Secrets and Silence
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In her book On Lies, Secrets, and Silence one of the essential writings of 1970s feminism, Adrienne Rich wrote: “Whatever is unnamed…will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”
That is how we move towards holding secrets, I think; how something that might begin as a simple boundary can turn into a secret. It is unspoken.
I never meant to go into the closet in the mid 1980s when I became a director of religious education. I was a young lesbian accustomed to being very open. But the long-time senior minister resigned right when I arrived, and I didn’t know how to navigate coming out along with other changes at the church. I couldn’t figure out how to communicate to this system in flux. So I did not name or speak particulars of my life.
And, quite quickly, it became unspeakable. That time in the closet taught me enduring lessons about what it means to have a chronic secret. The secret becomes the sun around which the other planets of your life keep their orderly orbits.
Adrienne Rich’s whole quote is this:
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language—this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
My time in the closet, wondering if everything would come crashing down if people knew the truth about me, ended one day when one of the church pillars came into my office and said in a friendly, no big deal, voice, “So am I crazy, or are you a lesbian?” It felt like Niagara Falls started rushing through my head. I could hardly stand up.
Finally, I managed to stammer, “You’re not…crazy.” This woman, seeming not to notice that the ground was tilting below me, went on, “Well, I mean, I assumed that the first time I ever saw you and I know we talked about it at the board before we hired you but then you never talk about it so I started to wonder…”
The board had talked about it? What I had thought was unnamed, omitted, censored had been talked about at the board meeting?
So many secrets are like that: people protecting each other from what we already know. After September 11, my preschool child’s teachers instructed us not to talk to our kids about it, to protect young ones from this knowledge which was too big for them to understand. Well, I didn’t want to create the situation where my kid ruined it for everyone, so I followed their advice.
In typical UU fashion, I kept asking probing and vague questions, like, “Did anything unusual happen at school today?” These kinds of questions kept eliciting responses of no, nothing, just another day. The attacks were on Tuesday, and the kids went to school all week. I was out each night leading services in various churches in Washington DC, where we lived. It was a very intense time.
Friday morning, Jie’s school was cancelled and I planned to stay home from work to recoup. I called Jie down to breakfast. Jie, who couldn’t read at all yet, arrived at the table with two books—one was a plain adult book with nothing but text, which Jie could not possibly have known was called “Talking to Children about Death.” In the other hand was the 2001 War Resisters League calendar. “I’ll have breakfast on the airplane, Mom,” Jie announced.
I took a hard look at this small child. “We need to talk,” I said. “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 the children. Following orders, I had left Jie alone, allegedly to protect the other kids.
We keep secrets to protect each other, and in the end, who are we protecting?
In this culture, there is a long list we could make of what is unnamed, omitted, censored, until it becomes unspeakable—in essence, a secret—in mainstream media. Or at a typical Minnesota nice potluck.
Our loneliness and pain are often things we try to protect one another from, along with the whole range of human suffering: abuse, all kinds of oppression—racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, cruelty, indifference, greed, fear for the planet, grief—this list goes on and on.
I am no longer living in the closet as a lesbian, and yet every day I navigate whether or not to come out—to people on planes or at the hair salon, to chatty people in waiting rooms and at the dog park. Marriage equality doesn’t change that. We are all, whatever our sexual orientation, deciding whether or not to come out multiple times a day about who we really are.
I grew up in a family shrouded in silence. (The big secret we all danced around was my father’s violent temper.) And early in my life a default to shame and secrecy clicked in, then resonated during my time in the closet. As a child, I was saved by the few times when my siblings and I were honest about our feelings. I still remember the surge of joy and relief I felt when my sister said, one day, “Let’s kill him!” She denied ever having said this about our father when I brought it up as adults, to thank her for the expression of rage which I couldn’t verbalize. But that moment of having the ability to see and be seen saved me.
We who grew up in families where we learned to be isolated from ourselves and each other need to work hard to create lives where we tell other people about the things we want to try to hold in because of shame.
I don’t live alone, but neither am I in an intimate primary relationship. And I do not want to turn to my housemate, who is also my child, to process the pitfalls and challenges of my life (though we do have great conversations about important things).
So, for my life right now, I’ve built in two phone calls a day with people I can talk to about pretty much anything. Early in the morning, I wake up and talk for half an hour with a friend and sister religious professional about the challenges of my day—awkward situations at work, parenting challenges or questions, frustrations with conversations that went badly the day before…whatever I need to process.
And in the evening I talk for a bit to another friend, right before bed. Sometimes we pray, or do particular spiritual practices, and for a while we shared haikus. These conversations tuck me into my life in a way that keeps me current, that keeps me naming things so they don’t turn into shame or secrets.
But what if our loneliness and isolation is the core secret in our life? I think it’s imperative, for our health and wellbeing, that we reach out and make changes. I’m here to say that if I can find my way out of the maze of distortion in a family where my mother literally spoke in two different voices, depending on whether or not my father was in the room—if I can build a life with openness and trust, anyone can.
Some of you may be saying, well, you have all these cool friends who are willing to talk deeply and honestly with you, and I don’t. I’ll challenge you on that. I’m humbled to tell you how long it took me to figure out that I could trust other people, and it’s an unending process.
There are ways for anyone to find someone to whom we can tell our truth, talk about our shame. One thing I love about CLF’s online services is that, in our joys and concerns, people share deep honesty with one another—honesty that might not be shared in a bricks-and-mortar church. Maybe you’ll find those people in one of the small groups or classes online, or in a bricks-and-mortar church, or in a community center.
You have to take the risk to go deeper with people. Maybe in a 12 Step group or another place where some folks will joyfully volunteer to spend half an hour a day talking to other people as their sponsors. Maybe there is someone in your family or a friend who would respond well to your request to talk each day on the phone if that would be of use to you.
I don’t know your secrets, but I do know your longing—your longing to be whole, your longing to be happy, your longing to do what you are here on this planet to do, rather than using up your energy keeping secrets.
Fundamentally, we come together to remember who we are, and to remember that we are not alone. We come to hold one another’s biggest selves, to see each other as both imperfect and holy. And we can be held, secrets and all, whether we dare to speak our truths or whether we take them with us to the grave.
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