HS #78 2022.1.13
Secrets Make You Sick
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”- Soren Kierkegaard.
For the last thirty years, my “home away from home” has been the Au Train Beach on the south shore of Lake Superior, ten miles from Pictured Rocks. Many good times of fires, frisbee, new friends, and watching shooting stars while sleeping on the beach. Best spot on earth!
Highway 28 passes over the Au Train River as it enters the beach, so there is a bridge locals and tourists use for jumping. Fathers encourage timorous children to leap – standing in the water ready to catch them. I’ve jumped a few times myself. Life doesn’t get any better.
So it strikes me strange that the most prominent graffiti on the concrete side of the bridge is the bold, black-painted phrase, “SECRETS MAKE YOU SICK.” I’ve contemplated who wrote it and why. Most likely a teenager. Filled with angst. Betrayed by a friend? Jilted?
Whoever and whatever, one thing is evident: The author discovered a deep truth. Secrets do make one sick – I should know.
Until ten years ago, I carried a secret. As a child, when the family was safely across the street at church on Sunday morning, I’d open the family Bible to the picture of Sampson at the treadmill – muscular in a loin cloth. I was fascinated by the brawny physique.
In third grade I had a secret crush on a couple 6th graders. I admired their poise and athleticism.
My secret took a name six years later when reading an article in TIME magazine about homosexuals – a new word for me. But the description rang true. I shuddered realizing the article was describing me.
Continuing through high school, my fears were confirmed. Friends would point out a cute girl and I would agree, keeping my true thoughts to myself – that I had noticed instead the guy she was with.
I went on to college and leadership in Campus Crusade for Christ. I considered joining the staff after college, but the application form had a question, “Are you physically attracted to those of the same sex?” This forced me, at age 20, to reveal my secret for the first time – to a CCC Director. He reassured me that “You are not gay in Christ.” I so wanted to believe him.
I finished undergrad, six years of grad school, and six years pre-tenure at Hope College without telling anyone. I lied only a couple times when, then in my thirties, friends asked why I wasn’t in a relationship. I envied those who could enjoy beer/wine without fear of revealing guarded thoughts.
After getting tenure, I bought a house, and furniture from Ten Harmsel on 8th Street. I remember my quandary deciding what size bed to buy, and choking up when the salesperson counseled, “You’re single now, but shouldn’t you buy for the future?”
In 2008, I spent two weeks in Tokyo. On the subway, the young man next to me fell asleep and his head lay on my shoulder for 15 minutes. I soaked up the experience – the longest duration of human contact I had since childhood.
I was 53 when my parents died. I never told them. I’ve wondered the reaction had I told my minister-father when in high school/college. I discovered the answer when sorting through his letters after he died. In 1977 he wrote “strongest possible opposition” to a state legislator who voted to extend rights to homosexuals. Dad called homosexuality a highly pernicious destructive force and spiritual illness from which society needs protection.
I sometimes wonder how life would have differed had I told my secret earlier. Would I have lost my college friends? Perhaps. Would I have gotten a faculty position at the alma mater of my father and grandfather? Tenure? Tough choices.
Nathaniel Hawthorne captured the double-edged poison of secrets in “The Scarlet Letter.” The truth of Hester Prynne was known, and she bore the results of rejection daily. But even worse was the internal damage, the soul-sickness, done to her lover who kept the secret within. The former may bring loneliness and isolation. The latter will for sure.
The world is still a tough place for those who are caught in Kierkegaard’s dilemma and forced to decide whether and when to leap – as from the Au Train bridge – by revealing their secret. Hopefully, they have trustworthy friends and relatives – as I did – standing ready to catch them.
