Sunday, October 29, 2006

Telling Secrets

When Fredrick Buechner wrote one of his autobiographies, he said he had misgivings.
“It is like telling somebody in detail how you are before they have asked the question, How are you? Indeed, it isn’t like it; it is it.”
But he wrote anyway, and he explains why in Telling Secrets, the book from which I draw my title:
“I have come to believe that by and large the human family has all the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition – that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we 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 instead the highly edited version which we put forth in the 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 so with what being human is all about.
“Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that 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.”
Fredrick Buechner, Telling Secrets. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1991.

That's how I intend to approach this blog.

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