Telling Secrets

by Frederick Buechner

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

soon discovered that for years most of what my wife and I had talked about had been the children—their comings and goings, what was happening in their lives.

Reinhold Niebuhr was there then and so was Paul Tillich, Samuel Terrien, Paul Scherer, John Knox, George Buttrick, Robert Macafee Brown, and above all the great James Muilenburg, who more than any of them became my father and brother in Christ.

Basically, it is to proclaim a Mystery before which, before whom, even our most exalted ideas turn to straw.

It is to try to put the Gospel into words not the way you would compose an essay but the way you would write a poem or a love letter—putting your heart into it, your own excitement, most of all your own life. It is to speak words that you hope may, by grace, be bearers not simply of new understanding but of new life both for the ones you are speaking to and also for you.

It struck me too that to attend a divinity school when you did not believe in divinity involved a peculiarly depressing form of bankruptcy, and there were times as I wandered through those corridors that I felt a little like Alice on the far side of the looking glass.

Harvard Divinity School was proud, and justly so, of what it called its pluralism—feminists, humanists, theists, liberation theologians all pursuing truth together—but the price that pluralism can cost was dramatized one day in a way that I have never forgotten.

Finally I had to tell them what I thought. I said they reminded me of a lot of dead fish lying on cracked ice in a fish store window with their round blank eyes.

“The reason I do not say anything about what I believe,” he said in his stately African English, “is that I’m afraid it will be shot down.”