Sunday morning, April 7th, 2013. Saddleback Church in Lake Forest California turns from celebrating the joyous resurrection of Jesus to genuine mourning for Matthew Warren, the son of the best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life. Thoughts and prayers pour in to the Warrens from celebrities, politicians and wealthy supporters of history's most successful megachurch prophet, whose book on life's reasons for living teaches that the Children of God are all made for a mission.
The millions of dollars earned on The Purpose Driven Life and its prequel The Purpose Driven Chruch are a testimony to Rick Warren's brilliance as an author and his understanding of the needs of his flock; they are the offspring of Warren's profound parental ability to inspire his children, the children of God, with a reason to live. His magnum opus outlines numerous "purposes" including "you were shaped for serving god" and "you were planned for God's pleasure." The Purpose Driven Life even miraculously saved a woman from being murdered, when she read it to her potential slayer...after admittedly giving him a substantial dose of attitude-lifting crystal methamphetamine (Celebrated Hostage Gave Crystal Meth to Captor, NY Times 9/28/05).
Although unspeakable in polite American society, the irony of Matthew Warren's purpose driven suicide will not be lost on the majority of citizens...including readers of the purpose driven book, devotees of the purpose driven life, megachurch regulars and the purpose driven evangelical community at large. Matthew's death is a great loss. Not so much because anyone outside of his circles knew him, but because of what his last act of desperation says about the man who led so many to an uplifting purpose while leaving his own son in the dark.
Ancient Roman Sibyls, the female prophets who adorn the ceiling of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, passed down the purpose driven sentiments they taught in the form of Etruscan writings on "Cosmic Signs." One of these prophecies speaks of the lightning that struck St. Peter's Basilica in February--the ancient month of cleansing--as a sign that popular, venerated men would begin to make highly visible falls from glory. No need mention the pope. The ancient prophecy continues to describe the arrival of meteors (like those that immediately followed on the 15th) and the rise of phantom diseases. All of this doom and gloom was supposedly a response to the greed of humanity and its preference of money over justice.
In March, an intrepid Italian archaeologist uncovered one of the ancient gates to the underworld, a classical site where ancient priestesses, priests and devotees of the gods of Erebus communed with the spirits of dead Sibyls. The opening of this gate to the modern world may be just a trifle of intellectual fantasy, but for the Romans it would have heralded the release of Lyssa, the demon prophetess of madness, the daughter of Black Night who inspires insanity-induced murder and suicide. And Lyssa, of course, reportedly served Justice, the Greek goddess who was last to abandon the money-driven generation of Iron--we mortals who turned from worshipping Nature to the god-man, someone the Romans thought was the embodiment of our eternal greed, our manifested quest for gold, salvation, and self-worship...a.k.a the purpose driven life.
Rick Warren will keep his bestselling profits, but according to the ancient world, the price of humanity's greed and the cost to those who promote it was Lyssa's self-destructive madness...a purpose driven suicide.
Dr. David Hillman is a scholar of Greek and Latin and author of "Original Sin: Ritual Child Rape and the Church" (Ronin, 2012).
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