October 6, 2007

Daily scripture one day this week was Psalm 139 -

O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD.

You hem me in—behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?

If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,"even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

As I unpacked more books today, I came across Freerick Buechner's Telling Secrets. In his introduction, he writes:

*I have called this book Telling Secrets because I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and 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.*

One of my classes is studying trauma and how it affects both the body and the soul. Some times trauma (or extended suffering) is too difficult to put in words. The secrets of the soul are so hard to bear that they are beyond words. How can we share our secrets, tell our secrets, when there aren't words for them? When telling our secrets would put our lives, our fragile hearts and hopes, in danger of falling apart?

Buechner again: *Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell.*

If there are no words, we can take comfort in knowing that the One who created us will understand our silence, our dance, our breathing, our movement, our stillness.

I know that for James, his trees and his fishing are his wordless ways. I suppose cooking is one of my ways, but there are others I've lost along the journey, silent ways of speaking my secrets.

The trauma class is helping me to find those ways, remember those silent ways of telling my secrets to the One who knows me best, no matter where I am.