no secrets
Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid ...
... the opening of our Collect for Purity, our rite of cleansing that, Celebrant's option in Rite Two, opens our celebration of the Holy Eucharist. From that point on, if lex orandi lex credendi is true for us, we don't need to say the Confession of Sin and hear the Absolution, much less do we need to say the Prayer of Humble Access, because, in our theological perception, God makes us clean in that opening Collect. What do you think? More, what secrets surface and float through your conscious before the celebrant closes "through Christ our Lord" and you respond affirming "Amen", what flashes through your mind?
What goes through my mind is not sins, of which there are too many to parade by every Sunday, but secrets. Not dark secrets, as Buechner sets them aside, but those he describes as "so precious we have no way of sharing them". Love, memories, as he says, that make our hearts leap. Buechner is right, in my decades long relationship with what he writes, he always has been right, correct. He always is, pinpoints me, Buechner rocks, as someone put it.
Including his line that "We are our secrets". I think, therefore I am. I am my thoughts, and the mental cupboard of them tucked away in my brain from my earliest awarenesses to this moment. My memories, my secrets. Things I hold too dear to share, and that no one else would understand or value if I did share. I am my secrets in ways that are so personal and private that no one knows me but myself - - and, maybe I concede, God from whom no secrets are hid.
It's so for each of us, billions of us on earth now and back through the ages. Each of us is a treasure house that, like our fingerprints, gives us our identity and our Being. When we die, that treasury of memories dies with us, and will never be again. We are unique, irreplaceable, each of us is Do Not Duplicate.
Here's Frederick Buechner's essay that I just found saved on my computer desktop. Clearing, I'm moving it to a file where, unfortunately, I'll forget it and never see it again.
WE TEND TO THINK RIGHT AWAY of dark secrets—things we did or failed to do that we have never managed to forgive ourselves for; fierce hungers that we have difficulty admitting even to ourselves; things that happened to us long ago too painful to speak of; doubts about our own worth as human beings, doubts about the people closest to us, about God if we believe in God; and fear—the fear of death, the fear of life.
But there are also happy secrets, the secrets we keep like treasure less because we don't want to share them with the world for fear of somehow tarnishing them than because they are so precious we have no way of sharing them adequately. The love we feel for certain people, some of them people we scarcely know, some of them people who do not suspect our love and wouldn't know how to respond to it if they did. The way our hearts leap at certain things that the chances are wouldn't make anybody else so much as turn a hair—the sound of a particular voice on the telephone, a dogeared book we read as children, the first snow, the sight of an old man smoking his pipe on the porch as we drive by.
We are our secrets. They are the essence of what makes us ourselves. They are the rich loam out of which, for better or worse, grow the selves by which the world knows us. If we are ever to be free and whole, we must be free from their darkness and have their spell over us broken. If we are ever to see each other as we fully are, we must see by their light.
"Search me, O God, and know my heart!" cries out the great Psalm 139, which is all about the hiding and baring of secrets. "Try me and know my thoughts... for darkness is as light to thee." Even our darkness.
It is the secret prayer of us all.
-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words