Amanda McMillen, “Secrets Revealed & All of us Healed”
What is it that you hope no one ever finds out about you? What are the secrets that you keep from others - or that you keep from yourself - that are always lodged in the back of your brain? The things that you think, that you dare not ever share. The things that you have done, that are embarrassing (or worse) to reflect on. The things that you fear, that you want to never be uncovered? The things that, if shared, would shatter the perception of who you are that you nurture? What are your secrets? (Now don’t everyone speak at once.)
The most stressful kind of movie for me is one in which a character has a secret, but chooses not to tell it, and it’s obvious that the secret is going to come out sooner rather than later, and when it does you know it’s gonna be a huge problem. In my family, we watch the silly (and, to us, absolutely classic) hallmark movie poetically entitled A Boyfriend for Christmas, and at the very beginning of the movie the couple destined to fall in love meets for the first time. Because of his job as a lawyer whose firm forces people from their homes in low-income neighborhoods so that developers can build shopping malls, and her job as a lawyer who defends these families against these corporations, when they meet, the man decides to lie about who he is and what he does for a living, and introduces himself as “Douglas Firwood” (while looking conspicuously at a Christmas tree).
The entire movie is tense, at least for me, and at least as much as a hallmark movie can be. Eventually, we all know, she’s going to find out, so just TELL HER! Douglas Firwood is a terrible lie! It’s extremely stressful, not knowing when she’s going to find out the truth - I’m not going to tell you how it ends because I’m sure you’re dying to watch it for yourself now and also because it’s a hallmark movie so you of course already know how it ends.
But this movie is so relatable. We keep secrets in order to protect our reputations, to protect our image, to protect our sense of self. We keep secrets in order to be more likable, in order to be accepted, to belong in a group. And they aren’t always as serious as lying about our names or what we do for a living - but we often keep from each other what we really think about someone else, or how we’re really doing when asked; how we really feel in our relationships, or what we are really most afraid of. Not to mention the secrets that come alongside addiction, or any behavior that we beholden to and try to cover up as best we can.
We keep secrets from ourselves, too. We don’t admit to ourselves our true thoughts about our friendships, our marriages, or our careers, because to face these hard truths might crumble our very sense of self. Truth can be blinding and destabilizing, which is why Emily Dickinson wrote “tell the truth but tell it slant” - this is why humor is used to cushion the blow of the truth - because it is often too difficult to face head on.
Secrets involve shame - if we didn’t feel shame, we wouldn’t need to keep our secrets. And that shame affects every other aspect of our mental health. The tension that I feel while watching this movie I just described is what is termed by psychologists the “secrecy burden”, according to new research that came out last year. Some secrets, the research explains, seem relatively benign, things that are determined to be “best kept”, and others are much heavier, those considered “deep and dark”. But in both cases, the secrecy burden involves both the individual burden to self, the preoccupation that you have with your own secret, and the social relational burden. This research found that a high secrecy burden leads to overall lower psychological wellbeing and authenticity.
In our passage from Hebrews, the writer says that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joint from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the human heart. Before him no creature is hidden.”
Now I want you to picture a two-edged sword - a blade that is sharp on both sides. It’s a blade that divides soul from spirit, joint from marrow; Hebrews says that it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the human heart.“Thoughts and intentions” are those hidden things of our lives, the secrets we keep, the real reasons we do what we do and think what we think: but God’s word cuts them open with a double-edged sword, like a scalpel performing surgery, separating joint from marrow, separating what is true from what is false, separating the self that we want to show the world from the truth of who we are. The word of God performs careful and precise open-heart surgery.
Each week we begin the service with the Collect for Purity: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit.” In other words, cut away the false, pretending, self from our true, less-than-perfect self, see us for who we truly are and wash us clean.
“The true self” is an elusive and confusing term, I realize. What is the true self? How do I know if I’m being my true self? Am I being my true self right now? The monk Thomas Merton wrote that “To be a saint means to be myself” and I’ve always loved this quote, the idea that sainthood is just me being myself - but what about when I’m not sure who my “true self” really is? When my good intentions and my bad intentions seem all kind of mixed together? The good news here is that we don’t have to be in charge of that. God’s word is the active voice in this passage. God’s word pierces through us, God’s word convicts us of our falsehoods and pretenses and bad intentions that are based in people-pleasing and fear of rejection and pain. We are simply the patient on the operating table, at the mercy of our Great Surgeon.
And it is this self, who has been pierced by the Gospel, pierced by the word of God, who can approach the throne of grace with boldness, as Hebrews says. Not the people-pleaser, not the secret-keeper, but the actual, real, flawed, contradictory, hypocritical, miracle of a person that is you - not the faint wiggly pencil outline of you, but the BOLD sharpie colored-in version. Let us approach the throne of grace with that boldness.
That Thomas Merton quote from earlier continues with this: “Sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is. We must find our real self, in all its elemental poverty, but also in its great and very simple dignity: created to be the child of God”. We have a great and very simple dignity, as children of God, and that is the truth of who we are.
But this work of distinguishing between what we are not and what we are, this work of casting off the false self and finding our real self in its elemental poverty, even this work is done by God. The “living word of God”, the judge of the human heart, describes not only the way that scripture opens up our hearts and minds, finding those things in us that we would rather keep hidden, the way that it convicts us; it also describes the word of God made flesh, the logos, the one who is described in the beginning of John’s Gospel like this: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”
This is who holds the scalpel, who pierces us with truth and clarity, who heals us, Jesus Christ, the one who himself was pierced for our transgressions, who was crushed for our iniquities on the cross, the one who died for the sake of giving us true life; Jesus is our open-heart surgeon, precisely separating what is false from what is true, revealing our true nature as children of God, our true nature as sinners with secrets, who are all brought finally into that relief of the light of the truth and given there endless mercy. Amen.
