January 3, 2016
Rev. Matt Alspaugh
Part 1 – Ordinary Confessions
Introduction
The theme for this month is Resistance, a powerful theme that seems to break two ways. There’s personal resistance – refusing to change, avoiding something new, such as my perennial resistance to writing New Years Resolutions.
Then there’s communal resistance, in particular for us, of being part of a resistance movement, acting against forces of oppression.
This morning we want to explore a facet of the first form of resistance.
I say we, because both Kristina and I are preaching on the exact same topic today – confession. We were going to share in leading worship here, but she was given an opportunity to preach at Kent, her home congregation, so you have to make do with just me today. Kristina and I worked together on readings and ideas, but each wrote our own sermons. So you might ask her for her sermon text, and have fun seeing how we each approached the same topic.
Confessions of Faith
Of all the traditional spiritual practices engaged in other churches, I suspect that the practice of confession is one that we Unitarian Universalists would have strongest resistance to.
Some of that resistance undoubtably comes from our individual religious pasts. Many among us came out of the Roman Catholic tradition, and recall, often without much fondness, the Catholic Sacrament of Penance, or confession. I don’t know this practice personally, but this is what I’m told is typical. You, as a child of seven or so, are introduced to this idea of telling a serious authority figure your sins every week. It can be very intimidating. You quickly learn that even if you didn’t do anything wrong, you do need to come up with some kind of sin to confess. So you learn to make things up. Or, if there are things you are really embarrassed about, you keep silent about those, so you learn to keep secrets. Am I right about this?
In other Christian traditions there is often some form of communal confession of sins before God, often in the form of some prayer of confession. Jews atone for their sins of the past year before celebrating the new year as part of Yom Kippur. Even certain Buddhist sects include a kind of confession, though the goal of such practice is navigating the effects of karma, rather than confessing sin.[1]
We Unitarian Universalists engage very little with confession. Both our Universalist and Unitarian traditions emerged criticizing older dogma that humans are born with original sin and face the possibility of an eternity in hell.
Our Unitarian ancestors believed all persons were born good, free of original sin, with inherent worth and dignity, fully worthy of God’s love, even ‘part and particle’ of God.
Our Universalist forebears saw the certainty of salvation for everyone after death. For them, the fear of divine judgment played no part in their theology, so choosing to do good was a natural consequence for the morally developed person.
So confession, as in acknowledging our sinfulness, our depravity, or our brokenness just hasn’t been part of our theology — or our practice. For example, our hymnal contains just three confessional readings — we read one this morning.
Confessions of the Ordinary Kind
And yet I wonder if we might have lost something by removing confession from our spiritual tool kit. Maybe there is some benefit to confessing, getting things off our chests, baring our soul, revealing secrets. Maybe we don’t direct these confessions to God, maybe they are a more ordinary kind of confession, shared with other people.
Indeed, in the age of the Internet, new kinds of confessionals have been created, secular places where we can see what it’s like to reveal our secrets. Places where we also can serve as the receivers, as the readers of such anonymously shared secrets.
Postsecret[2], which we heard about earlier, is probably the best known of such sites, but there are other art installations, like Candy Chang’s Confessions, as well as phone apps like Whisper and Yik Yak that allow you to post your secrets.
The Exercise
We want to explore what it might be like to confess in this ordinary realm. We want to offer you a chance to share your secrets anonymously, postsecret style. Our greeters will pass out a couple of cards to each of you. These are facsimiles of the original postcards that Frank Warren handed out in Washington to start the postsecret project.
We invite you to take one of these cards home just as a reminder to think about confessions and secrets this week. Or you could mail it off to postsecret!
On the second card we invite you to write a secret, if you’re willing, following the directions on the card. We’ll collect and read those out loud later.
But we want to keep everyone safe with this practice. So here’s how this will work.
First, we ask everyone to write something on a card and turn it in, even if all you write is (‘I have nothing to share’, or just ‘no’). I’ll collect them face down, and shuffle them.
We will also shuffle in some outside secrets from postsecret and other sources. This means you can’t automatically assume a secret came from a person in this room. We don’t want you wondering – who wrote that!
Third, we won’t read secrets that name people by name or otherwise identify them.
And finally, we’ll shred these cards when we’re done.
