Out of the Darkness, 27 September 2008
On 27 September 2008, I dressed in my Roman scout’s uniform in commemoration of the departed. For I had taken the 2006 Hadrian’s Wall walk in preparation for The Overnight.
That year, I had raised $770 for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). I had spent far more walking the Wall, between travel, equipment, food and drink, electronic equipment I lugged around yet never or hardly even used (cameras, batteries, power cords and adapters, and a portable color printer). One could say I was a fool, for I could have saved my money and just simply given it all to the AFSP.
Yet I knew that if I was going to walk all-night, 10 miles in San Francisco, I wanted to get in shape. I wanted to be more healthy, and to live for a long, long time. Thus I wanted to walk its 80-mile length in preparation for my one-night 10-mile hike.
I also wanted to see the Wall with my own two eyes. I had written about it for the Pendragon game over a decade before. I wanted to walk the Wall. As witness to it. Of its durability. Its survivability through the adversity of wind and weather. The pain of history it has endured.
I also wanted to use the hike, to put it plainly and perhaps somewhat comically, as a form of “publicity stunt.” Why is Peter going all the way out of his way to walk an ancient Roman wall half-way-around the world? Why is he dressed up as a Roman reenactor? What’s with the fancy cap?
That’s a good question. I am glad you asked.
I am doing it for suicide prevention.
During the early Roman era, such as the Republic and the early Empire, people used to commit suicide all the time. When their businesses failed. When their marriages failed. When their armies failed. When their crops failed. It was expected. If you are a failure, take yourself out of the populace. Do the rest of us a favor. Just go away.
You buried your shame when they saw your corpse. Good riddance to bad rubbish!
This was what the Romans thought made for a strong, healthy society. Yet, in a way, it just left the travesties and monumental follies to others to clean up. Yes, you were gone. Now everyone else had to clean up your messes. It was a way to escape personal commitments, and though it often absolved the rest of your family, it often meant your family was then burdened with the stigma and loss for generations to come.
Later in the Roman Imperial era, things changed. Christianity altered Roman culture dramatically. Instead of committing suicide, you were called to suffer to live. Shame was not a sin. Indignity was to be borne and tolerated. Living through deprivation and disgrace were to be seen as mantles of grace.
Christianity utterly altered human consciousness, calling for compassion, rather than rejection, to those who faced failure. To try and fail, to embarrass yourself or to bring shame on yourself or your family was no longer the reason to commit suicide. It became an explicit call to live. To survive. To repair the relationships. To admit one’s guilt, and yet to live through it. To fix what was broken. To not leave things as the responsibilities of others. To bear oneself with dignity and humility, yet with grace.
To me, to be part of Legio X Fretensis, the Legion first exposed to these new ideals borne out of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, known as Christ, was to be a living history docent, a teacher and representative for that vital shift in human consciousness which began in the first century of the Christian Era.
I wasn't trying to hit anyone over the head with my Christianity. Yet if people asked “What’s with the get-up?” I’d answer them.
“My friend Molly committed suicide in 1985. She sat next to me in college. So I am doing a suicide prevention walk now to remember her 21 years later.”
As a Christian, I was suffered to live. Molly chose to “go Roman” and checked out.
So, I did this Hadrian’s Wall trip in 2006, and I raised $770. I also raised a few eyebrows, a few consciences, and a bit of laughter. My own spirit shifted. It definitely gave me a new spirit and confidence in my own personal physical tolerances and limits. Though my body was decidedly knocked low from exhaustion when it was done, I knew one thing:
If I could do this, I could suffer to live through a heck of a lot in life.
There were a few other objective lessons for me.
Many people didn’t listen to what I had to say about suicide prevention. They didn’t want to talk about it. I brought it up, and sometimes I had a sincere reflection with another person about the topic. Yet it was rapidly swept under the tide of views, images, places, food, and the pressing demands of time.
We even got on BBC television. Yet the producer didn’t really want to know that I was personally walking for suicide prevention. That sort of got missed from the piece.
