Telling Secrets

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits. We believe in God-such as it is, we have faithbecause certain things happened to us once and go on happening. We work and goof off, we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these, and if our faith is not mainly just window dressing or a rabbit’s foot or fire insurance, it is because it grows out of precisely this kind of rich human compost. The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don’t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us

mainstream of things in the hills of Vermont, and my Life has had very little impact on anybody much cept for the people closest to me and the comparative few who have read books I’ve written and been one way or another touched by them. ads But I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.

The sad things that happened long ago will always remain part of who we are just as the glad and gracious things will too, but instead of being a burden of guilt, recrimination, and regret that make us constantly stumble as we go, even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead. It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later.

Sad to say, the people who seem to lose touch with themselves and with God most conspicuously are of all things ministers. As a minister myself I am peculiarly aware of this. I don’t say they do it more than other people but they do it more publicly. It could hardly be more ironic. First of all, ministers give preeminence to of all books the Bible whose absolutely central and unifying thesis is that God makes himself known in historical experience. Secondly, they call their congregations to examine their own experience as human beings in that most intimate and searching of all ways which is known as prayer. Thirdly, in their sermons, if they do it right, they proclaim above all else the staggeringly good news that God so loves the world that he is continually at work in our lives in the world in order to draw us, in love, closer and closer to himself and to each other. In other words, a major part of their ministry is to remind us that there is nothing more important than to pay attention to what is happening to us, yet again and again they show little sign of doing so themselves. There is precious little in most of their preaching to suggest that they have rejoiced and suffered with the rest of mankind. If they draw on their own experience at all, it is usually for some little anecdote to illustrate a point or help make the pill go down but rarely if ever for an authentic, first-hand, flesh-and-blood account of what it is like to love Christ, say, or to feel spiritually bankrupt, or to get fed up with the whole religious enterprise. Along with much of the rest of mankind, ministers have had such moments, we can only assume, but more often than not they don’t seem to trust them, don’t draw on them, don’t talk about them. Instead they keep setting them aside for some reason-maybe because they seem too private to share or too trivial or too ambiguous or not religious enough; maybe because what God seems to be saying to them through their flesh-and-blood experience has a depth and mystery and power to it which make all their homiletical pronouncements about God sound empty by comparison. The temptation then is to stick to the homiletical pronouncements. Comparatively empty as they may be, they are at least familiar. They add up. Congregations have come to expect homiletical pronouncements and to take comfort from them, and the preachers who pronounce them can move them around in various thought-provoking and edifying ways which nobody will feel unsettled or intimidated by because they have heard them so often. Ministers run the awful risk, in other words, of ceasing to be witnesses to the presence in their own lives-let alone in the lives of the people they are trying to minister to- of a living God who transcends everything they think they know and can say about him and is full of extraordinary surprises. Instead they tend to become professionals who have mastered all the techniques of institutional religion and who speak on religious matters with what often seems a maximum of authority and a minimum of vital personal involvement. Their sermons often sound as bland as they sound bloodless. The faith they proclaim appears to be no longer rooted in or nourished by or challenged by their own lives but instead freefloating, secondhand, passionless. They sound, in other words, burnt out. Obviously ministers are not called to be in that sense professionals. God forbid. I believe that they are called instead, together with all other Christians and would-be Christians, to consider the lilies of the field, to consider the least of these my brethren, to consider the dead sparrow by the roadside. Maybe prerequisite to all those, they are called upon to consider themselves-what they love and what they fear, what they are ashamed of, what makes them sick to their stomachs, what rejoices their hearts. I believe that ministers and everyone are called also to consider Jesus of Nazareth in whom God himself showed how crucial human life is by actually living one and hallowed human death by actually dying one and who lives and dies still with us and for us and in spite of us. I believe that we are called to see that the day-by-day lives of all of us-the things that happened long ago, the things that happened only this morning-are also hallowed and crucial and part of a great drama in which souls are lost and souls are saved including our own. That is why to keep track of these lives we live is not just a means of enriching our understanding and possibly improving our sermons but a truly sacred work.

The passage from Genesis points to a mystery greater still. It says that we come from farther away hen space and longer ago than time. It says that evolution and genetics and environment explain a lot about us but they don’t explain all about us or even the most important thing about us. It says that though we live in the world, we can never be entirely at home in the world. It says in short not only that we were created by God but also that we were created in God’s image and likeness. We have something of God within us the way we have something of the stars. Life batters and shapes us in all sorts of ways before it’s done, but those original selves which we were born with and which I believe we continue in some measure to be no matter what are selves which still echo with the holiness of their origin

painting, writing music, dance, all of it that in some way nourishes the spirit and enriches the understanding. I think that our truest prayers come from there too, the often unspoken, unbidden prayers can rise out of the lives of unbelievers as well as believers whether they recognize them as prayers or not. And I think that from there also come our best dreams and our times of gladdest playing and taking it easy and all those moments when we find ourselves being better or stronger or braver or wiser than we are. This is the self we are born with, and then of course the world does its work. Starting with the rather too pretty young woman, say, and the charming but rather unstable young man who together know no more about being parents than they do about the far side of the moon, the world sets in to making us into what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than it apparently did the selves we originally were. That is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather

