by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon delivered on Sunday, March 19, 2000

First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon

There are all kinds of secrets in this world. There are the secret places where children go to hide their treasures—the wing of a bird, a colorful stone from the river, a tiny doll, coins perhaps. All of us, including children, seem to need those private places, those places where our loves and losses can be kept, safe from prying eyes, where our daydreams can be free and undisturbed.

What about gossip? Gossip is a kind of passing on of secrets that somehow gives us a sense of power. "Did you hear? He did that!" I find myself gossiping from time to time, I’m sorry to say, and I’m trying to be aware of it and to stop. I gossip mainly with other ministers, in regard to our colleagues. As in, "Did you hear about Frank? He left his wife and ran away with the organist—and the organist is a man!" With gossip, we hope that the other party is riveted by the revelation that we have been able to unearth and pass along. We know, others don’t. We can reveal or conceal, and therein lies the power, the juice. We even call it "juicy gossip."

And what about lies? What is their kinship to secrets? Are we obliged to always tell the truth, even when the truth might reveal a secret that we’re not ready to let go of, a secret that, revealed, might harm ourselves or others? Are there some secrets which are best kept? Suppose you are partnered, but have a mad crush on one of your co-workers, and you’re flirting with him—and that’s where it ends: harmless flirting and the acknowledgment of attraction. Period. After all, you love your partner and you are in a good relationship. Should you tell your partner? Maybe, maybe not. One needs to ask, what purpose would it serve? Suppose, on the other hand, you enter into an affair with this person. How can you keep this secret from your partner and not feel a deep, deep division? You would be living constantly with the unspoken between the two of you. You would have to watch your language, plan your assignations, be careful even that the scent of this other person doesn’t travel into your bed at home.

So there are all kinds of secrets, and I want to begin today by defining the kind of secret I’ll be dealing with in my sermon. I’ll be talking about a secret as information that is withheld from others because of shame or fear of rejection. Let’s understand from the get-go something about human nature. We all want to be loved and accepted. That’s why we comb our hair just so, pick out clothes that will flatter our figure. That’s why we smile sometimes when we don’t feel like smiling. That’s why we sense the direction of the group and follow silently when we don’t necessarily agree with that direction. And that’s why we are reluctant to reveal certain experiences, certain facts about ourselves. "They’ll lose respect for me. She could never love a person who would do____(you fill in the blank), or whose family was _____." And so we go along with our secret intact, a secret which will so often end up separating us from the very people we want so much to love us.

And there is another kind of secret that is pertinent to my sermon today. It is the secret we will not disclose even to ourselves. We may sense the truth, or we may have pushed it into the subconscious, but we decide to put it aside, because it is just too painful to deal with. Maybe a woman had an abortion when she was quite young—against her deepest desire, which was to have this child. She grows up, and for whatever reason, never has children. She continues to grieve this loss, unspoken and unacknowledged. There is an undertow of sadness to her life; it’s always there, though she doesn’t know where it comes from. In moments when she may be doing something just so simple, like brushing her hair, the memory of the lost child breaks into her thoughts. When she sees a pregnant woman, round with life, she takes a sharp breath—she is filled with her loss, her secret longing.

The derivation of the word "secret" tells us something of the power of secrets. The word comes from a combination of two Latin root words, "secretus," which means "to set apart" and "cervere," "to sift." So it means to sift something out, as being unworthy, and then setting it apart—from others and perhaps even from ourselves. And then—something that was very surprising—the dictionary referred me to the word "crisis." When I turned to that word, I discovered that "crisis" came from the exact same root words as "secret." And the very first definition of "crisis" was "the turning point in the course of a disease when it becomes clear whether the patient will live or die." I thought about the power of secrets to take energy, to take the life from us. And other definitions of crisis: "an intensely painful attack" and "a time of great danger or trouble." Yes, these are the times when secrets are born—when we are vulnerable, when we are frightened, when we have to protect ourselves sometimes even literally, to be able to live.

We are living in a time in which things formerly hidden are being brought out into the open. In the not-too-distant past, fearful diseases like tuberculosis marked not only the individual but the family. Victims of mental illness were hidden away. Desertions by fathers were explained by saying, "He has a traveling job." These deceptions were invoked with good intentions, usually to protect the family name. But later the grown child would often learn from a stray remark or a newspaper clipping what he had sometimes suspected, and then would feel betrayal and deep pain. This new openness is by and large a very positive phenomenon.

