First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scriptures: Psalm 139:1-12, I John 4:16b-18
February 27, 2005
Sometime during the evening of Thursday, January 20, after the last program of a busy church had ended and the last member of that busy church had left, the church’s pastor….the only pastor the church had ever known….the pastor who had started it from scratch and nurtured it from a handful of visitors to over 800 members….the pastor who, in ten crazy, wonderful and relentlessly-forward-surging years, had led those members from the auditorium of an elementary school to a beautiful facility known as Christ United Methodist Church, Chapel Hill, North Carolina….the pastor whose vision had led the way and whose energy had carried the day…. locked his church’s doors, killed his church’s lights and, after barricading himself in his office, turned out his own lights, too (effectively giving death the final round in his twelve-year battle with depression).
His name was Raegan May. And when they talked about “rising suns” in the orbit of North Carolina Methodism, his was the one that loomed largest and shone brightest. Until the eclipse, that is, which left classmates, colleagues, members and friends….along with his wife, Lee, and his three daughters, Emily, Megan and Abbie….trying to make sense of the darkness.
I happened on the scene….well, more to the point, I ventured into the territory….six days after they found him, but only three days after they buried him. Not that I knew him. But the ink was barely dry on his death certificate when the people at Duke Divinity School told me about him.
Which was a good forewarning to have received on Thursday prior to entering a Chapel Hill hair salon on Friday. Because Kris said I absolutely had to have my few remaining hairs cut and trimmed if I was going to preach in Wilmington on Sunday. Not that I go regularly to salons where one pays twice as much to a stylist (whatever happened to the word “barber”?) who takes twice as long. But when your wife says, “Do it,” you do it (given that it is good practice for retirement).
As stylists go, she was friendly…although she did cut my ear (because that’s what Tar Heels do to Blue Devils). And in the conversation that followed the mop-up, she managed to put enough bits and pieces together so as to figure out what I did for a living. Which prompted some confessing about years of backsliding, even though her mother and daddy (why is it that Southern women always say “daddy” but never say “mommy”?) had taken great pains to turn her into an upstanding Southern Baptist. As if there were any other kind. Then she asked me if I had heard about the suicide of Raegan May….whose name she didn’t know, but whose story she did (hey, Chapel Hill is not that big a place and this was, after all, a beauty shop).
When I told her I had heard about Raegan and “wasn’t it a shock and a shame,” she said: “Well, you being a preacher and all, is it all right if I ask you a question?” At which point I had no choice. What was I going to say: “No, it isn’t all right”? Besides, she had already sliced me once. So she asked her question. And, as she did so, I could see the heads of the adjacent stylists tilt, ever so perceptibly, so as not to miss what I might offer by way of an answer.
“So is it true what they say (she said), that he will go straight to hell with no possibility of redemption?” Well, you know what I answered. Of course you know what I answered. Which sufficed. And satisfied. But I did not tell her that my answer was fired in the crucible of firsthand experience. Meaning that I did not tell her about Bill and his choice. Nor did I tell her about eleven years of living with it (never to be confused with “getting over it”). Nor did I tell her I had written a book about it.
People to whom I have told this story seem surprised at my silence. “You are so open,” they say, “so honest….so public….so unguarded….so self-revelatory.” Which is true. I am. But even I pick my moments. And this was not one of them. I figure there are times to let the shirttail of my soul hang out and times to keep the shirttail of my soul tucked in.
One of you said I should send her a copy of my book. Which I am still pondering. And may still do. But I wonder if she will even remember the conversation….the question….let alone me (or my bloody ear). Not that the book didn’t surface elsewhere in Chapel Hill at the time of Raegan’s death. Truth be told, it surfaced in the sermon at his service. The Dean of Duke Divinity School gave my book to the preacher. Which he borrowed….rather liberally, as it turned out. But hopefully, helpfully.
