Yes, it is shocking when it really happens. It is devastating. I'm sorry for your loss and all that you are going through. This is a great place for you to find some answers, and there are lots of people here ready to help you find them.
When you say your father was religious, what do you mean? What kind of religion? What kind of person was he? What caused him to end his life?
I believe there are helpers who greet us on the other side, and that suicidal people find themselves in a transition area which is a healing one. There are those who believe that a person must somehow "redo" the lessons they missed here by ending their "contract" in this life, but I don't know anything about that.
I believe the love you are sending is your greatest gift to him. I feel that spirits hear and understand us but that it is not always easy for them to speak clearly to us. He is in a different world now. We will all continue to try to make the connections clearer and easier to understand, and in the meantime, love is the issue and the answer to all of our problems.
Inside of each of us, I believe, is a "survival" mechanism which assists us in "not surviving" if our essence, our core, believes we are better off out of this physical world. There is a place inside of us which embraces the place of "no things" and knows that our ego must let go in order to be free. What I mean is, there is a deep deep place of letting go, and some of those who commit suicide, I believe, have simply found that place, that place in their imagination and in reality, that place of "no things," which frees them from all that consumes their energy and holds them down. And so they leave, if they can.
What they sometimes forget is that the world of "things" is full of suprises and synchronicity and that this strange path in our lives itself is the precious lesson, one which is so rare and unique to us that no one else in the universe can trace its outline. It is in our hands. We often cannot see the forest for the trees.
Also, I think perhaps that some of those who commit suicide are not succumbing to irrational impulses, or despair. They are following their own programming in some unfathomable way that we cannot comprehend, as we do not live in their own psyches. At least, we don't see that we do live there...we feel and believe in our own isolation here on this earth.
Of course we want to keep our loved ones in this world, and most of the time we are interested in staying here for a time. But we are all also adventurers who know we are born free, each with a spirit greater than we can comprehend.
Again, I am sorry for your loss, and for the abandonment you must feel, and for the unanswered questions you must have. But these questions will lead you to the place of peace we all seek. Our tears are real here on this earth, but so is our love, and there are no limits to how far and wide it can penetrate.
much love, blink