For many, it was an “oh yeah.”
When to me, inwardly in my heart, and often outwardly in my expressions, it was the very reason I was there in the first place.
In 2006, I did not make my goal of $1,000. So I had to make up the short fall of donations personally.
Though I survived my walk, I lapsed back into a sort of cocoon of unsurity with life. I celebrated those who did come out of the woodwork and donated $770. Yet I also felt distrust. I had hoped for more. My attachment to the outcome was rather heavy.
I kept thinking like this:
“If my own life or death, my own suicide, was dependent on raising $1,000, I don’t have sufficient friends in the world, or I fell out of touch with too many friends over the years, or I didn’t communicate the need sufficiently, or I didn’t get out early enough, or the economy is really hurting, or whatever — for whatever reason — I didn’t raise my $1,000 commitment. I could not command, control, affect or adequately request the commitments of others. Of course not. They command their own selves. Yet below this, I couldn’t get them involved. I couldn’t even get them interested. They just didn’t care. Or care enough. Or they were busy. They did not take me seriously. Hey, I was in a Roman get-up, so it was sort of a joke anyway. Right? I mean, it was just a put-on costume, right? They didn’t see what it meant to me. They did not take it good-naturedly enough. Generously enough.”
Yet most of all, I thought this:
“If my own life had depended on getting that money, that interest and commitment from the people in the world around me, I’d be dead right now.”
That last part killed my ego. Not in a good way. I cried a lot. Reading about all the suicides that keep going on in the world. The distraught individuals that “go Roman.” Or, when people even jestingly bring up Samurai culture, those who commit seppuku. Falling on your sword. Call it what you want.
Beyond that there are the suicide-homicides. Those that kill not just themselves, but others as they go down. The Sampsons that pull down the temple on the heads of others. Balin and the Dolorous Blow that destroys the Grail Castle. The 9/11 hijackers and the Trade Center. The suicide bombers across the world. The Columbine shooters. Mere boys. The others that “go postal” and attack and wound or kill themselves and others. Their families, their workplace, their neighbors, their places of worship, their schools.
It keeps going on. I keep thinking, “This is madness!” “No, this is Sparta!” Yet this is not Sparta. This is not ancient Rome or Britain. This is the United States of America and the modern world.
I thought about what it means to have operational capital to keep a suicide prevention hotline staffed, as well as programs to deal with troubled hearts and grieving families. To face the day-to-day costs of suicide. So long as people do not change in their attitudes, it will be more than a Herculean effort. It will be Sisyphean predicament. The ball will only roll down the other side, as we discover, just as we face one crisis, people commit suicide for other reasons.
The best way to deal with this is to truly pray and contemplate the meaning of life. The meaning of our own lives. And to find meaning, purpose, and value in our own existences. To engender that will to live. To accept that Jesus suffered to die, and yet was reborn, so that all of us might suffer to live.
We can all go through our own “death of our egos” and then be “reborn” in a psychological or spiritual sense. I am not asking people necessarily to convert to Christianity as the “only” way to find faith in the world and life, yet to consider the life of Christ, and the Christian experience, as analogy for our own experiences. Or which ever great teacher shows us how our existence is filled with suffering, and yet, there is a purpose to it.
Buddha would say, “Exactly!” Jesus would say, “Now you’re on to something!” And Prof. Henry Higgins would say, “By Jove, you’ve got it!” I suppose that makes him an adherent to Roman religion in a way.
My own spirit has been opening up again after devastating realities in my past. The Flowers in the Cracks began to blossom again for me in 2006, after the personal tragedies and failures of my past. I had my own personal epiphany and began my own pilgrim’s path.
Thus, after all this thought and effort, I was further hammered when in 2008, my college friend Terry Young committed suicide.
For everything I had done, I had not done enough.
This was why on 27 September 2008, I did a second suicide prevention walk for the AFSP.
I didn’t fly to Hadrian’s Wall this year. I’ve been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. (It says, “I Walked the Wall.” I then sing, “But the Wall won...”)
