Secrets-We All Have Them

One of my favorite paragraphs in all of literature is Dicken’s third chaper in his A Tale of Two Cities:

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore.

We all have secrets, things we don’t discuss outside our own heads. As Dickens alludes to, this is the state of the human condition. In this series of articles, I will make the case that the depth of that secret place is tied to what other perceive as hypocrisy, hypocrisy the leading cause of people leaving Christianity for good. I define hypocrisy as where you pretend to live at one standard, but not you are not consistent, or live secretly live at another standard, until your secret is discovered. As always, it is for the leavers that I write.

I have always been intrigued by secrets, even as a young boy. My mother was a very candid woman; she had no filter whatsoever. Therefore, our family had few secrets. No, I wasn’t sired by some man other than my dad. My father did have a drinking problem later in life, but while he tried to hide it, it was no secret. However, the world around us, the Appalachian Bible-belt had a hidden history, one that permeated every street and darkened every smile.

I’ve shared before how our church’s assistant pastor—held up to us young men as the epitome of godliness—had a secret. A dark one. He was a habitual pedophile, molesting and seducing many young men in our church, including my brother. But this was a well-known secret, one that the community chose to deny. Just like they chose to deny our pastor’s mistresses, and how a young woman in our church exchanged sex with our head deacon (in his sixties) to get the gig of playing the piano for the Sunday morning service. Have you noticed a pattern? Many, but not all, of our secrets are sexual in nature.

That Appalachian culture carried it’s secrets close to the surface. People often guessed correctly about such secrets, whispered over morning coffee or in a fishing boat late at night when everyone’s pole had sat silent for hours. Drawing on Dicken’s metaphor, these books of secrets had a weak spring and no lock.

This is very different from the subculture I later joined, and evangelical discipleship group, whose book of secrets was tightly locked, because the standard was unrealistically high. I have also noticed that the culture my wife grew up in, Scandinavian-stoic Lutheran, of the upper Midwest, likewise holds their secrets far out of reach. No whispers.

I’m going to tell several stories, some sad but also funny, so you can laugh. Then I want to deconstruct the psychology and metaphysics of hypocrisy. Yes, there is a metaphysical issue that is the foundational problem for Christian hypocrisy.

Men’s Retreat

In the mid nineteen nineties, I put together a men’s winter retreat for our evangelical church. We were living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where snow is measured in yards. The trip was going to be a Nordic ski trip, deep into the woods to a cabin (Tom’s Lake Cabin) and spend the weekend. A serious blizzard was blowing in, off of Lake Superior, the following day, however we discussed it, and (being “Yoopers”)  loved the idea of experiencing the thirty-inches of new snow, high winds, and far below zero temperatures while in a remote cabin. Fifteen men signed up for the adventure. The pastor agreed (he didn’t come) that the goal would be a time of bonding and holding each other accountable for “anything we might be dealing with.”

On the first night, after a great dinner, and sitting around the stone fireplace (the only place in the cabin where it was at least thirty degrees) I led a discussion time, and a time of prayer. I started by saying to the men, everything we shared will be held in confidence. To “prime the pump,” I reached into my most secret place and share a deeply personal failure. I honestly can’t remember what it was as I had so many to draw from. The second person, after a few minutes of silence, confessed to the group that he had a porn addiction and needed help. I led a time of prayer and I offered him my help, like accountability.

Now, in the discipleship group I had been a part of, we had done such times of candid sharing and prayer, (yet we kept our books closed, pretending we had no secrets) but I didn’t realize that this was a real shocker for the rest of the group. So, for the next thirty minutes, we sat in silence as we all stared into the fire and listened to the howling wind. I then changed the subject because I could sense the awkwardness setting the air between us like cold molasses.

The next morning, we had breakfast and where going to spend the day skiing in the blizzard-like conditions. I washed dishes, not noticing it was getting quieter and quieter. When I was done with the dishes, only the chap who had ridden with me to the trailhead was sitting in the cabin. “Did everyone else take off on the ski trail?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said. “They all headed for their cars. They’re heading home. They said they were afraid of the storm.”

My car mate and I stayed for the week-end and as we skied I pondered the events of the previous evening and morning. I had totally miscalculated the event and how threatening the situation must have been for most of these men. This retreat failure was my fault for not realizing how tightly our book of secrets was held in that culture, and here I was, trying to rip the covers off.

I will continue this thought.

Respectfully, Mike