What is it like to have secrets and to confront those of others – in childhood, in family life, at work, with friends and strangers, in religious and political activities? What do people feel justified in concealing or revealing, prying into or leaving untouched?...

 

[C]onsider the conflicts that we all experience in making such choices: between keeping secrets and revealing them; between wanting to penetrate the secrets of others and to leave them undisturbed; and between responding to what they reveal to us and ignoring or even denying it.

 

These conflicts are rooted in the most basic experience of what it means to live as one human being among others, needing both to hide and to share, both to seek out and to beware of the unknown.

 

 

Sermon: “Secret-Keeping”

I knew that something was wrong the same way I find out so many things nowadays: on Facebook. When I joined the online social network five years ago, I was delighted to reconnect with friends from my growing-up years. I found my closest high school buddies, my former prom dates, even my best friend from Catholic elementary school, whom I hadn’t spoken to for 26 years. (She’s a stripper. I’m a minister. I’m not sure who

was more surprised.)

 

Facebook also reconnected me with my first love, Anthony: the first boy I flipped for, head over heels, as a teenager. We grew up in the same town: a small, a “shabbily picturesque”1 college town where grain elevators and John Deeres punctuate the cornfields. Our puppy love wore off after a couple of years together – but small towns, with their intricate and tightly-knit webs, don’t always permit people to stray into different orbits. Such was the case with me and Anthony.

 

When I was in my 20s, Anthony and my parents wound up buying houses across the street from one another. When Mom and I chatted on the phone, our conversations were peppered with reports of their Anthony Sightings: “I saw Anthony using his new lawn mower today,” or “Anthony taught his daughter how to ride her bike this week.”

 

One summer, the reports turned grim. Anthony had testicular cancer, and it soon spread to his brain. Over the next couple of years, he sought treatment at clinics across the country. He lost his hair to chemo. His workmates donated months of their vacation time so that Anthony wouldn’t lose his job; they held spaghetti dinners at the Elks Lodge, raising tens of thousands of dollars for his medical bills. Then good news arrived through both Facebook and the Hewitt Family grapevine: Anthony had come back to health and his job, and was fully living life.

 

Then....

 

I knew something was wrong when, one October day, I noticed a flurry of elegiac comments posted on his page. What was this? He had died? How? The cancer? What happened? I wrote to another childhood friend, a distant relative of Anthony’s. I learned only that Anthony had taken his own life, violently, and at home. Something felt “off” to me, beyond the sadness of his death.

 

It took a full week for the final, breathtaking detail to emerge, this time from “the authorities”: Anthony never had cancer. At all. He’d been faking it all along, a fact that he confessed to his wife before killing himself, and which was revealed in his autopsy.

 

“Anthony,” by the way, is not his real name. His story made a dramatic public splash in and around our hometown, but in this sermon I’m choosing to protect the privacy of his family. You might say that his real name – and that of our hometown – is my secret.

 

I’ll admit that this story – all true – is extreme; Anthony’s secret was of the highest order, created and sustained by a troubled individual for reasons that no one will ever understand. His secret was powerful enough to manipulate a town full of caring people; ultimately, it proved too powerful for him to put back in the box. In the end, I think Anthony concluded out of desperation that the only way he could escape his out-ofcontrol secret was though the desperate act of taking his life.

 

What secrets do each of us hold? Which of them have a hold over us?  Which of our secrets are too big, or too painful, to keep? How do we discern whether to break secrecy – especially when the secret belongs to

someone else? If I’d learned, through some unimaginable means, that Anthony was faking his cancer, would I have told someone?

 

Is it true that “...truth will come / to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man’s son / may, but at the length truth will out?

 

A minister’s job description is elastic. As your minister, on any given day I’m called into service as a preacher, pastor, supervisor, facilitator, or counselor. Sometimes when I’m wearing my Counselor hat, with that box of Kleenex between us, I remind people that one of my job descriptions is Keeper of Secrets. Actually, the clinical term would be Keeper of confidentiality, not secrecy, since there are a few grave revelations that I’m not

permitted by law or conscience to keep secret, even between counselor and parishioner: elder abuse, for example, as well as physical or sexual abuse of a child, and the intent to harm self or others.

 

By and large, though, there’s a wide berth between those areas of mandated reporting and the confidences of yours that I keep.

 

And I do keep them. I’ve been a minister for over a decade now, and dozens of people have trusted me with their secrets: all those pieces of your life that you shelter in your soul, invisible from the rest of the world until they’re ready to be shared.

 

Here’s what I’ve learned from the people I’ve served: it can require tremendous energy to hold onto secrets; as a result, secrets can impose terrible loneliness on their keepers.

 

But I’ve also learned that secret-keeping can incubate precious new growth within the soul. The bubble of privacy that a secret provides can create safe space for transformation. Therapist David Richo gives the label “legitimate secrecy” when our motive is to protect our inner core. But when we purposely mislead or deceive others, “trying to appear one way and act in another... lacks integrity.”

 

The notion that secrets can be safe, albeit lonely territory is not a very common notion, nor a popular one. In fact, if you tuned into cultural messages, you’d think that all secrets are shameful or threatening. Here’s what I mean:

 

 “Secrets are like vampires,” says one writer, “... they suck the life out of you.”

 

 “Secrets are like stars,” says another writer, “They're hot, volatile concentrations of energy.”

 

“The possession of secrets acts like a psychic poison,” wrote Carl Jung.