But it should be said before we go further that all secrets should not be told, and when they are told and how they are told and to whom they are told should be up to the one who has the secret. Of course there are exceptions, and those would be secrets which are damaging to the young or to the otherwise vulnerable. If you learn that a child is being abused, for example, you are obliged to speak and end the secrecy. But in all of our lives, we need protective structures. These psychological structures provide us with safety and order, and we are the ones who can best decide when to open the doors. Walls are necessary. Imagine a house where every door is always open—wind and rain would be forever entering that structure, and the people inside would feel no sense of privacy and control. Denial is a psychological mechanism that protects the vulnerable psyche against pain it cannot withstand. Sometimes it is appropriate for secrets to be kept.

At the moment in our society secrets are being revealed in startling and not always healthy ways. Consider the TV program in which one young man surprised the other with the secret that he was sexually attracted to him. The straight man was taken quite off guard, and perhaps not even admitting to himself his own simple affection for men, a secret which some straight men carry buried deep inside, this very shocked young man subsequently shot and killed the other. It is no one’s right to "out" another—and certainly not for purposes of entertainment. Shows like this, which strip people psychically bare in from of the TV cameras, are the epitome of the commodification which occurs throughout our society: the only criterion considered is "will it sell?" And the dark places within are shoved into the brightest of lights, with the approval of the victim, who is so caught up in our cultural norms that he doesn’t seem to realize that he himself has been turned into a commodity.

Similarly, we have tell-all biographies and memoirs which often cross the line as to what is useful and what is merely titillating. When Betty Ford broke barriers in talking about her addiction, many others sighed with relief—even the President’s wife, they said—and they dropped the chains of their shame and sought treatment. On the other hand, when I pick up a book purportedly about Hillary Clinton and find that most of the book is a lurid detailing of the hundreds of affairs that Bill had, I wonder about the motivation for writing and publishing this book. Truthfully, I have to say, though, I read every page.

As a minister, I get told a lot of secrets. Typically, someone will come into my office and sit down and after the briefest of polite exchange will just jump into the middle of it. I feel honored that I am so trusted by this one who has come to me. Sometimes a person will say, "I’m sorry to be taking up your time—I know how busy you are." And I say, "This is the most important thing I do." And I mean that—it’s not just that I want to be there for that person, but listening to others reveal the secrets of their lives deepens me in ways I cannot explain. It is a professional relationship, but it is a deeply intimate relationship that teaches me so much about you, my people. Your revelations help me to understand your hurting places and how to reach those places in my sermons. And these visits remind me of how human we all are, including me. You know, most of the deep, dark secrets people come to tell me are things I’ve experienced myself. You’ve got a minister who has blundered through much of her life, who has made missteps, who still makes missteps, who has had some pretty major secrets to deal with. You’ve got alcoholism, mental illness, divorce, violence in your family background? I’m your person! You can’t really surprise me with much you bring though my office door.

On the other hand, there are secrets I don’t wish to hear—because you see, I believe that I should be in relationship with people who tell me secrets, or that I tell my secrets to. Just dumping your secrets on some hapless passerby isn’t fair, because a secret will create a bond, but will also create a kind of burden, a burden that person may not be ready to take on.

Consider what happens to me on airplanes, for example. You know how it goes. You sit down next to someone, and you prominently display your book—at last a chance to read! You hope that your seat mate will not engage you in chit-chat. And then it starts, and you get drawn in. At some point, this individual says to you, "And what do you do?" At that point I remember how people generally respond to learning that I am a minister. They either clam up entirely and never say another word to me the whole trip—or they begin telling me their secrets. At that moment I have to decide—do I tell the truth, or do I make up some weird profession, as some of my minister friends are wont to do. I have fantasies about what I could say. "Oh, I’m a chicken farmer. Free-range, of course." Or maybe "I’m a prison guard—do you want to see my gun?"