Others have found it so. Or so they have said. All but one of the sermons in it, I never planned to preach. Nor, as a collection, did I ever plan to publish. And I wouldn’t have published, had not Rod Quainton given them to John Claypool, and had not John Claypool given them to Debra Farrington, and had not Debra’s people at Morehouse Publishing come circling back to me. Like I said, I am open and honest. But in my own way, on my own terms. Pulpit appearances to the contrary, I am a rather private person….one who does not believe that every box should be opened, every closet vacated, and every rock lifted for purposes of show and tell. Making me more like you than you think I am like you.
But the story seemed worth telling. And the sermons seemed worth sharing. And while time does not remove all scars, time does relieve most wounds. So I wrote it all down. Morehouse printed it all up. And when the book saw the light of day last October, several boxes appeared here on the afternoon of Julie and Jared’s wedding rehearsal. Which Tina Grubb and Janet Smylie locked away for the weekend (in a gesture of great caring and kindness). Since then the book has gone through two printings. And given its birthplace in an Episcopal publishing house tucked away in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has done amazingly well. A trio of newspaper articles helped locally. And thanks to the amazing tentacles of the internet, I have been able to track sales and receive responses nationally.
For it is the responses rather than the sales that interest me, given that the responses are filled with stories. And what is strange about the stories is how privately they have been held and how closely they have been guarded. Even here at First Church where I thought I knew a lot, I really knew a little. Either because I never asked, or because you never said.
As you will remember, upon purchasing the book you had the option of leaving it for a signature, an inscription, or a short message. For which many of you asked. Not because you wanted my name, but because you wanted me to direct it to someone else’s name. Or, in many cases, you wanted me to recall someone else’s name….someone who used to be but is no more.
You expected me to say something personal….something helpful….to someone experiencing something hurtful. Your request came in words written on one page, suggesting words I might write on another page, the better to introduce words printed in a slew of pages, about things for which it is sometimes said: “There are no words.” Over and over again I read lines like:
I never said anything to anyone about this before.
In our family, this is something nobody wants to talk about.
I have never known what to say to my mother (father, sister, brother, uncle, cousin, even my best friend). But maybe if I give them this book (with their name written in your hand), it will open a door which has been closed far too long and far too tightly.
A friend of my daughter’s in San Francisco took Julie to dinner, introduced the subject of the book, and then asked Julie’s opinion about whether she should send it to her father. Apparently, her father’s father (meaning her grandfather) committed suicide years and years ago. But nobody ever owned up to how he died, meaning that nobody ever dealt with why he died, or how various members of the family felt about his dying. And because they avoided the subject of his dying, it eventually became easier to avoid the subject of his living, too. Which meant that, over time, it became as if he’d never been. I mean, if you can’t talk about “it,” you can’t talk about him. Because talking about him might introduce the subject of “it.”
What she wanted to know was what Julie thought would happen if she were to send my book to her father, accompanied by a note saying: “I think I know what happened to Grandpa. Yet you and I have never talked about what happened to Grandpa. I wonder if maybe we might now…. and whether this book might help us?”
But what she was really asking Julie was: “Have you and your father been able to talk about your brother? How you felt. How your father felt. What was said. What wasn’t said.” It wasn’t permission she was seeking from Julie, or even encouragement she was seeking from Julie, so much as testimony. That’s what she was seeking from Julie.
The girl asking the question is somewhere in her mid-twenties. Meaning that her father must be in the neighborhood of his mid-fifties. Meaning that the window of opportunity will never be more open. She, being well beyond adolescence. He, being well short of Alzheimer’s. But it is entirely possible that if she raises it, he will deny it….decline to discuss it….or find ways to avoid it. Why? Because it happens all the time in families.
Families are full of secrets. There are birth secrets (dealing with the when, where, how and who of conception). And there are death secrets (leading to equal, or even greater, layers of deception). Along with behavior secrets (involving things that clearly happened, but which the involved parties were instructed to “keep under your hat” and “never tell a soul”).
