REVD ROGER HOLLOWAY OBE MA

Suicide It’s an odd coincidence that our newspapers this weekend should have much to say about a high-profile suicide in the United States - because, for weeks, I’ve been thinking about (not, of course, contemplating) this saddest of all endings to a human life. It started because of a visit my wife and I made to a Buddhist monastery in central Vietnam. (That’s not a bad throw away line). We’d looked with joy at the beauty of the pagoda, we’d marvelled at the lilies on the lake, we’d opened ourselves to the peace of it all. And then I saw the way the people kept stopping at what appeared to be an open garage - seeming harshly out of place. In time we too wandered over. It was a very elderly, rather rusty, Austin car. Reaching back in memory, I remembered it as one of the bigger, more powerful models of the early sixties. On the windscreen was a typescript, framed under glass. And a photograph. The text told of a monk of that community who, one day in 1966, set off southwards on the long and bumpy drive to Saigon. The government of South Vietnam at that time - non-Communist but murderously oppressive - had been breaking up peaceful Buddhist political protests with bullets, and had taken to ransacking and burning Buddhist temples in and around the southern capital. When he got to Saigon - right in the centre - this monk had parked that same car, had sat peacefully on the pavement for a minute or so - and then, dousing himself with petrol, had burnt himself to death. The photograph, with the billowing smoke, and the shaven head shining in the flames - it must have appeared in the newspapers of the time, but I didn’t see it: now it’s an image I shall never forget.