But I say none of these things, because I’m not very good at lying, and I would have to continue lying when the person says, "Oh, how fascinating! Tell me, if these chickens are free-ranging, how do you find the eggs?" And so I tell the truth, and confess that I am a minister. At first, they don’t believe me—maybe it’s the large silver dangling earrings and the jeans. "You mean, of a church?" they ask. "Yes," I answer. They explore further. "Are you the real minister, or do you just teach Sunday School?" "I’m the senior minister," I say. They look at me squinty-eyed and take this in, and then begin unburdening their heart. There I am, trapped in seat 27A on a packed plane listening to the secrets of a perfect stranger.

I hear all kinds of things. Like the time the young married man confessed that he and his wife were trying to have a baby, and were having trouble with the wife’s becoming pregnant. He then proceeded to outline in great detail and with great earnestness everything they were doing to get her pregnant. This was, believe me, more than I wanted to know. He finally ended with the statement, "You know, getting my wife pregnant is just so much work." I said something, well, compassionate, and went back to my book.

In the realm of secrets, public figures are fair game, for the press is known for "outing" all kinds of secrets about them. A case in point is Madeline Albright, who discovered only three years that her roots were Jewish. Albright grew up in a solid Roman Catholic family. During the war, she lived as an exile in London, and she would ask her parents about their childhood in Czechoslovakia, their native land. "My parents talked about how they met and how they were high school sweethearts," she said. "They talked about getting ready for various holidays, for Easter and Christmas." Of course, since both parents grew up Jewish, the stories they told of these family holidays were fabricated. You see, three of the four of Albright’s grandparents had perished in Nazi concentration camps, but her parents escaped and converted to Catholicism. For 59 years, Albright believed she came from Catholic roots. "As a child, I was a very serious Catholic," she said. "I was especially devoted to the Virgin Mary." She became an Episcopalian when she married in 1959.

When this startling revelation of her Jewish background came to light, a reporter asked her if she thought her parents had done the right thing in fabricating a new family story for their children. After a long pause, she said in a voice filled with tears, "I think my father and mother were the bravest people alive. They dealt with the most difficult decision anyone could make. I am incredibly grateful to them." Albright has had a chance to explore her Jewish roots, which she has done—though this knowledge came with a cost: knowing that her beloved parents had deceived her about their very identity, and hers.

Some would disagree with Albright’s assessment of her parents. Some would say they were more cowardly than brave, others would question the validity of their conversion. I believe that other people simply don’t have the information—moreover, don’t have the right--to judge her parents. Who are we to say? This instance, though, brings up the larger question that affects virtually all families: to what extent do we have a right to know or a responsibility to tell our family secrets? It is not always clear--human situations are often so complex. Should parents reveal their youthful use of marijuana to their teenage children? This falls under the category of "don’t ask, don’t tell." But if they ask, you’d better be truthful. Or here’s one that’s a little harder. Do you have the right to know about your grandfather’s suicide? Do you tell your oldest son that his parents decided to marry because his mom was pregnant? Should a grown child learn that philandering runs in the family?

Given that the answers are not always clear, still we have to make decisions. To not decide, as they say, is to decide. I want to share with you some stories in which secrets were held, and those secrets were harmful. The first story is about the previous minister at the First United Methodist church, right across the expressway from us. Some of you may have known him—his name was Laron Hall. He was, according to all reports, a beloved minister. Unbeknownst to his congregation, he was also a gay man. He couldn’t disclose this fact, because he could not be a Methodist clergyman if the authorities knew. Then he contracted AIDS. People say that his preaching was always strong, but his language became ever more beautiful, ever more powerful, as his body wasted with the disease. Still he could speak to no one about his illness. His congregation saw his declining health, and some guessed what might be happening—but Hall instructed the staff to lie when they were questioned about diagnosis. It was that, or give up his church.

The months went by, and he grew more and more frail. It was only when he died that his congregation found out the truth—his obituary stated that he had died of AIDS. How did this news affect them? They felt angry, betrayed by the deception. Some said that they would have wanted to pray for him to give up his sinful ways, but by far the most were sad that they were not allowed to support this man in his time of need. I didn’t know the man myself, but when I heard what had happened, I decided to go to the memorial service—out of respect for him and to see how the service would be handled. There were musicians, there were dancers, there were many, many speakers. And yet each dignitary who got up to speak carefully avoided saying what Laron had died of. It got to be the elephant in the sanctuary, so to speak.