I used to enjoy going places and doing things with my father. They didn’t have to be grandiose or expensive things. Which they never were. Going to see a sandlot baseball game was a good thing. But it was not uncommon for my father to stop on the way home at some watering hole or another and suggest I wait in the car for fifteen minutes or so. “I’ll leave the key in the ignition so you can listen to the radio,” he would say. And he would return, as promised, in fifteen minutes. But after starting the engine, he would reach over, put his hand on my knee and say: “Don’t tell your mother that we stopped. We’ll just let this be our little secret.” And the first few times it happened, I suppose I felt honored to be trusted. But after that, I felt burdened by being conscripted (into his conspiracy of silence). The truth was, I didn’t mind the fifteen minutes. But I hated being linked to the deception that, over time, all but fractured our family.
One of my heroes, Frederick Buechner, writes:
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. Telling, in the sense that they reveal the central paradox of our condition….that what we hunger for (more than anything else) is to be fully known, and yet that is often what we fear more than anything else (being fully known).
Yet they are important to tell, because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we are. And come to accept, instead, the highly-edited version we show the world, in hopes that the world will find the edited version more acceptable than the real thing.
Go back to the girl in San Francisco who wants to break through years of silence with her father about the circumstances surrounding the death of her grandfather. It has gone on for so long (the silence, I mean) that I am not sure who is being protected. But the casualty is not truth, but love. Because secrets separate. By definition, that’s what secrets are designed to do. They keep people apart, by ruling certain subjects “off limits.” It is no longer about how grandpa left the world, but about how father and daughter will live together in the world.
Sure, it is risky to upset the status quo. Frightening, too. But the last time I looked, love casts out fear.
Where there’s only a little love, there’s a lot of fear.
Where there’s a little more love, there’s a little less fear.
Where there’s a lot of love, one finds very little fear.
And when love becomes perfect, there’s a total absence of fear.
The problem being that all human love is imperfect. Which means there will always be some fear. God’s love, alone, being perfect. Which is a good thing, given that I read (and we prayed) this morning that “there are no secrets from Him.” One of the first prayers I memorized (after I got through “Now I lay me down to sleep,” “Our Father,” and “Hail Mary, full of grace”….my grandmother being Catholic) was this morning’s collect.
Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known,
and from whom no secrets are hid…
No secrets. Can you imagine that? The truth is, you probably can’t. The psalmist said (Psalm 139) that such knowledge is too great to grasp. But wonderful, too. For if there is nowhere to hide my deeds….nowhere to hide my words….nowhere, even, to hide my thoughts….then there is nowhere to hide me. The God who searches me and knows me will search me and find me. Anywhere I run. Anywhere I hide.
Heaven? There.
Sheol? There.
Light? There.
Darkness? There.
Utterly out to sea? There.
And if you read verse ten carefully, not only will I be sought and found, I will be held and led.
Bringing me full circle to Chapel Hill, North Carolina….to Raegan May’s suicide….and to the question of my ear-slashing stylist: “So is it true what they say, that he is now damned, doomed and fried, beyond all possibility of redemption?”
To which I said in great (albeit abbreviated) theological profundity:
Hell no.
Note: This sermon grew out of responses received from my book published in October entitled Take the Dimness of My Soul Away: Healing After a Loved One’s Suicide.
In thinking theologically about unshared stories and closely-held information, I was aided and abetted by rereading Frederick Buechner’s volume, Telling Secrets, where he writes: “I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are your secrets. Our trusting each other enough to share them has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human.”
As concerns the oft-quoted line, “We are about as sick as the secrets we keep,” it sounds like vintage Buechner, but don’t hold him hostage to my memory.
And as concerns the stylist in Chapel Hill, I was grateful for her question and her haircut. She provided me with both a good story and a good appearance. Truth be told, I was not really slashed and sliced, so much as nicked. But given the weighty tone of the sermon, the exaggeration of my plight was aimed at providing a lighter touch.