Beneath the question about food, there were for her unspoken questions about love, trust, fear, loss, separation, and these were also my questions. Childhood fears persist in us all, and what I feared most was losing what I loved the way years before I had lost a father I hardly knew well enough to love. So I clung onto my children for dear life because in many ways, too many ways, they were life. I looked to them and to my wife to fill empty places in me which, with their own lives to live, they didn’t have either the wherewithal or the inclination to do. I got so caught up in my daughter’s slow starvation that I wasn’t aware of the extent to which I myself was starving. my Life went on of course because that is what life does. I kept on writing books, which a relatively small but faithful audience kept on reading

and in the winter of 1982 I accepted an invitation to teach a course in preaching at Harvard Divinity School. I attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City in the 1950s, and my years there were among the richest in my life. Reinhold Niebuhr was there then and so was Paul Tillich, Samuel Terrien, Paul Scherer, John Knox, George Buttrick, Robert Macafee Brown, and above all the great James Muilenburg, who more than any of them became my father and brother in Christ. But in addition to the excitement and challenge of those extraordinary teachers-I remember riding up in the elevator once with Paul Tillich so awed by his presence that I couldn’t choke out so much as good morning-there was no less richly an extraordinary sense of community. God knows there was nothing homogenous about the place. I can’t think of a theological position or denominational affiliation that wasn’t represented by one or the other of the men and women who had come to study there from almost every part of the country and every kind of background both intellectual and social. There were countless views on how the good news of the Gospel could be most authentically related to the headline news of those times when the Cold War was threatening to sweep civilization itself away

It did not take me long to discover early in the game, as you might have thought I would have known before I came, that a number of them were Unitarian Universalists who by their own definition were humanist atheists. One of them, a woman about my age, came to see me in my office one day to say that although many of the things I had to teach about preaching she found interesting enough, few of them were of any practical use to people like her who did not believe in God. I asked her what it was she did believe in, and I remember the air of something like wistfulness with which she said that whatever it was, it was hard to put into words. I could sympathize with that, having much difficulty putting such things into words over the years myself, but at the same time I felt somehow floored and depressed by what she said. I think things like peace, kindness, social responsibility, honesty were the things she believed in-and maybe she was right, maybe that is the best there is to believe in and all there is-but it was hard for me to imagine giving sermons about such things. I could imagine lecturing about them or writing editorials about them, but I could not imagine standing up in a pulpit in a black gown with a stained glass window overhead and a Bible open on the lectern and the final chords of the sermon hymn fading away into the shadows and preaching about them. I realized that if ideas were all I had to preach, I would take up some other line of work. I had never understood so clearly before what preaching is to me. Basically, it is to proclaim a Mystery before which, before whom, even our most exalted ideas turn to straw. It is also to proclaim this Mystery with a passion that ideas alone have little to do with. It is to try to put the Gospel into words not I would compose an essay but the way you I would write a poem or a love letter-putting your heart into it, your own excitement, most of all your own life. It is to speak words that you hope may, by grace, be bearers not simply of new understanding of and also for you. Out of that life, who knows what new ideas about peace and honesty and social responsibility may come, but they are the fruits of the

We keep at our jobs whatever they happen to be. We keep the car in repair. We have the TV fixed and try to get the furnace cleaned once a year. We see to it that our clothes are reasonably clean and that there’s something in the refrigerator for breakfast. We do the best we can taking care of the very young, the very old, and sometimes each other. If you have ever watched ants at work on a bare patch of lawn, you have seen us. They scurry this way, stop, scurry that way. They labor under the weight of the crumb they carry just so far before abandoning it. They meet and part, disappear into the grass and appear again or never do. Small things loom large-the fallen leaf, the rusty nail. Large things go unnoticed-the sky, the house, the enormous face in the air. They keep busy on their tiny errands. Life is busyness for all of us, is keeping busy. Keeping still comes harder. But stillness comes. Even the ant lays down her crumb. Even at our busiest and on the move, something within us pauses from time to time between the rusty nail and the fallen leaf, between stops on the subway, between laying down the pen and picking it up again. We keep still, and we dream. I don’t know what dreams are, but I know they come from far away, both the sleeping kind and waking kind, and I know that at least some of them come from the gray chapel in the White Tower.