 

 And then there’s Dr. Phil, who eschews poetic similes in favor of Texas straightshootin’:  “When we keep a secret... there is almost always shame involved. If the truth weren’t uncomfortable, why would anyone hide, enhance, or completely alter it?”

 

Lots of reasons. There are lots of reasons, besides shame, that a person might hide the truth.

 

I’ve already made it clear that secrets can be toxic... and yet I disagree with these uniformly negative characterizations of secrets. For every “vampire” of a secret that swaddles danger, deception, or deceit, there is a secret that’s keeping someone safe or sane. For these reasons, I hold to “a neutral definition of secrecy.”

 

As philosopher Sissela Bok points out, secrecy is defined by the act of concealing or hiding.9 It’s not quite the same thing as privacy (although they overlap) because “secrecy hides far more than what is private. A private garden need not be a secret garden; a private life is rarely a secret life.” As she explains, secrets protect “the dangerous and the forbidden” as well as “the sacred, the intimate, the fragile.”

 

So much about our lives is fragile. There are secrets about what we know, and about what we do (or have done)... and then there are secrets about who we are. Secrets about what we know and what we’ve done don’t live quite so deeply under our skin. In seminary, for example, I overheard a friend talking about how hard it was for her family to make ends meet. In a fit of generosity, I bought a Safeway gift card and put it in her mailbox with an anonymous note. Strangely, I’ve always felt guilty about this; I think I felt so important helping her that I didn’t consider how she’d feel receiving anonymous charity from a classmate. We’re still good friends, over a decade later, but I’ve never brought it up. Perhaps she’s forgotten all about it. It’s remained my secret. But it has little

sway over how I view myself or live my life.

 

The secrets about who we are – well, that’s a different beast entirely, and that’s where the sacred and the fragile meet. Not everyone is who they appear to be. I’ve known people to wrestle with fundamental questions of identity, like sexual orientation and gender. For people who are trying to find their authentic self, secrecy can offer a bubble of safety; a cocoon in which the True Self can emerge.

 

Here’s the thing, though: within that cocoon, the risk of secrets about who we is a splintering of the self. It can be exhausting. Anytime you keep a secret about who you are, you have to present a substitute, inauthentic front to the world; that snares other people, unwittingly, into our false world. Keeping secrets about who we are involves

manufacturing a false part of ourselves. Eventually, it can exact violence against the soul – or just outrun our energy to maintain it.

 

That’s why it’s so important to be able to trust others with our secrets. And: that’s why we need to be just as mindful, and intentional, about opening ourselves to receiving those secrets.

 

Some of you know that it can be far more difficult to be party to someone else’s secret than to own one yourself. Being invited into secrets raises “questions of loyalty, conscience, and truthfulness,” says Sissela Bok, because learning others’ secrets can change us in ways we cannot control. “To acquire any new knowledge is to be changed;... the change, moreover, may be irreversible. One cannot unlearn a secret, no matter how

unpalatable or dangerous it may be.”¹²

 

No wonder that some of us feel angry when we learn another person’s secret and are instructed not to tell.

What do we do, when secrets – ours or others – become too big to handle? When we can no longer hold onto different pieces of ourselves, within the whole – what then? How is it possible to be in one’s integrity and be a keeper of secrets?

 

If those answers fit tidily into a sermon, it wouldn’t be a sermon delivered from a UU pulpit.  

 

This is the best I can do:

 

I believe that most people harbor secrets out of fear, and that the weight of a secret at times becomes a form of karmic punishment.

 

I believe that each of us has the right to say to a friend: “I care about you, but I don’t want to be put in the position of knowing your secret. Please don’t tell me any more.”

 

I believe that it’s more important to keep a secret, uncomfortably, than to seek relief by sharing it, if doing so will undo someone’s life.

 

I also believe that once someone shares a secret with us, that secret never stops belonging to the person who entrusted it to us. (Clearly, matters of mandated reporting are another matter.) Guardians of secrets don’t have the right to break secrecy without fully preparing the secret’s owner for that breach.

 

Underlying all of these convictions is a renewed appreciation for how complicated the world of secrets is, and how important it is to stir some compassion into the mix of judgement and narrowed eyes. Every so often, I think about Anthony, and his family; his two little girls who will never unravel the bitter mystery of his secret or the pain of his suicide. And I wonder: did he tell anyone? Did Anthony confide in his minister? In a therapist?

 

Or did the weight of his secret break him because he was he was the only one carrying it?

 

Secrets can break people; they can also liberate people. In the words of Sissela Bok, “These conflicts are rooted in the most basic experience of what it means to live as one human being among others.”

 

May we each embrace this life, as one human being among others, calling forth compassion and clarity from one another.

 

Endnotes

1. Emily Chenoweth, in “Heather,” p. 153, The Friend Who Got Away.

2. Launcelot, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 2.

3. See http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/books/excerpts.php?id=20572.

4. Jeannette Walls in O, the Oprah magazine, Nov. 2009, p. 52. The rest of the quote continues: “...but they can only survive in the darkness. Once they’re exposed to the light, there’s a moment of horror, of recognition, but then poof – they lose their power over you.”

5. Martha Beck. See www.oprah.com/spirit/Martha-Beck-Secrets-and-Lies.

6. Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 31.

7. In his monthly column in O, the Oprah Magazine, January 2010, p. 54.

8. Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, p. 9.

9. Bok, p. 6.

10. Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, p. 11.

11. Bok, p. 281.

12. Bok, pp. 32-3.