizing how precious, beautiful, loved, and unrepeatable every person is—while also seeing how broken they are, how they’re hurting and struggling and weighed down by wounds known only to them and God.

It means appreciating the goods of this world, being thankful for them and good stewards of them, but not finding our worth in them. It means seeing every good thing as a gift from God and every bad thing as something permitted by God because He can use it to lead us to glory. It means using the gifts we’ve been given to love and serve others, not simply for selfish gain. It means holding all that is passing loosely, knowing things like wealth, fame, power, and physical strength, health, and beauty are not meant to last, so we should not give our hearts to them.

It means loving God’s law and seeing how good and kind that law is. It means seeing God in the poor and having a special heart for them. It means knowing that nothing in this world is worth the price of Heaven and keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus. And it means striving to unite our hearts with God every day, knowing He is always with us, always loving us, always giving us the graces we need when we ask for them and working in all circumstances to draw us closer to Him.

It can take a long time to see all this, and an even longer time to live what we see. A few people can do it it really quickly (like Catherine of Siena), but most of stumble and struggle along the way. When that vision is fixed firmly in our minds, though, and when we’re constantly calling on God’s grace to help us live in accord with that vision, I believe that day by day, He faithfully brings us further and further along, so that when we finally get to Heaven, we’ll discover that Lewis’ words were true. Somehow, by the grace of God, Heaven will flow backwards, and we’ll see that we were in the world but not of the world, living for Heaven all along.  

Five Things I’m Loving

1. “Love” might not be the right word to describe my feelings after listening to this conversation between Bari Weiss and Walter Russel Mead, but I did find it very helpful for fitting the recent horrors in the Middle East into an overall picture of what is currently happening globally.

2. I broke down and bought Be a Heart Design’s beautiful, simple Advent wreath and am now counting down the days until I can set it up in our dining room.

3.  My male readers may want to skip down to number four, but if you are a woman of a certain age and waking up a lot in the night because it feels like someone just turned the thermostat up to 110, you might want to invest in some woolen long underwear from Simply Merino. I know: the idea of wearing wool seems completely counterintuitive. And they are not cheap. But I have noticed a 100 percent difference in my sleep quality when I wear them. Like, I actually sleep through the whole night and don’t wake up once. This is, I am told, because wool doesn’t just keep you warm when you’re cold; it also keeps you cool when you’re warm, helping naturally regulate your body temperature. However the science works, to me it seems like magic. If you want to try it for yourself, you can use the code Emily10 to save 10 percent (I get nothing from the code—no money at all, just sharing from the goodness of my well rested heart).

4.  The messages I’m getting from those of you who have already received a copy of The Supper of the Lamb, my new children’s book with Scott Hahn have been the highlight of my month. I am especially loving how much your middle graders and high schoolers are enjoying it. That is the power of children’s books, though: they work on so many levels and reach so many people.

5. Speaking of books, Katie Bogner’s wonderful new Advent book, All About Advent and Christmas, is finally here! It is such a good resource book and really helpful if, like me, you only have the bandwidth for doing one or two Advent activities with your littles because you’re trying to sell your house and pack your house and figure out the budget for eliminating century old wiring from another house. I also have code for you on this one. You can save 10 percent with the code Chapman10.

That’s all for this weeks, folks. I am off to stage my house for tomorrow’s open house. And just in case you forgot, this week’s prayer request is “bidding war,” because rewiring old houses does not come cheap!

In Case You Missed It

Discerning the Will of God: On Babies and Dreams (full subscribers only)

The Devil and All His Works: On Demons, Deliverance, and Celebrity Exorcists (Full Subscribers Only)

Things That Make Me Cry: Two Dancing Feet (Free for Everyone)