If a person commits suicide they go to hell?
I’ve quoted this peculiar story before. But I’ll put it here as I think it has some relevance to the issue of suicide.
I had a pastor who was quite prophetic. He died in January 1992. But probably not long before he died, he said to me one day “I think you’ll be doing a cleaning job for a while. You won’t like it much and you won’t be doing it for long, but I think the Lord will just want you to hear about a ghost.” He went on to say that he thought I’d seen this “ghost” before.
Now to me that sounded silly. So I basically ignored it, despite the fact I knew just how accurate his predictions were. So that would have been around 1990 or 1991.
Fast forward to 2006, and I did a cleaning job for a few months (about four months), didn’t like it much, and heard about a ghost. I was being shown around an old store in Ipswich, west of Brisbane, when the young bloke showing me the round suddenly remarked, “This place is haunted!”. I said “What?” He said that he thought a manager hanged himself upstairs in the 1890’s. I later asked the staff who worked there, and they said they thought he hanged himself downstairs in the 1960’s.
Anyway the young bloke said that one night all the stuff on one complete row of shelves just jumped up and landed on the floor! At other times he could push this heavy buffer around with his little finger - something was pushing it with him. He told me he didn’t like being there at night. It scared him. On the other hand I had quite positive vibes - I think the ghost expected me to do something for him.
I finally got around to ringing the priest at the local Catholic Church a couple of years later. I’d procrastinated because it was such a strange story. But he listened to me, and said “Leave it to me.” So I did.
But I didn’t quite know whether he’d said a mass or not. After all I was just a strange voice on the phone with a peculiar story to tell. I wondered what to do about it. But sometime in 2010 I happened to notice an Australian priest on this forum. He was the only Australian priest I’d seen on the forum.
But guest which church he was located at? When I looked up his profile and did a bit of cross checking, it turned out he was the newly appointed associate priest **at the very same church where I’d rung the main priest a couple of years before! **So through the email facilities offered by the forum, I sent him an email. After a brief exchange he said he really would say a mass for the suicide.
And this time I felt reassured. I’ve since found out this priest has been relocated to the Cathedral office, so he’s probably on first name terms with the Archbishop. I’m therefore wondering where the old pastor’s prediction will end up.
As for seeing the “ghost” before - way back around 1970, my father and I would sometimes go camping around a locality called Legume, just over the border from Killarney, not far from Warwick. These days there’s a bypass to the Cunningham Highway leading to Warwick, so you don’t have to travel through Ipswich. But way back in 1970 the bypass didn’t exist, so you had to go via Ipswich.
Casting my mind back, I remember when we were returning from one such trip, we were travelling through Ipswich. Now it would have been a Sunday or public holiday or we would not have been camping. Which meant there were few people around, and fewer still at work. Yet I noticed a bloke standing on the footpath with a briefcase and a resigned, frustrated look on his face.
As we drove past he looked at me, and I looked at him. I turned back to watch him, and as I did so he turned on his heel and walked through a closed door. It gave me the heebie geebies, and I wondered if I was going ga ga. So I did what I could to ignore it.
But that, I think, was the “ghost” because it was pretty much the same area where I cleaned the store years later.
The relevance to the topic? I think he was working out his purgatory, as a suicide, by being bound that store for around 40 or so years - 1960’s to 2010 (to be honest I’ve never been game enough to go back to the store and ask if they still happen to have a stray ghost or two still hanging around, and I don’t live in the area).
I remember reading somewhere where somebody said a saint or saints said the average stay in purgatory seemed to be about the equivalent of 40 earth years.
So … if he was working out his purgatory for his suicide, then that would indicate not all suicides are doomed.
That’s my peculiar story. I mean, if “… the Lord just wanted me to hear about a ghost…” as the old pastor predicted, then I have to assume there was some good reason for it. Even if I thought it was ridiculous at the time.
