"My Four Last Sermons: The Dirty Harry Gun"
Psalms 61:1-4
We are all pretty fragile. It's one of the main lessons I've learned about people during 40 years of ministry. No matter how tough we think we are, no matter how much of an "I've-got-it-all-together" exterior we show the world, no matter how much we play the rugged individual role in our relationships, there is something that will come along and shatter each one of us. We will be broken. It's part of what it means to truly be human—to recognize how fragile we really are.
I have seen, over and over again, that life is precious. And it is precious because it is so precarious. All's it takes is a moment—just one single moment—and our bone china lives teeter and fall to the floor, and we find what we thought to be our priceless lives in pieces.
And the main lesson I’ve learned is not only about our fragility and brokenness. It’s mainly what we do when we are broken. There are two kinds of broken people I’ve dealt with through 40 years of ministry: those who ask for help, and those who don’t.
Bob was a student at a community college in a town where I was pastor. Somehow he and I met, he introduced me to his girlfriend, who he had met at the college their freshman year.
Bob was an interesting kid. He had a lot of musical talent. One of which was being an Elvis impersonator. And he was good at it. He had the voice down. And all the hip shimming moves. He could really work it. He entertained a lot of the kids at the community college in impromptu performances at the dorms or student union.
The only thing that was a bit odd about his Elvis impersonations was that Bob had rusty red hair and a face full of freckles. He didn't use a black wig. He just coiffed his own red hair in an Elvis fashion. But he was still good.
He and his girlfriend started coming to the church where I was the pastor, and they were fairly regular their whole freshman year. Which is odd, because most college kids pretty much ditch church once they go away to college.
The first year of college went by fast for Bob and his girlfriend. They kept in touch with me during the summer, and even showed up at church once or twice, traveling the distance from their respective home towns to come see me and be at church.
Once their second year started, they showed back up at church, beaming and holding hands. It looked like it was going to be another stellar year for the both of them.
But a couple of months into the semester something happened. Bob's girlfriend found someone else. As much as she thought she was attached to Bob, she was "totally in love" with the other guy. She broke up with Bob.
I didn't know all this until Bob called me in the middle of the night one night. It was after midnight. I answered the phone. Bob said, "You gotta come over and you gotta come now! Please! Come now!"
Bleary eyed, I got dressed and drove to the mobile home where Bob was living. I knocked on the door. He told me to come in.
When I walked in, Bob was sitting on the couch, and had a Dirty Harry gun to his head. You know, one of those 44 magnum pistols. I had seen one in a couple Clint Eastwood movies, but had no scope of how big of a pistol those things actually are until I saw Bob holding it to his head. I was suddenly, fully awake.
He was crying. Nay, sobbing. And he was beside himself. Which is a weird expression. How can you be beside yourself? If anybody could, Bob was, that night. He first blurted out that his girlfriend, whom he thought he was going to marry, had broken up with him and told him about the other guy she was in love with.
In the instant of that conversation with his girlfriend, Bob was shattered. Totally broken. The number one reason teenagers and young adults commit suicide is because of boyfriend/girlfriend problems.
Bob felt his life was over. The past year and a half with his girlfriend seemed, now, like a sham. Everything had been useless, and all meaning for the present was gone. Not only that, but the future Bob had created in his mind with his girlfriend was now totally wiped out. In his mind, there was nothing left to live for. Life was over, and he was ready to end it with a single blast to the head with his 44 magnum.
Needless to say, I was scared spitless. All the training in the world doesn't prepare you for the power of emotion that is surging in a suicidal person, and in the person trying to stop the suicide from happening.
I started praying in my own head, begging God to give me wisdom and words to say that would diffuse Bob, and keep him alive. I calmed all my nerves, so that my anxiety would not fuel Bob's over amped anxiety. I tried to become a non-anxious presence.
Bob was a good kid. As a college kid, he had let me into his world. I cared for the kid. I didn't want to see his head split open, and brains splattered up against the far wall of his tiny mobile home.
But after about a half hour of talking with Bob, the gun still to his head, he jumped into a fugue state. If you don't know what that is, it's basically a psychotic break with reality. Bob started moving in and out of three different personas. He'd sit on the couch and talk with me for a couple of minutes, seemingly himself, but then suddenly jump up and he was Elvis singing one of Elvis' songs, gyrating his hips.
Are you lonesome tonight,
do you miss me tonight?
Then he'd just as quickly fall down on the couch, pull his knees up to his chest, start sucking his thumb saying in baby talk, "I want my mommy." Then he'd jump up again as Elvis.
