"Secrets and Our Life in Community"
by Rev. Kimi Riegel
November 3, 2002

Secrets to success, dirty little secrets, codes and secrets, beauty secrets, secret societies, enemy secrets, family secrets, medical secrets, secret strategies, insider trading secrets, lies and secrets, Victoria Secrets, keeping secrets, telling secrets, gossip, business secrets, secrets we keep from ourselves and the secret places for hiding things; secrets are a part of every aspect of our existence. We tend to think of them as negative; signifying the hiding of some wrongdoing, but without secrets much of our lives would be uninteresting. Secrets can be alarming but without them life would also be quite frightening. One could argue back and forth, as I will this morning, the merits of keeping secrets and being open. In the end we are left with the personal choice to share or not.

Sometimes, it seems like there's nothing more important than being able to share the details of our private lives, finding that safe place where we can escape from the prisons of our secrecy and truly begin to connect, to get to know other people on some deeper level than surface pleasantries. So much of our lives are invested in keeping up appearances, pretending that we are who we seem to be, and not the more complicated souls we really are. We need places to take down the defenses, settings where we can open up, tell our stories, and get to know, understand, accept, and love each other as ourselves, without sham or secrets.  

Sometimes it seems better not to share. I am not talking about in a relationship with a councilor or minister. Professionals get paid to carry secrets. As ministers, we have covenanted to forfeit the power that sharing secrets carries. I am talking about the kind of secret sharing we do over coffee with friends and neighbors. I am talking about the kind of secret sharing we do in an attempt to build intimacy. And it does build intimacy, sometimes, but at what risk? What do we loose in terms of control, and what burdens do we place on others?  

Perhaps you have heard it said, "It is best to keep your own council." And I agree. This need to know others' business or to tell our own can get out of hand. We live in a society in which information moves so quickly that intimacies can become common conversation across the globe.

The other day I was chatting on the Internet to someone I hadn't seen in years, using a tool that allows people to type messages back and forth to each other in live time. She told me her whole life story in vivid detail. She told me of the private particulars of her divorce and her struggles with her job. It was strange. I don't think if we had met face to face she would have shared that much. I was uneasy with what kind of written response I could give to such an outpouring of emotion. If we had been together I might have given her a Kleenex or a hug, but here "on line" it was just uncomfortable. Yet this is more and more common. People on the Internet are sharing intimate details about their lives and the lives of their families, sometimes with quite dangerous results.  

We need to be careful. Some things are best kept to ourselves. That's why when I lead small groups, I not only say that people should feel open to share, but also not to, and that while confidentiality is our goal, given human nature, no one should trust it so far that they reveal what they never want to be known outside the group.  

Sissela Bok in her wonderful book tided Secrets discusses all the ins and outs of the ethics of what she calls concealment and revelation. She is an amazing scholar and writer. She is one of those writers that I turn to often and I would highly recommend any of her books.  

She first defines secrecy as that which involves intentional concealment. This avoids the assumptions we might have of secrets being dangerous or threatening or awesome and worth of respect. She offers the premise that "a degree of concealment or openness accompanies all that human beings do or say"[1] What is left up to us is to determine when secrets are detrimental and when they are life enhancing.  

On the positive side, secrecy offers us a level of protection. One of our favorite movies at home is Enemy of the State. In it Will Smith has information about a crime, he doesn't know he has it and he is hunted down by the men who want the information they believe he has. These men are illegal operatives in some U.S. governmental agency. They have at their disposal all the surveillance equipment any science fiction lover would desire. The truly scary part is much of it is a reality, but that's another sermon. They know virtually his every move until he encounters someone who is working against this agency, a past employee, who helps Smith's character elude them and use their own technology against them. There is no secrecy, and protection is impossible, until the character gains control of some of the same means of concealment. We all fear "thought police" from the novel 1984. A government that knows all and sees all- we want to protect our privacy and ourselves from those all-seeing eyes of “big-brother". And yet, in the events of last September we have an example of secrets that were kept from our government that resulted in the death of thousands. If there had been less secrecy would there have been more protection?  

Ms Bok talks of these conflicts - state and individual, parent/child, or in journalism, religion or law as conflicts over power - which is the power to control information. She writes:  

"to be able to hold back some information about oneself or to channel it . . . gives power; so does the capacity to penetrate similar defenses and strategies when used by others. ... To have no capacity for secrecy is to be out of control over how others see one. ... To have no insight into what others conceal is to lack power as well.”[2]

Any claim for control or secrecy can be taken too far. We however need secrecy to maintain our freedom and our sanity. Ms Bok identifies four claims that hold control over secrecy. The first of these is identity. If all we are bleeds out into the communal life we are quickly going to go insane as what we would call our identity slips away. We need to be able to guard our solitude, feelings, intimacy and that sense of being apart. We need secrecy to protect our personality.  

And given this need to guard our identity she offers the second and third claims for secrecy; the needed to protect our plans and actions. In order to make choices we need to be able to compare options some of which may be unpopular or threatening - striped of the capacity to keep these possibilities secret we become more predictable and transparent thus more subject to control. Stories with suspense, sports events with secret plans, juries of our peers, revolutionaries planning to over throw oppressive governments and even creativity all require some level of secrecy in the planning and action. Secrecy protects our plans and the resulting actions.  

