Telling Secrets

We’re on this perilous mission together. I’ve found that when men can share anything with each other, anything, it creates a certain esprit de corps.

Based on actual events, the 2003 film, Saints and Soldiers tells the gripping story of a small band of World War II Allied soldiers trapped behind enemy lines with information that could save thousands of American lives.  Out-gunned and ill-equipped, they battle a frigid wilderness and roving German troops in order to smuggle the critical intelligence back to Allied territory.

During one scene in the movie, while stopping to re-group on their mission, a small band of soldiers are challenged by one of their members to share their deepest secrets.  At first they resist, protesting and hesitating to share anything too personal.  After one of the men takes a risk by sharing something pretty personal that he had never shared with anyone before, the rest of the group begins to follow his lead.  Unfortunately, the soldier who made the intial challenge, first laughs mockingly at his brothers’ confessions and, when his turn comes, refuses to share a secret of his own, declaring dismissively:

 I can’t tell you chaps; I’ve just barely met you. 

His betrayal of their trust destroys any level of intimacy and camaraderie that they maight have had, a trust that was essential to their survival and success as a unit.  They needed trust to enable them to truly know one another – the way each another thought and acted and moved and were motivated.   That knowledge that came from trust would create a more cohesive team for the “perilous mission” they were on “together”.

In reality, all of life is in its own way a “perilous mission” – fraught with fear, uncertainty, risk, hardship and danger.  We need each other on this mission.  We need to be known by each other. We need to know each other.  In order for us to navigate well this mission, this life which is before us.

Maybe for some of us – if not all of us – we have been burned in the past.  We may have told a deep dark secret, somethirng embarrassing, that was shared that we asked not to be shared.  Perhaps someone broke trust and mocked our secret by revealing it or by judging our confession, causing us to retreat – sharing less and less of ourselves, becoming less and less human, less and less who we really are.

Perhaps Frederick Buechner wrote it best in his book, Telling Secrets:

I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that 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 of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.