I just got dressed in my kit, in commemoration of the 2006 walk, and my international effort to raise awareness for a consciousness filled with hope and the desire for survival, and the appreciation and value of human life.
This year, I only raised $330.
Yet this year, I am not attached to the monetary contribution. I read the headlines. Life is very tough right now.
Yet if my life depended on raising $1,000, I’d be dead right now. A second time over.
Fortunately, I saw the shortfall coming, and backed down my commitment to $500. So I owe, personally, another $170 to the cause I believe in.
The money mattered less to me this year than the prior walk. Because of one thing: my friend Harshi walked with me. He heard what I was doing, and he said he’d be there.
I may not have raised sufficient money to “save my life,” or the lives of those who struggle with depression and thoughts of suicide. Yet this year, someone walked beside me.
Harshi will ever have my gratitude for being there this 27 September 2008.
Many people, right now, are in financial straights far more desparate than at any time I have ever known in my life. While I have known and previously helped homeless people, 2008 is a whole different ball of wax.
I know too many people who have been locked out of their apartments. People who have found the notice on the door. People who are homeless or near homeless. Late with the rent. Too late.
The Great Depression was named so not only for the economy, but for the bleakness it cast over people’s hearts and lives. The sun was just as bright and the days just as long. Yet people felt a cloud over themselves. Unsurity. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. Trouble.
Just as it was no coincidence that the movement is called Out of the Darkness. It reminds me of “Let there be light.” The lightness to be kindled in each heart.
FDR would have said a rousing speech, and played “Happy days are here again.”
Perhaps we need good songs in 2008 now to turn from dark depression to days of light. If you know of any good ones, please let me know.
If you want to write a song to reflect the story I have told today, to commemorate those who suffer, and to focus on hope for the future, please send it to me at PeterCorless@mac.com.
For the sake of history, and the educational purposes of Legio X Fretensis, please tie what you can thematically to Roman culture and art. Yet it need not be so. You can drop the trope if you wish.
For me, for now, it is onwards to adventure. Enjoy the day.
-Peter Corless.
petercorless@mac.com
650-906-3134 (mobile)
That year, I had raised $770 for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). I had spent far more walking the Wall, between travel, equipment, food and drink, electronic equipment I lugged around yet never or hardly even used (cameras, batteries, power cords and adapters, and a portable color printer). One could say I was a fool, for I could have saved my money and just simply given it all to the AFSP.
Yet I knew that if I was going to walk all-night, 10 miles in San Francisco, I wanted to get in shape. I wanted to be more healthy, and to live for a long, long time. Thus I wanted to walk its 80-mile length in preparation for my one-night 10-mile hike.
I also wanted to see the Wall with my own two eyes. I had written about it for the Pendragon game over a decade before. I wanted to walk the Wall. As witness to it. Of its durability. Its survivability through the adversity of wind and weather. The pain of history it has endured.
I also wanted to use the hike, to put it plainly and perhaps somewhat comically, as a form of “publicity stunt.” Why is Peter going all the way out of his way to walk an ancient Roman wall half-way-around the world? Why is he dressed up as a Roman reenactor? What’s with the fancy cap?
That’s a good question. I am glad you asked.
I am doing it for suicide prevention.
During the early Roman era, such as the Republic and the early Empire, people used to commit suicide all the time. When their businesses failed. When their marriages failed. When their armies failed. When their crops failed. It was expected. If you are a failure, take yourself out of the populace. Do the rest of us a favor. Just go away.
You buried your shame when they saw your corpse. Good riddance to bad rubbish!
This was what the Romans thought made for a strong, healthy society. Yet, in a way, it just left the travesties and monumental follies to others to clean up. Yes, you were gone. Now everyone else had to clean up your messes. It was a way to escape personal commitments, and though it often absolved the rest of your family, it often meant your family was then burdened with the stigma and loss for generations to come.
Later in the Roman Imperial era, things changed. Christianity altered Roman culture dramatically. Instead of committing suicide, you were called to suffer to live. Shame was not a sin. Indignity was to be borne and tolerated. Living through deprivation and disgrace were to be seen as mantles of grace.
