so i love postsecret, its become a spiritual practice for me to start obsessively checking every 20 minutes on Saturday night to see if the new ones have been posted yet. but in discussing this phenomenon with other people i have become a little concerned about the popularity of the postsecrets. Why is it so popular i ask? As i read them each week I wonder why these things are secret and i wonder what these secrets say about the things we actually value. I would say the root of most of them is an inability or the desire not to make yourself vulnerable. Things you couldnt tell your partner, things that would expose you as different from the impossibly odd standards society has laid upon us, expressions of thoughts that might condemn you or even change you by simply saying them out loud. Do i read these each week because i identify with the plight of these people, trapped inside my own sense of decency, unable to put myself out there enough to even stand next to someone at the grocery store.
Do we all live lives of secrets? If our society works because we keep things from each other what does that say about us? We might all be living a lie. How have we been made to feel so bad about ourselves that we cant even share our thoughts without worrying about being attacked for them, or for just being effected by feelings. Has capitalization bullied us into thinking that we actually dont have enough, dont look good enough, dont have someone, arent thin enough, arent muscled enough, arent happy enough, arent smart enough, dont matter enough unless we have all this stuff...etc... I think we may have been more effected by all of these things than we think. I mean just look at what has become of christmas over the last 50 years.
how does all this impact our faith. I have to dress a certian way to be a christian, be branded if you will. How can i be saved enough, happy enough, have enough christian art, the right bumper stickers and all that...? Just trying to be all that is exhausting. God made humans not clones. why all the secrets? what made some things ok to talk about and other things not.
secrets destroy communities. The one i am in here at school is still suffering from the aftermath of secrets. Its not fun because everyone is so suspicious of each other, the class above me particularly suffered i think. its horrible. its like everyone things the other guy has a gun in his pocket. why are we fascinated with these secrets. what are these secrets doing to America and how can we start truth telling again? Theres more power in truth than there is in cohesion or secrets. ask Martian Luther King, Thomas Merton or the womens rights activists. people respond to truth, but we have gotten so cynical that we might not even believe it. we need Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha to come and get us to listen or at least work at it. now it feels like all the sides are sitting in a different rooms of a corporate high rise congratulating each other on the great job we are doing ignoring the fact that the building is on fire.
dunno what to do about that, or how i got here from postsecrets, but it is what it is. how can i start this honesty movement. transparency of communication. illumination of the people.