[pass out cards, more images]
I’d like the greeters to come forward, and pass out these cards. Please give each person two of these. We’ll do this while we sing, Hymn #1.
[show presentation]
Hymn #1 May Nothing Evil Cross This Door
Silent Meditation
Reading – from “Confession” by David Whyte
“To confess is not only to acknowledge a truth we have held from ourselves all along, breathing quietly, alone and in secret what we could not initially give a voice, but the hopeful dedication to a larger life that might make us powerless to commit the self same sin again.”
Part 2 – Secrets and Confessions
The Cost of Secrets
The fact that Frank Warren has received a million postcards, and his is only one site among many sites and phone apps, says something. People want safe ways to confess, to reveal their secrets, large and small. There’s good reason: Keeping secrets can sometimes become a burden, destructive, even deadly.
Rev. Erika Hewitt tells of a hometown childhood friend who she followed at a distance on Facebook[3]. The friend had developed testicular cancer, with mets to the brain. He sought experimental treatment at major clinics. He lost his hair to chemo. His neighbors raised significant money for his medical bills. And, finally, good news, he was cured.
And then, suddenly, he was dead. “What was this? He had died? How?” Hewitt wondered. Only later did she learn that her friend had died of suicide. Hewitt learned the secret: she tells us her friend “never had cancer, at all. He’d been faking it all along, a fact which he confessed to his wife before killing himself.” Hewitt concludes that as the secret grew, it proved too complex for him to continue to keep, a kind of cancer of the spirit that metastasized beyond his control, and the shame of it all led him to suicide.
But sometimes we think we’re keeping secrets to protect people, when in fact the people we protect often figure it out, and they wonder why we aren’t talking. I occasionally saw this as a chaplain in the hospital, when family members wanted to keep a terminal diagnosis from a patient, and the patient almost always knew as much or more about their situation than the family did. And, in one case, the patient also didn’t want his family to know that he knew that he was dying!
Rev. Meg Riley tells about trying to protect her child from bad news by keeping it secret.[4] In the days after September 11, 2001, the teachers at her child’s preschool adamantly didn’t want the parents to talk about the attacks with their children, because they thought the children wouldn’t understand. Even though Meg didn’t agree with this logic, she went along, not wanting her son to be the one who blurted it out to everyone else. After a few days of this, her boy showed up at the breakfast table with one of Meg’s books, an adult book which he clearly couldn’t read, called “Talking to Children about Death.” Meg said she — I quote –“took a hard look at this small child” and said,
“We need to talk. Something really painful has happened.”
“WHAT?”
“Well, a plane flew into a building.”
“Actually, mom, two planes flew into two buildings, and it was done on purpose. Why did someone do that on purpose?”
“So much for protecting children,” Meg concludes.
And yet, how and where we reveal our secrets can be devastating too. I have a friend who saw a psychotherapist and discerned that she was sexually abused as a child. At the recommendation of her therapist, she wrote letters to her family revealing this realization. This was back in the 1990s, when many therapists promoted a kind of radical truthtelling.
Rather than finding healing, my friend found herself shunned by many family members and the family nearly torn apart. Even two decades later, she is still trying to repair the few relationships she still has with her birth family.
Confession and Revelation
On the other hand, difficult secrets can often be revealed to the ones we love, if we do the telling with care. Therapist Evan Imber-Black shares this story – names of course changed for confidentiality.[5]:
“… I met this family for therapy due to increasing battles between mother and daughter. A previously close and loving pair, mother and daughter were arguing daily over how much freedom Suzanne could have. The more Suzanne pushed for autonomy, the more Elena clamped down. … As I began to know the family, it was clear that Suzanne was a terrific teen who got excellent grades, was active in clubs and sports and had good friends. What was going on in this family? In our fourth session, Elena asked to see me alone. …
Elena began our meeting, tears rolling down her face. “Alan doesn’t know, Suzanne doesn’t know, my in-laws don’t know — when I was 16, I had a son. My parents sent me away. I was forced to put him up for adoption. I have no idea what happened to him. I think of him all the time. I have to make sure this never happens to Suzanne.”
Elena’s parents kept her tightly restricted as a teen — no dating, no boyfriends — and in response, Elena found ways around their rules, but had no knowledge to protect herself. In our conversation,… Elena suddenly realized, “Oh my god, I’m doing the very same thing to Suzanne that was done to me.”