Christianity utterly altered human consciousness, calling for compassion, rather than rejection, to those who faced failure. To try and fail, to embarrass yourself or to bring shame on yourself or your family was no longer the reason to commit suicide. It became an explicit call to live. To survive. To repair the relationships. To admit one’s guilt, and yet to live through it. To fix what was broken. To not leave things as the responsibilities of others. To bear oneself with dignity and humility, yet with grace.
To me, to be part of Legio X Fretensis, the Legion first exposed to these new ideals borne out of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, known as Christ, was to be a living history docent, a teacher and representative for that vital shift in human consciousness which began in the first century of the Christian Era.
I wasn't trying to hit anyone over the head with my Christianity. Yet if people asked “What’s with the get-up?” I’d answer them.
“My friend Molly committed suicide in 1985. She sat next to me in college. So I am doing a suicide prevention walk now to remember her 21 years later.”
As a Christian, I was suffered to live. Molly chose to “go Roman” and checked out.
So, I did this Hadrian’s Wall trip in 2006, and I raised $770. I also raised a few eyebrows, a few consciences, and a bit of laughter. My own spirit shifted. It definitely gave me a new spirit and confidence in my own personal physical tolerances and limits. Though my body was decidedly knocked low from exhaustion when it was done, I knew one thing:
If I could do this, I could suffer to live through a heck of a lot in life.
There were a few other objective lessons for me.
Many people didn’t listen to what I had to say about suicide prevention. They didn’t want to talk about it. I brought it up, and sometimes I had a sincere reflection with another person about the topic. Yet it was rapidly swept under the tide of views, images, places, food, and the pressing demands of time.
We even got on BBC television. Yet the producer didn’t really want to know that I was personally walking for suicide prevention. That sort of got missed from the piece.
For many, it was an “oh yeah.”
When to me, inwardly in my heart, and often outwardly in my expressions, it was the very reason I was there in the first place.
In 2006, I did not make my goal of $1,000. So I had to make up the short fall of donations personally.
Though I survived my walk, I lapsed back into a sort of cocoon of unsurity with life. I celebrated those who did come out of the woodwork and donated $770. Yet I also felt distrust. I had hoped for more. My attachment to the outcome was rather heavy.
I kept thinking like this:
“If my own life or death, my own suicide, was dependent on raising $1,000, I don’t have sufficient friends in the world, or I fell out of touch with too many friends over the years, or I didn’t communicate the need sufficiently, or I didn’t get out early enough, or the economy is really hurting, or whatever — for whatever reason — I didn’t raise my $1,000 commitment. I could not command, control, affect or adequately request the commitments of others. Of course not. They command their own selves. Yet below this, I couldn’t get them involved. I couldn’t even get them interested. They just didn’t care. Or care enough. Or they were busy. They did not take me seriously. Hey, I was in a Roman get-up, so it was sort of a joke anyway. Right? I mean, it was just a put-on costume, right? They didn’t see what it meant to me. They did not take it good-naturedly enough. Generously enough.”
Yet most of all, I thought this:
“If my own life had depended on getting that money, that interest and commitment from the people in the world around me, I’d be dead right now.”
That last part killed my ego. Not in a good way. I cried a lot. Reading about all the suicides that keep going on in the world. The distraught individuals that “go Roman.” Or, when people even jestingly bring up Samurai culture, those who commit seppuku. Falling on your sword. Call it what you want.
Beyond that there are the suicide-homicides. Those that kill not just themselves, but others as they go down. The Sampsons that pull down the temple on the heads of others. Balin and the Dolorous Blow that destroys the Grail Castle. The 9/11 hijackers and the Trade Center. The suicide bombers across the world. The Columbine shooters. Mere boys. The others that “go postal” and attack and wound or kill themselves and others. Their families, their workplace, their neighbors, their places of worship, their schools.
