Secrets keep people sick
Secrets keep people sick.
It’s one of those things you pick up in recovery. It doesn’t really matter if it’s addiction or mental health you are struggling with, or whether you find yourself well onto a path of restoration, eventually you face the deep and stark reality that secrets keep people sick.
I’ve had a lot of people question my practice of public transparency over the last number of months – struggling with how the discomfort that public admission of failure or brokenness makes them feel. To be fair, I have plenty of moments when I question it myself – who really wants to stand vulnerable in the public square – but then I remember that secrets keep people sick.
Secrets are what cause families to stay quiet about abuse, and trauma, and neglect. Secrets are how addicts force their loved ones to enable their behaviour. Secrets are how gossip poisons communities and relationships and toxifies the brain with deceit.
Failure we all have. Darkness we all face. Brokenness we cannot escape. But secrets, we can defeat.
In one of the most torturous stories in scripture, Jesus encounters the Garasene Demoniac, shackled and chained on the outside of town – away from the eyes of the community. Jesus frees the man thought to be possessed and irredeemable and sends any remnant of the demon into the abyss. The Garasenean people cannot believe their eyes. Jesus faced the darkness, embraced the marginalized, and shattered the chains that shackled this man on the outside of town. The people immediately beg Jesus to leave them, to get away from their home. They cannot face this kind of salvation for someone they had dismissed and sent out of their sight. They looked at him, they looked at what he had exposed, and then they took a long hard look at themselves. If he could expose this travesty, if he could call out this depth of darkness, what would he expose in them?
Revealing secrets doesn’t have to lack discretion. It also doesn’t require the sharing of every detail of our lives. But if I am to boast in my weakness and kneel at the cross, I must lay down my secrets bare.
Secrets do indeed keep people sick. But God knows even our deepest skeletons – and She offers us an abundant, redemptive and salvific love, shattering our shackles on the outside of town.
“Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secretes are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name: through Christ our Lord. Amen.” - BCP (1662)
Originally penned by David: Summer 2018
