Telling secrets...

This is from one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors, Fredrick Buechner - Telling Secrets.  I've often explained this phenomena of writing as being akin to pulling down your pants and letting everyone see your privates.  It's em-barr-ass-ing, yet necessary.  It explains well why it is that I believe honest-to-goodness writing is critical to the heart's health.  We do no good holding stuff inside and keeping it to ourselves...

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“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has 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 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 instead 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 a human is all about.

Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where are secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is all of our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell.“


- Fredrick Buechner, Telling Secrets