Each of us is a secret that God makes public: "My frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth" (Psalm 139:15). But not all secrets are as joyfully unambiguous as the birth of a new life. There are many matters we prefer to hide and so we speak of "skeletons in the closet" and not "airing dirty laundry in public."
Secrets often bring dysfunction and unease. "Don't trust, don't talk, don't feel is supposed to be the unwritten law of families that ... have gone out of whack, and certainly it was our law," Buechner admits about his own family.
In some respects, Buechner's life is an open book. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he has authored more than 20 books of fiction and non-fiction. Several of his autobiographical books recount his public life, the headlines of his accomplishments and achievements.
But now Buechner explores his family secrets, reflections that resemble "the back pages of the paper where I have always thought the real news is anyway -- the reviews, an obituary or two, a couple of in-depth reports, the editorial and op-ed sections ... I have found more and more that, like the back pages, it is in the interior where the real news is."
WE ALL HAVE basically the same secrets. In sharing we can find healing. Buechner wrestles with the paradoxical fact "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."
Buechner's alcoholic father committed suicide when Buechner was only 10 years old. Buechner's mother pretended it did not happen. There was not even a funeral. All this was complicated by the shame that inevitably attends a suicide. Buechner's mother did everything possible -- even moving -- to make it seem as if the man never existed.
Through Alcoholics Anonymous Buechner found that telling secrets can bring healing. AA's "spiritual rule" includes its members uncovering deep secrets and "making peace with the people they have hurt and been hurt by."
Buechner regards AA groups as "far closer to what Christ meant his church to be, and what it originally was, than much of what goes on in most churches I know." He lauds the mutual support and honest caring without official leadership, fund raising, bureaucracy, buildings, programs, or creeds. "They make you wonder if the best thing that could happen to many a church might not be to have its building burn down and to lose all its money." Many congregations -- with all their unseemly secrets -- are dysfunctional families.
Buechner's experience led to deep insights about care-giving, healing, forgiveness, and providence: "Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track ... of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally."
Thoroughly modern, Buechner wrestles with all the doubts and ambiguities of our post-secular age. But in this beautiful testimony to faith, he sees God's hand in his life.
In 1982 Buechner taught a preaching course at Harvard Divinity School. When he began a lecture with prayer, there was titillated astonishment. Buechner was perplexed. In 1985 he visited Wheaton College, that bastion of evangelicalism. One day he lunched with two students who were making small talk. Suddenly one asked about what God was doing in the other's life.
Buechner was shocked because although "I believe ... that God is indeed doing all kinds of things in the lives of all of us ... where I live, if anybody were to ask a question like that, even among religious people, the sky would fall, the walls would cave in, the grass would wither." This freed him to speak about the secrets of his faith, it "was like finding something which, only when I tasted it, I realized I had been starving for for years."
Buechner is a masterful articulator of his faith. This is neither dogma nor creed, yet its storytelling ranks as one of the finest pieces of evangelism and one of the most beautiful confessions of faith that I have ever encountered.
Arthur P. Boers was pastor of the Windsor (Ontario) Mennonite Fellowship and the author of the recently released On Earth as in Heaven (Herald Press) when this article appeared.
Telling Secrets: A Memoir. By Frederick Buechner. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. $14.95 (cloth).
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