He said all I had to do was ask for it by name. Then he told me the name. He said the name of the room where I had been at peace was Remember. I think of all the things you and I could remember that would not bring us peace at all, but I believe that at least part of what the dream meant was that way beyond all those things, at the innermost heart, at the farthest reach, of our remembering, there is peace. The secret place of the Most High is there. Eden is there, the still waters, the green pastures. Home is there. I think our best dreams are always trying to move in that direction-homeward-and writing a novel, for me, is a form of dreaming, of deepest remembering. I dream up a character or two and some vague sense of a story to bring them together, and then, sitting on a couch with my feet propped on a low bench in front of me and my pen in my hand and my eyes staring out toward the window or down toward the slate floor, I let whatever wants to happen happen. In the early eighties I made a number of false starts on novels. I would write about thirty pages or so and then lay them aside because they weren’t coming to life for me. Most if not all of them, as I remember it now, had to do one way or another with Bermuda

More than anything else I remember to the point of being able to feel echoes of it to this day the almost unbearable lurch of freedom and gladness and wild excitement in my stomach as we trotted off around the harbor. past. Fifty years later Bermuda was where most of those unfinished novels were set, and as I think back on them now, it seems clear that in the process of trying to remember and dream my way into them, what I was looking for was less a book about that enchanted place to write than a place like that enchanted place inside myself to find and be.

for me, in the fall of 1985 I moved west. All life I have been an easterner. I think of the East as more my than anything else coastal. I think of it as where the cold winds of the sea strike first, where the winds of change, of new ideas, of foreignness, strike first, and where if war ever comes, I suppose the bombs will strike first too. I think of the East as the outer edge of things where there is always the danger of losing your foothold on the reality and reliability and American

, but in the part of the East where I live, if anybody were to ask a question like that, even among religious people, the sky would fall, the walls would cave in, the grass would wither. I think the very air would stop my mouth if I opened it to speak such words among just about any group of people I can think of in the East because their faith itself, if they happen to have any, is one of the secrets that they have kept so long that it might almost as well not exist. The result was that to find myself at Wheaton among people who, although they spoke about it in different words from mine and expressed it in their lives differently, not only believed in Christ and his Kingdom more or less as I did but were also not ashamed or embarrassed to say so was like finding something which, only when I tasted it, I realized I had been starving for for years.

. At their best they bring many strengths with them into the pulpit but rarely, as I listened to them anyway, their real lives. In that sense at least the rector of Saint Barnabas, a man named Robert MacFarlane, did not strike me as evangelical at all. His sermons were not seamless and armor plated but had spaces in them, spaces of silence as if he needed those spaces to find deep within himself what he was going to say next, as if he was giving the rest of us space to think for a moment about what he had just been trying to say

Then Peter said, “I do not know the man.” It was Peter’s denial, of course, MacFarlane said: I do not even know who he is. It was the denial that Jesus himself had predicted, and the cock raised his beak into the air and crowed just as Jesus had foretold. But it was something else too, MacFarlane said. It was a denial, but it was also the truth. Peter really did not know who Jesus was, did not really know, and neither do any of us really know who Jesus is either. Beyond all we can find to say about him and believe about him, he remains always beyond our grasp, except maybe once in a while the hem of his garment. We should never forget that. We can love him, we can learn from him, but we can come to know him only by following him-by searching for him in his church, in his Gospels, in each other. That was the sermon I heard anyway, and I remember thinking that if it were not for all the reasons I have for living where I do, could imagine moving a thousand miles just to be near where I could hear truth spoken like that. And I remem ber too that the last time I attended a service there, there were real tears running down my cheeks at the realiza tion that the chances were I would probably never find myself there again. When I got home, I thought I could not rest until I found a church like that

n. Have no anxiety about anything but se known to God. And the peas that preses all the standing will keep your but d minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:6-7 antys I do not believe that such groups as the which I found my way to not long after returning finns Who ton, or Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the gr they all grew out of, are perfect any more than a thing human is perfect, but I believe that the church has an enormous amount to learn from them. I also believe that what goes on in them is far closer to what Christ meant his church to be, and what it originally was, than much of what goes on in most churches I know.

There is the outward camaraderie and inward loneliness of the congregation. There are the unspoken rules and hidden agendas, the doubts and disagreements that for propriety’s sake are kept more or less under cover. There are people with all sorts of enthusiasms and creativities which are not often enough made use of or even recognized because the tendency is not to rock the boat but to keep on doing things the way they have always been done.

Thinking it over since, I have come to believe that maybe another rule came to an end along with it. This one was a rule that I had no less devastatingly laid down for myself, and it was this: that I had no right to be happy unless the people I loved-especially my children were happy too. I have come to believe that that is not true. I believe instead that we all of us have not only the right to be happy no matter what but also a kind of sacred commission to be happy-in the sense of being free to breathe and move, in the sense of being able to bless our own lives, even the sad times of our own lives, because through all our times we can learn and grow, and through all our times, if we keep our ears open, God speaks to us his saving word.

I like to believe that once or twice, at times like those, I have bumbled my way into at least the outermost suburbs of the Truth that can never be told but only come upon, that can never be proved but only lived for and loved. It is the experience that I think the author of the 131st Psalm is trying to describe, and I will let the final word be his. O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a child quieted at its mother’s breast, like a child that is quieted is my soul. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for evermore.