Over several weeks Elena gradually shifted her responses to Suzanne’s burgeoning womanhood. As her shame and anxiety lifted, she decided she wanted to tell her secret first to her husband. Alan received her secret with love and concern. “I always knew there was something you were keeping from me because you were so distant from your own parents, and I never knew why. When you and Suzanne began to struggle, it was like you had become a different person, and I couldn’t figure it out.” Over time, Elena opened her secret both to Suzanne and to Alan’s parents.
Writer David Whyte talks of confession as “acknowledging a truth we have held from ourselves all along, breathing quietly, alone and in secret” – a truth that “we could not initially give a voice.” That seems to have occurred in Elena’s case, when she realized she was unconsciously mistreating her daughter.
As we have seen with Elena and her family, confession, revealing the secrets we hold in separation and shame, can be a process that unfolds over time. We might start with revealing a secret anonymously, on line, or as we do here today. Then we wisely keep in mind, as Elena did, the potential for harm to others that telling a secret might bring. Later on, we may be able to confess these secrets directly to others around us, and as we do, the secrets lose their power, and our connections with the ones we love gain in strength.
Collection of Secrets
I’d like to now collect those secrets — or whatever you have written. Please give me a card, even if it doesn’t have a secret on it.
Offertory – Angels for Animals
Confessions
Reading – Frank Warren, from Postsecret
“Are all 500,000 secrets true?
(pause)
Frank replies:
I think this question is more complicated than it might appear on the surface. Of course, no one could claim that all 500,000 secrets are
“true” in the strictest sense or the word.
But I think of each postcard as a work of art. And as art, secrets can have different layers of truth. Some can be both true and false, others can become true over time depending on our choices.
Sometimes a secret we keep from ourselves only becomes true after we read it on a strangers postcard.
[One woman wrote:]
“Do you know that I left my boyfriend of a year and a half because of the postcard that read; ‘His temper is so scary, I’ve lost all my opinions’. It hadn’t even occurred to me what was happening and it took a total stranger writing it down to make me realize what the hell was going on in my life.”
(pause)
The woman who shared this with me describes an epiphany she had from seeing the artistic message that was true for her on a stranger’s postcard. Whether or not the secret was “true” or “false” in the strictest sense of the word was not an important question for her.[6]
Part 3 – Truth, Size and Healing
Are our secrets true or not? As Frank Warren suggested in the reading from the postsecret site, the idea of truth has a certain fluidity with secrets like these.
Maybe a more important question is size: how big are these secrets. How much do our secrets rule our lives? Some secrets, especially the ones that dwell hidden in our unconscious minds, can have tremendous power over us, and can even threaten to take over our lives. Just discovering these secrets within ourselves, as the woman who left her boyfriend did, may be a huge step toward healing and wholeness.
Other secrets may be far smaller, minor moments of shame or embarrassment. We can decide when and how we share these secrets, if at all.
Do know that I am available as your minister to talk, and listen confidentially, if you need to process something about your life. Perhaps I can help in the process of ripening, of discerning how you will move forward, even if it’s something which you cannot yet reveal.
Why do we find sites like postsecret fascinating? When we read those postcards, when we learn the things that other people choose to keep secret, we realize that maybe our own secrets are not so shameful after all. As we participate in the flip side of confession, playing the confessor, we begin to see our commonality with other people, and we are reminded that we are human, with all of our weaknesses and imperfections.
I think this is the whole point of this very ordinary kind of confession. As we begin to uncover and share our secrets, whether anonymously or openly, we remind ourselves we are not alone. As we begin to speak our inner truths or serve as a confidant to others, we strengthen our connection with others, remembering we are on a common journey. As we, gradually, over time, find those we can trust to hold our vulnerabilities, and who trust us with theirs, we create bonds of connection and relationship even as we heal our spirits and become more wholly human.
Notes:
1 https://uusbhc.wordpress.com/2006/02/12/confession-the-rev-eva-cameron/ – (thanks to Rev. Eva Cameron who expands these ideas)
2 http://www.postsecretcommunity.com/
3 http://www.questformeaning.org/quest-article/secret-keeping/
4 http://www.questformeaning.org/quest-article/secrets-and-silence/
5 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-imberblack/only-half-the-story_b_3132489.html