It's now or never,
Come hold me tight
Kiss me my darling,
Be mine tonight
Then sit back down and whine out, "What am I going to do without her, Steve?" All the while he's also threatening to pull the trigger, and I'm trying to find ways to talk the gun away from him.
That went on for another 45 minutes. It seemed like 45 hours. It was one of the most bizarre things I've witnessed.
It takes a lot of energy to maintain a fugue state, and stay in a psychotic break. Bob finally started tiring, after a couple of hours. I was able to finally talk him into handing me over the gun. I took it, pulled all the bullets out of it, and stuffed it down the back of my pants. That was weird, having such a large gun aimed at my butt, but I was so relieved to get it out of Bob's hands, I didn't care.
I asked Bob if he had any other guns in the home, or any other weapons. He didn't. After talking with him another hour, and his fugue state disappeared, I called his parents and took him to the hospital on a psychiatric admit, and had the nurses put him on suicide watch. His parents came to town later that morning, and took him home.
I put Bob's 44 magnum in a cabinet in my office, on one of the tall upper shelves, way back in a corner, where hopefully no one could get at it. You'd think I would have been exhausted and slept the next couple of days. But all the emotions I had suppressed in order to get through that experience all came flooding out. I went over and over and over again, every moment of that experience with Bob, thinking about everything I said. I thanked God it ended like it did, and that God was with us, but wondered if I did everything right. What would have happened if it ended badly?
And I thought about Bob and how fragile and broken he had become so quickly. How quickly his world was shattered.
It wasn't the only time I talked someone down from a suicide attempt. Those were rare instances, thank God. But as rare as they were, there were many, many others, who, even though they never became suicidal, were nonetheless broken by life. Meaning as they knew it had become shattered. And hope only seemed like a word that had no connection with the real, disastrous world. (I'll say more about finding the meaning of life next week.)
Finding the meaning of life is more of a long term question with a long term search for an answer. With Bob, it was more about trauma. How do you get through sudden, destructive, and unexpected trauma? How do you face life that has suddenly demonstrated its fragility? How do you keep standing when the foundation you thought you had laid in life starts shaking and shifting so violently?
I have been so thankful, privileged really, to all those who have asked me to walk with them through their trauma. Through their very worst day. Through that which has the power to evoke the most fear in us.
That fear is not about death. The fear is about annihilation. It is the fear that what is being experienced has the power to erase us totally, and make it like we didn't exist at all.
There is only one way to get through that kind of experience. Anne Lamott wrote a book on prayer titled, Help. Thanks. Wow. She says that those are the only three authentic prayers.
In her section on "Help," she wrote,
…when we finally stop trying to heal our own sick, stressed minds with our sick, stressed minds, when we are truly at the end of our rope and just done, we say the same prayer. We say, "Help!"
Asking for help is what I have found to be the only way to get through the debilitating trauma of any crisis. When I am talking with someone under the weight of this kind of trauma, one of the questions I ask is, "What are the resources you have to help you through this?" And by resources, what I am hoping to hear in their answer is God and other people. If I don't here anything like that, I know this is going to go badly.
That's one of the great things about being part of the community of a congregation. It's certainly one of the great things about being a child of God. That when we say, "Help," in the middle of some trauma we have a God, and we have God's people who come running.
The people I have felt so sorry for are those who do not have anything like a church, or have cut themselves off from God, and when they say, "Help," there is no one there. They know no one's going to be there, so they might not even say, "Help." And they stay broken and unhealed. They stay in tiny fragments, and have no one to help put the pieces back together again. They never recover because they don't have that one, little word (Help) as a resource.
About a year and a half or two years after my night with Bob and his Dirty Harry gun, he showed up in my office. He had come just to visit me and tell me thanks for for being there for him. He didn't remember hardly anything from that night. But that day, two years later, he looked great. Fresh. New. He told me about what he'd been up to, the therapy he had gotten, how much God meant to him, and that he was even starting a new relationship with a different girl.
And then he said, "I'm ready."
I said, "Ready for what?"
He said, "Ready to have my gun back. Do you still have it? I wouldn't be mad if you had gotten rid of it."
My stomach did a bit of a flip-flop, but he looked really good. I prayed to God that I was doing the right thing. So I got up, opened the cabinet door, reached back, and brought out the 44 Magnum. No bullets, though. The gun was empty. I said, looking at the gun and then at Bob, "You're sure?"
Bob nodded. I handed over the gun.
We talked a little more. We prayed together, and Bob left. I never saw him again, but I will always, always remember that night. And will always remember that a person who was in pieces was now put back together, by the grace and power of God, because he was willing to cry out for help.
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