by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given April 6, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

It was a number of years ago. I was pretty new to the ministry. It was a Monday morning and I hadn’t been in the office long before I heard the doorbell ring. A man came in asking to speak to a minister. I had not seen him before. He came into my office. I closed the door. We sat down and he told me that there was something that he needed to tell someone and asked if we could pray together. At that point he got down on his knees and confessed that he had had an affair and that it was something he could not forgive himself for. It was tearing up his life and he couldn’t hold it in any longer. He needed to tell someone. We said a prayer together and then knelt a silence for a short time. Soon thereafter the man got up and was ready to go. Was there anything else I could do for him, I asked? No, he said, that’s what he needed. He was probably there for all of 10 minutes.

Secrets have power. They are there with us. Sometimes the point comes when we need to tell someone about them. We need to get them out and not carry them with us any longer. That happened early in my ministry, but I’ve since come to understand that is part of my role. It usually doesn’t happen quite so dramatically but there is the human need to tell someone something we are carrying around.

Secrets come in many forms. Some to get told but some are with us, maybe, when we die. Recently I was with a group at dinner and the subject of secrets came up. Suddenly it seemed as if everybody had a story.

There was woman who, on her deathbed, told her children that they had another sibling. They had no idea this was the case. It was from an earlier marriage—also a surprise—that she had not told her family about.

And a similar story, also on the deathbed: This time it was the mother revealing that it was their father who had another child. Their father had died some years earlier and they were left to search this person out. 

In both of those cases, I expect, it made for a dramatic last chapter of life.

Life can be full of surprises. We don’t know what people are carrying around. I’m always a little amazed at what is out there. Recently there has been the news from the past and present governors of New York and their confessions of hiring high-priced prostitutes and having extramarital affairs. I have to confess as these stories came out I’ve often felt like maybe my life is a little on the boring side.

I’m not sure that most people are carrying around things that are so dramatic. But I know that there are things we all carry around, big and small. And that is part of the human story. There are things we know and so many things we don’t know. Part of what makes secrets juicy is that we are by nature curious. We want to know what’s happening—maybe because it might reveal a good story. Maybe because it might make us somehow feel superior. So we are curious and sometimes what is not said only leads to speculation.

Do you ever read the obituaries in the paper—especially the ones that have been paid for, often with photos? But do you notice how often there is nothing said about the cause of death? I immediately find myself wondering what is going on there. And I find myself trying to guess what that cause might be. That’s especially true when someone young has died. It makes for more of a mystery.

Secrets have power and they are with us in all kinds of forms.

Three hundred human services workers and graduate counseling students were asked what their biggest—i.e. most difficult, burdensome or painful—secret was. Because of the delicacy of the topic, extreme care was taken to protect the confidentiality of the respondents.

Twenty percent of the respondents had not told a single other person their deepest secret.[1] The reasons they gave were that the secrets were too personal or embarrassing, they feared others’ reactions, or they were afraid of hurting or burdening someone else. And sometimes it may not just be our secret but a family secret. That can make it a lot more complicated. Sometimes it has to do with shame or guilt. Sometimes with the passage of years it the right time doesn’t reveal itself.

Not all secrets need to be told. It depends of how it will affect others and the consequences that can come. But sometimes secrets need expression. Often they have a whole lot more power in the shadow then when they are held in the light. That’s something to pay attention to. Secrets have as much power as we give them.

Researchers charted a way to study the degree to which we open ourselves. They make a chart with four areas—think of a window pane with four sections.[2]

It first divides between what is known to self and not known to self.

What is knows to others, what is not known to others.

This produces four parts of the window:

The open part—what is known to us and known to others

The hidden part—what is known to the self but not to others

The blind part—what is known to others and not to self

And the unknown part—what neither the self or others know.

We probably all have things in all of those boxes. But they point to our public and private selves. The question might be what is the right distribution. If too much is kept in it is not necessarily healthy. There’s a way that something can fester and not find its way out of us.  When we are carrying around too much we can find ourselves more prone to depression and anxiety. It can stand in the way of relationships in our lives. What’s important, I think, is to try to have as much perspective on something as we are able to. As we are able to think about the balance of our private and public selves we might see parts of our lives in better context. To imagine how we might give expression to what’s inside of us.

It is important to say that not all secrets are bad. They can also carry with them possibility and creativity. There are those things that perhaps only we know, that point to potential that point to strengths we may not want to let others know about. They can be a source of power and we can use that power in our lives.

There’s a website called postsecrets.com. It takes postcards people send in and posts them. There has also been at least one book written. With images of the cards people have sent in.

One is a photo of the back of a man. The word EQUALITY is on the back of his head. Underneath that it read “in 5^th grade our student teacher was gay. We made fun of him the entire year. I’m gay too. I’m so sorry."

In another one is a drawing of a small mischievous creature with the words, “I’m planning on spending all of my tax refund on frivolous things.”

I didn’t wear undies to church last week.