It keeps going on. I keep thinking, “This is madness!” “No, this is Sparta!” Yet this is not Sparta. This is not ancient Rome or Britain. This is the United States of America and the modern world.
I thought about what it means to have operational capital to keep a suicide prevention hotline staffed, as well as programs to deal with troubled hearts and grieving families. To face the day-to-day costs of suicide. So long as people do not change in their attitudes, it will be more than a Herculean effort. It will be Sisyphean predicament. The ball will only roll down the other side, as we discover, just as we face one crisis, people commit suicide for other reasons.
The best way to deal with this is to truly pray and contemplate the meaning of life. The meaning of our own lives. And to find meaning, purpose, and value in our own existences. To engender that will to live. To accept that Jesus suffered to die, and yet was reborn, so that all of us might suffer to live.
We can all go through our own “death of our egos” and then be “reborn” in a psychological or spiritual sense. I am not asking people necessarily to convert to Christianity as the “only” way to find faith in the world and life, yet to consider the life of Christ, and the Christian experience, as analogy for our own experiences. Or which ever great teacher shows us how our existence is filled with suffering, and yet, there is a purpose to it.
Buddha would say, “Exactly!” Jesus would say, “Now you’re on to something!” And Prof. Henry Higgins would say, “By Jove, you’ve got it!” I suppose that makes him an adherent to Roman religion in a way.
My own spirit has been opening up again after devastating realities in my past. The Flowers in the Cracks began to blossom again for me in 2006, after the personal tragedies and failures of my past. I had my own personal epiphany and began my own pilgrim’s path.
Thus, after all this thought and effort, I was further hammered when in 2008, my college friend Terry Young committed suicide.
For everything I had done, I had not done enough.
This was why on 27 September 2008, I did a second suicide prevention walk for the AFSP.
I didn’t fly to Hadrian’s Wall this year. I’ve been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. (It says, “I Walked the Wall.” I then sing, “But the Wall won...”)
I just got dressed in my kit, in commemoration of the 2006 walk, and my international effort to raise awareness for a consciousness filled with hope and the desire for survival, and the appreciation and value of human life.
This year, I only raised $330.
Yet this year, I am not attached to the monetary contribution. I read the headlines. Life is very tough right now.
Yet if my life depended on raising $1,000, I’d be dead right now. A second time over.
Fortunately, I saw the shortfall coming, and backed down my commitment to $500. So I owe, personally, another $170 to the cause I believe in.
The money mattered less to me this year than the prior walk. Because of one thing: my friend Harshi walked with me. He heard what I was doing, and he said he’d be there.
I may not have raised sufficient money to “save my life,” or the lives of those who struggle with depression and thoughts of suicide. Yet this year, someone walked beside me.
Harshi will ever have my gratitude for being there this 27 September 2008.
Many people, right now, are in financial straights far more desparate than at any time I have ever known in my life. While I have known and previously helped homeless people, 2008 is a whole different ball of wax.
I know too many people who have been locked out of their apartments. People who have found the notice on the door. People who are homeless or near homeless. Late with the rent. Too late.
The Great Depression was named so not only for the economy, but for the bleakness it cast over people’s hearts and lives. The sun was just as bright and the days just as long. Yet people felt a cloud over themselves. Unsurity. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. Trouble.
Just as it was no coincidence that the movement is called Out of the Darkness. It reminds me of “Let there be light.” The lightness to be kindled in each heart.
FDR would have said a rousing speech, and played “Happy days are here again.”
Perhaps we need good songs in 2008 now to turn from dark depression to days of light. If you know of any good ones, please let me know.
If you want to write a song to reflect the story I have told today, to commemorate those who suffer, and to focus on hope for the future, please send it to me at PeterCorless@mac.com.
For the sake of history, and the educational purposes of Legio X Fretensis, please tie what you can thematically to Roman culture and art. Yet it need not be so. You can drop the trope if you wish.
For me, for now, it is onwards to adventure. Enjoy the day.
-Peter Corless.
petercorless@mac.com
650-906-3134 (mobile)
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