Being Real (Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner) November 6, 2008 Newsletter
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November 6, 2008 Newsletter
Good morning! The sky is so interesting and beautiful, for the sun is rising in the window behind me and the rain is falling in the window in front of me. I've got my perfect cup of coffee - now I encourage you to wait until you have a chance to concentrate, pour your favorite drink, and take your time reading this today. "We hunger for perhaps more than anything else to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are - even if we tell it only to ourselves - because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets, too, because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about...and we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell. (Our creator. Our God.)
On his daughter's sickness and battle with anorexia:
I didn't have either the wisdom or the power to make her well. None of us has the power to change other human beings like that, and it would be a terrible power if we did, the power to violate the humanity of others even for their own good...The best thing I could do for her was to stop trying to do anything... Love your neighbor as yourself is part of the great commandment. The other way to say it is, Love yourself as your neighbor. Love yourself not in some egocentric, self-serving sense but love yourself the way you would love your friend in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, trying to understand, comfort, strengthen yourself...If your daughter is struggling for life in a raging torrent, you do not save her by jumping into the torrent with her, which leads only to your both drowning together. Instead you keep your feet on the dry bank - you maintain as best you can your own inner peace, the best and strongest of who you are - and from that solid ground reach out a rescuing hand. "Mind your own business" means butt out of other people's lives because in the long run they must live their lives for themselves, but it also means pay mind to your own life, your own health and wholeness, both for your own sake and ultimately for the sake of those you love too. Take care of yourself so you can take care of them. A bleeding heart is of no help to anybody if it bleeds to death.
God's Presence in Tragedy & Pain (in his case his father's suicide & illness of daughter):
As I understand it, to say that God is mightily present even in such private events as these does not mean that he makes events happen to us which move us in certain directions like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is. For instance I cannot believe that a God of love and mercy in any sense willed my father's suicide; it was my father himself who willed it as the only way out available to him from a life that for various reasons he had come to find unbearable. God did not will what happened that early November morning, but I believe that God was present in what happened. I cannot guess how he was present with my father - I can guess much better how utterly abandoned by God my father must have felt if he thought about God at all - but my faith as well as my prayer is that he was and continues to be present with him in ways beyond my guessing. I can speak with some assurance only of how God was present in that dark time for me in the sense that I was not destroyed by it but came out of it with scars that I bear to this day, to be sure, but also somehow the wiser and the stronger for it. Who knows how I might have turned out if my father had lived, but through the loss of him all those long years ago I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way. As I see it, in other words, God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as the puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don't, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it.
In fact I am inclined to believe that God's chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time so that if we didn't play those roles right the first time round, we can still have another go at it now. We cannot undo our old mistakes or their consequences any more than we can erase old wounds that we have both suffered and inflicted, but through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.
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 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.
Remember the quote by Edward Young last week - "We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies?" Buechner writes to that affect...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 processes 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...
Well, I honestly took out two paragraphs! I don't know what else to take out. What a subject. Being who God created us to be. Original...He created us in his image. But individual. I love his permission on telling secrets to be only to ourselves...for if we are at least admitting to ourselves our dreams, our hurts, our deepest conversations that we have with our souls, we stay genuine...not just who others desire us to be. Oh, goodness, I won't type more. So much to think about. Thank you for trusting me with your time on Thursday mornings...I will keep on looking for books that will change us. Have a great weekend. If you're freezing or alone, at least make yourself a great cup of coffee or tea and turn on the fire. Silence is also beautiful. If you don't want to be alone then I can assure you from all that walk into the store - you only are probably one house or door from someone that needs to have someone that will listen. Susan
Latin for this week:
Intimus - a close friend or confidant.
Works Cited:
Buechner, Frederick. Telling Secrets. New York. Harper Collins. 1991.
Late last night I received a phone call from a friend telling me that her father-in-law had died 30 minutes earlier from an accident at the farm. One misstep changed their lives. I am going to change what I write on this morning because of the call. This note will take full concentration, but I truly believe you will be glad if you take the time to read and think about this with me. I can't put down the book that I've had by my desk to read for a few months, Telling Secrets: A Memoir by Frederick Buechner. I haven't written what I've underlined before because I didn't know how I could do the book justice in deciding what to write for you. I'm going to anyway, for he discusses how we cover up...not showing our real selves for various personal reasons. He shares about how events in his life have made him who he is today, but how he had to admit his thoughts, his emotions, his "secrets" to be real. To not be a mold. Easier than being vulnerable by admitting who we really are. He discusses the suicide of this father and the sickness of anorexia of his daugher. His writings include "where is God in the suffering?" I am going to go ahead and type for you only a portion of what I've underlined and wish I could type. I am not going to analyze this further, but let all of you also think about these topics that are hard to put into words of my own, thus once again letting an author become a mentor, helping me to think and not merely exist.