The fourth claim to secrecy involves protection of property. We hide our most precious belongings from intruders, we keep our diaries locked and put away, and as a nation we protect our food and water supplies from destruction. These protections of our property involve secrecy.  

Thus we need secrecy to protect our identities, plans, actions and our property. [3]

The dangers of secrets are perhaps better known. Again Ms. Bok describes these in detail, I will summarize; First, she talks of the harm secrecy can do to individual and group judgment as it prevents the flow of information. People who have spent many years in the secrecy of undercover work talk about how this time affected their identity and their ability to make decisions. We need only to think back to Patty Hearst or of people in cults who were kept in a total isolated secrecy to know the harm that can do to ones ability to see reality.  

Secrets also weaken character, as they tend to spread and include others in the act of concealing a wrongdoing. We easily remember the Watergate days and how the keeping of a secret spread and ruined the lives of many people. People who are keeping secrets can loose track of the truth - what is secret becomes what didn't happen. A recent movie Insomnia is in part about a police officer that keeps the events around the death of his partner secret. As a result he is eventually subject to the manipulation of a criminal who claims to "know" what happened. The officer's good record and character are tainted by the secret he keeps.  

But the risks of secrecy are not just to those who keep the secrets. A classic example of this is the current debate over the registry of sex offenders - without this information about someone's history of harmful acts towards children it is difficult to make a good decision about their particular involvement in the society. Ms Bok points out that while not all that is secret is about wrongdoing all that is wrongdoing requires some secrecy. [4]She writes:  

"Secrecy can hamper the exercise of rational choice at every step: by preventing people from adequately understanding a threatening situation, from seeing the relevant alternatives clearly, from assessing the consequence of each and from arriving at preferences with respect to them. Those who have been hurt in such a way by the secrecy of others, may in turn seek greater control over secrecy and thus in turn experience its impairment of choice, its tendency to spread and its capacity to corrupt."[5]

While we recognize the need for secrets we also each of us have experienced the dangers of secrets or the sharing of that which we thought was secret. With the pros and cons of secrecy laid out we are left with deciding as individuals when to share and when not to share and as a nation what is private and what must for the safety of our citizens be made public.  

Ms. Bok uses the term discretion to describe the process of deciding when and what to share or keep secret; we must exercise our own judgment.[6] We are left to our own discretion in the realm of secrecy which she claims "tests human relationships as little else does.” [7] She describes those who seek intimacy by sharing too much, too intimately or too often as indiscreet. These people in fact find themselves more and more isolated, despite f; their desire for more connection, because the community comes to not trust them. Discretion is a matter of trial and error for children and adolescents as they mature, but we must at some point come to the understanding that in adulthood the choices are ours and often with far reaching consequences. Thus with an awareness of the dangers and benefits of secrecy, its tendency to build or destroy intimacy, we have the information then to deal with the conflicts between openness and secrecy and make our own decisions on a case-by-case basis.  

As a community we are to a large part judged by the secrets we keep or tell. If we are too open we risk becoming a community that is said to gossip and have no boundaries or being too closed we risk being unfriendly and secretive. Secrets in community are often destructive. Edwin Friedman, the guru of systems thinking and communities, outlines four destructive tendencies of secrets in community; First, they function to divide the community into those that know that those that don't - which secondly, leads to unnecessary estrangements and false companionships based on the secret not on true connections. Thirdly, like Ms Bok discusses, secrets in community distort perception as information is confusing at best and misleading at worst. Fourth and finally secrets in a community keep whatever difficulties and pathologies there are alive and well. It keeps anxiety high and trust level low so small issues become larger and the real concerns are often never addressed. Secrets are rarely a part of challenge or positive change. And still, we strive to have the intimacy and connection that holding each other's confidences brings.  

As the minister it is essential that I keep confidences, but it is destructive if I act in secret, hold potentially harmful things secret or use secret information to manipulate anyone. Thus is it easiest for me to keep only those secrets that are of a pastoral nature, those that we have verbally agreed will be secret, and all other information is assumed to be freely shared. Let me make that clear - all other information will be shared freely. So coffee hour conversations, phone calls, meetings and most interactions are not secret unless otherwise noted, thus I hope to avoid many of the dangers of over using secrecy. When someone asks me to keep a secret that is not of a pastoral nature I may not agree - holding secrets is part of my job but the seductive and destructive nature of being in a secret or the potential for harm with a secret is too great a danger for any human to engage in.  

The question of when to share secrets is complex and hard, whether this issue is gossip or confidentiality, manipulation or professional boundaries, or any of a score of other aspects. The argument always seems to seesaw back and forth, with a great deal of "yeah but.”  

It is up to each of us. There are grounds for reserve, and reasons to hope that nonetheless, guardedly, people can create clusters of real human sharing, especially here. It would be my highest hope that while we may need to be careful in what we share, we also need to acknowledge the importance of being open. Discretion and thoughtful care are essential. In our world, in our relationships, and here in the congregation, we need to use our discretion to promote open communities that are caring, sharing, accepting, and loving places.