Your parents wanted to take you off life support. I wouldn’t let them. You got better… then you divorced me.

One of the best parts of this job is spying on the cards you write to each other. Love, your florist.

Some of the things revealed are deeply personal. Some are very painful. Others are pretty funny. The postcards—and the venue for expression—make a point that secrets are not necessarily bad. They can be creative and healing, too.

What is there in the shadows, what we hold inside of us has power. And part of the spiritual task is to pay attention to that power. What we need to keep inside and what we don’t need to keep inside. We live with all kinds of basic needs including the need to be loved and accepted. Sometimes it is fear of not being loved that keeps secrets inside us and that holds us in the shadows.

Words of T.S. Eliot:

If a man has one person, just one in their life,

To whom he is willing to confess everything—

And that includes, mind you no only things criminal,

Not only turpitude, meanness and cowardice,

But also situations which are simply ridiculous,

When he has played the fool (as who has not?)—

Then he loved that person, and his love will save him.

Life is a process of understanding ourselves in relation to our world: why we live, why we die, to understand the events that have shaped us, to understand why others have influenced us in ways positive and not so positive. Part of our task is to put our lives into context. To be aware that we are not the sum total of something we are ashamed of or something that happened to us long ago but the sum of something much more. To see ourselves as whole.

To ask what has meaning. To ask what we are called to be doing this day or the next day or this year or in the next year. To always be open to what might be revealed.

Sometimes it is difficult to know what is going on inside of us. Sometimes in the midst of all that is going on around us it is difficult to know just how we are supposed to move in the world.

But there are times when something unknown wants to be known. When something in us wants to find expression. It may not even be something that is in our consciousness. But It might be something that we have to pay attention to, that might need to be given voice.

Jeremy Taylor was a teacher I had in seminary. His field of study is dreams. He believes that dreams are a way we find health and wholeness. That in learning from our own dreams and the dreams of others we can know ourselves and what we are wanting in our lives.

In one of his books he talks about a student who was in his dream class. now not all student remember dreams but usually after a few weeks in the class, with lots of intention, most people do start to remember dreams, if only in fragments. This was my experience, I know.

So he writes about a young man who can’t remember his dreams and weeks and weeks go by. Finally he is the only one in the class who hasn’t shared and dream and this is affecting his participation in the class. Finally the teacher asks him if he remembers anything, even a fragment. No, he doesn’t. OK. So how about he just make up a dream, the theory being that even an imaginary dream is coming for the subconscious somehow. But he doesn’t want to do this because, he says, it would feel like cheating. The discussion goes on and he finally says that he does have a twinge of memory from that morning’s dreams—that there had been pastel colors. When asked what colors, he responded that he had no specifics—only this vague memory of “pastels.”

Taylor writes “although I could not imagine a more inadequate fragment to work with, I decided on grounds of group-process alone that it would be a good idea to go ahead and work with it. We proceeded and another student eventually asked the young man if there was any association in his mind between the word “pastel” and the word “pastoral.” The young man gets a strange smile on his face and admitted with some resistance that there was indeed an association. He finally recounted his commitment to training as a minister and to pastoral life was distinctly pastel. He was forced to admit the self knowledge to consciousness in that moment that he was in theological school primarily to satisfy parental expectations rather than as an expression of his own deepest desires and commitments. Having once admitted this to himself, it became impossible to pretend once again that he did not know this about himself. Taylor writes as a postscript that it was not long after that the young man left theological school.[3]

Secrets come in many forms. They might be in the form of something that is unknown in our consciousness that wants to be known. It may need to be called out. This is when they can be a gift. Sometimes we might be ready and other times we might be very resistant. 

Life is a mystery that keeps presenting itself over and over again. The spirit moves and we may not always know what it is asking of us. We may not even be aware of the ways that we are being asked to move in the world. It starts, I think, by paying attention to what’s going on inside us. To understand what might be holding us back and what might also be propelling us forward. To understand that source of power—to hurt as well as to heal. What happens to us and our spirit in the midst of holding something in? How is it that we lose sight of our potential in the world?

Is it always easy to know? No, not at all? But the spirit is with us. 

Words of Rumi: “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want; Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.”

We live in times that ask us to live the way that brings our gifts into the world. Sometimes that means taking risks. Sometimes that means putting ourselves out there. It means being with the whole of our lives—all of our brokenness, all of our mistakes, all of the ways that life has not been fair, but also all the ways that we have been loved, all the gifts that we bring, all the possibility that lives in each one of us. It means living with a faithfulness that what we need will be provided. It means living with a faithfulness that we will find our way in the world. 

PRAYER

Spirit of life, bless us on the journey. Hold us in our brokenness, in our wholeness. Point us to possibility, to new life. Call us to see our power in the world and to use our gifts well. Call us into right relationship with others that we might see ourselves not as isolated beings but connected in mystery and wonder. Connected in hope and possibility. Amen.

BENEDICTION

In this season of spring may you know new life, may you know wholeness and possibility. Go now in love. Go in peace. Amen.