Family Secrets

Secrets in a family or church can have devastating results.

They concern those things that go on that nobody wants to talk about. They're like elephants in the room that everybody knows are there but refuse to confront. They create threatening shadows of suspicion and anxiety and tension that drain off energy and openness and joy.

Maureen McCormick could tell you something about the negative power of secrets. She's the actress who played Marcia on the TV sitcom The Brady Bunch 40 years ago. In her intriguing memoir, Here's The Story, she candidly recounts her decades-long journey through depression, drug abuse, self-image problems, and difficult relationships. She was very much unlike the ideal, happy teenager she portrayed on television and her trek into early womanhood was filled with disappointment and some destructive passages.

McCormick, now 52, traces a lot of her personal emotional pain and bad choices to an unpleasant family secret about syphilis, passed from her grandmother to her mom, that brought about severe psychological and physical effects for both of those women in Maureen's life. Maureen would only learn about this sensitive matter when she was a teen, and then simply because other family secrets generated by it started tumbling out. But she had sensed for a long time a heavy cloud over her family. Now for her there would be the stress of fear over whether she would inherit the disease. She found real solace on the set of the imaginary TV family in which she was a part since there was such friction and distress in her actual home. Even there, though,in that artificial environment, she struggled to maintain a perfectionistic image. These days, fortunately, she considers herself a survivor who has faced up to and worked through some of the bad stuff from the past. Odd, isn't it, how one little hidden secret can spin off such waste of years and lead down such lifestyle deadends.

Those things we can't bring ourselves to talk about, like abuse or alcoholism or affairs or mental illness or incest don't just go away. Sweeping them under the rug won't help. Try keeping a beach ball under the water! These family secrets have a life of their own and produce waves and vibrations of discomfort and discord that hang in the air. In churches, too, those significant issues that we've never resolved, like past conflicts or pastoral terminations or poor financial practices or episodes of immorality are unfinished business that color everything we attempt to do now and continually seem to haunt us.

This is not a new phenemenom. It shows up in the Bible, too. In fact, in the stories of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph in Genesis we find many illustrations of secrets that had hurtful and in some cases harmful impacts.

For instance, on at least 2 occasions, in chapters 12 and 20, Abraham and his wife Sarah travel to other places and he actually asks her to lie to the ruling authorities and say that she is his sister rather than his wife so that should those kings desire her because of her beauty, Abraham would not be put to death so that they might take her as their own. Here, by the way, is convincing proof that God uses even flawed individuals--Abraham was known as a man of great faith and yet at this point he stumbles in a kind of ugly compromise. He was putting his wife at real risk with this deception. She could have been forced into a marriage with one of those rulers, had children with him, and endangered God's promise of a line of descendants through Abraham. You have to wonder if Sarah ever really shared her heart about this cowardly act with her husband or if it just set up something of a wall between them from then on. You have to wonder, too, if they ever told their son, Isaac, about this foolish mistake when he was old enough to understand. Maybe not, because in chapter 26, years later, he himself tells the same kind of lie about his wife, Rebekah, out of fear. Talk about multi-generational transmission of bad relational patterns!

You see another type of secret in Genesis 29 where Leah, caught in a loveless marriage, never seems to be able to express her unfulfilled longing for her husband, Jacob. Given by her father, Laban, to this man who really wanted her sister and eventually got her, too, she had children by her husband but never really won his heart. It's obvious by the names she gave to their children that she talked to God about her loneliness and hurt but you get the impression that she didn't open up in a frank, intimate conversation with her spouse and disclose her deep desires and affections and yearnings for close attachment with him. She lived in real misery. Jealousy and a sense of rejection tormented her. Why is it that sometimes we go through life without having those soul-to-soul talks with those close to us that might bring such inner connection?

Leah's sister, Rachel, Jacob's other wife, forged a secret that could have had horrendous consequences. In Genesis 31 we read of how she and her whole family are fleeing from her crafty, manipulative father, Laban, to return to Jacob's homeland. She clandestinely steals some figurines, some pagan idols, from her dad's house. When Laban pursues this departing entourage and finally catches up with them, he demands the return of these little statuettes from whoever took them. Jacob knows nothing about the theft. Rachel has not told him. He boldly authorizes the death of anyone in his party found to have them, completely unaware that he is putting his wife's life in jeopardy. Through a further act of deception, Rachel manages to hide the fact of her wrongdoing and keep the images, but the outcome of this undisclosed sin could have been most unpleasant. A family could have been violently ruptured because Rachel privately coveted and took something she didn't need and shouldn't have stolen.

Perhaps the most heartwrenching secret in these Genesis narratives shows up in chapter 37. Jacob's sons, bitter and angry over his parental favoring of Joseph, whom they see as arrogant and boastful, consider killing the young man but ultimately decide to sell him into slavery. However, they lead their father to believe that his pride and joy has been killed by some wild animal. The light goes out in Jacob's soul. His grief is overpowering. He has no idea that his son is still alive. And those brothers maintain that secret for many years. Imagine the loss of transparency that now existed between these sons and their father. Try to grasp the ongoing tension that these guys lived with daily not knowing if Joseph would suddenly return. Picture the heightened suspicions that flowed among these men as they wondered if one of them would break ranks and tell their dad and expose their evil deed. They paid a price for their clinging to a secret. It would be hard to live with much zest and focus.

Ironically, and providentially, it would fall to Joseph to clean up a lot of this relational dysfunction that had wounded this family for generations. According to Genesis 39-50 this young man ended up in Egypt and after many twists and turns, ups and downs, he becomes a ruler there. When his brothers come to that country years later, seeking food in a time of famine back home, they stand before the brother they'd despised and abandoned unaware of his identity. He recognizes them, though, and begins a process of healing and reconciliation with them. It's done with tears. It's done with truth. It's done with time. This loving confrontation was hard work but Joseph took the initiative and stepped up and broke the cycle of rivalry and dishonesty and pain. The secrets were out. Everyone could breathe again. Mending of tattered relationships could take place.

Tender, open, intimate dialogue in our families and congregations could pave the way for stronger, healthier, closer ties among us. Harboring secrets keeps us in the dark and distant from each other, which in turn breeds all kinds of evil strategies and addictions and manipulations to help us cope with the insecurity and alienation that we feel. Life is so much freer and fuller and more relaxed when we're not hiding stuff. Granted, you don't want to spill the ugly garbage of a lifetime all at once and without sensitivity to the age and maturity level of your listeners, but gradually and gracefully turning loose of long locked away emotional and relational toxins will revolutionize your life. You won't have to live on pins and needles. You won't have to be constantly looking over your shoulder.