Then it was the Bishop’s turn. I didn’t expect much of him—Bishops are so often chosen because they stick to the party line. But I was surprised. The Bishop began to speak, and he said right off that Laron had died of AIDS. I can’t remember his exact words, but he said something like this: "How sad it is that when Laron needed you to comfort and support him as he faced his own death, that you could not be there for him, could not be there for the beloved minister who had comforted so many of you in your own grief and loss." An almost audible sigh, a collective relief,

swept over the sanctuary. Someone at last had spoken the truth. People could stop holding their breath and let go. They were free to weep then—not just over Laron’s death, but over their own pain in being separated from their minister when he needed them. They were able to at last acknowledge what, at some level, they had known all along.

The second story comes from yesterday’s Oregonian, which reported that the lead bombardier of Hiroshima—a man named Thomas Wilson Ferebee--had just died at the age of 81. Ferebee was born in 1918, the second child of 12 children in a farm family. He dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. He trained for a while with the Boston Red Sox, but failing to make the team, he joined the army. By age 26, when he took off for Japan, he was a pilot with 26 missions under his belt. He believed the squadron of seven was on a typical mission—he was unaware that the B-29 "Enola Gay" he was flying on August 6, l945, carried an atomic bomb. When he dropped the 38-by-7-foot bomb, he saw "a tremendous blinding light." He said in a 1985 interview, "The first time I ever heard it mentioned was when I landed, and some general came up to me wanting to know what the first atom bomb looked like." Can you imagine that this man had to live the rest of his life with the knowledge of the horrific destruction rendered by the bomb he had unknowingly dropped? He said, "We should look back and think just what one bomb did, what two did. . . . I think we should definitely realize it just can’t happen again." The larger picture, historically, is of course ferreting out the truth of why we dropped the bomb in the first place and accepting our responsibility for that egregious deed. There are individual secrets, and there are state secrets. What is not in our standard history books affects us as much or more than what is there.

Writer Susan Griffin believes that we are so connected to one another and so connected to the past and even now so much a part of the future that is to emerge, that we all belong to one another, and any one secret revealed frees us all. She writes in her book A Chorus of Stones:

"I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung."

"The unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth." Isn’t it so? Isn’t the truth withheld a terrible load to bear, robbing us of precious energy, energy that we could use to love—and doesn’t that withdrawal stifle the joy that would be there, if we weren’t pulled back into the vortex of the secret?

Truth-telling is not easy. Our truth will hurt others, we say. And sometimes that is right and sometimes that is a rationale we use to protect ourselves from the consequences of our truth. When we live behind the curtain of a secret, we have to constantly be on the alert, to pretend to be what we are not, to watch that somebody doesn’t blow our cover. To live without the secret is to be able to look someone in the eye and say, "Here I am. You don’t have to like it. But it’s honest. The inside is congruent with the outside. What you see is really what you get."

And there’s a particular reason to unburden ourselves of family secrets. When the alcoholism, or the gambling or the abuse is not spoken of, it simply perpetuates itself in generation after generation. The only way to break the cycle is for a voice to refuse the shame and to break the silence, for someone to say, "This is what has happened. It must not happen again."

The remarkable thing is that when we finally get up the courage to confess what we believe is unthinkable, we find that others, many others, have shared our experience. That’s because we have so much in common with every other human being. All of us need others. All of us fall short of what we think we should be. We think our pain is unique until we begin to reveal ourselves in trusted company, and we see that we are simply human, no more, no less. We find our secrets are not so terrible after all, and in our freedom we are able to become genuinely intimate, perhaps for the first time, because we can be fully there, as we are, no apologies, no hiding. It is out of this authenticity that our lives take on power and focus. In refusing to betray ourselves with secrets and lies, we refuse to betray the holiness at the center of our being. And we live the life that is ours to live, and no other. What else, pray tell, could we be called to do?

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Holy One, we come today confessing the multitude of fears that harness us to silence and to inaction. We would go forward into our lives boldly, and yet we pull back, ashamed and uncertain. Let us this day take hold of our goodness and not let go of it. Let us claim your love for us, just as we are, imperfect and yet striving to be the people we were meant to be. Let no secret, no lie, betray us as we live ever more authentic, ever more passionate, lives. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now and be faithful to your truth, and no other. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning. Welcome to each one of you. May you feel today that you are in the presence of truth and of beauty. May you feel surrounded by love and uplifted by hope. Come, let us worship together.

Copyright 2000, by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.