Secret places on the River and of the Heart: Spiritual Insights from Colorado Christian Fly Fishing Guide

Fly fishers have “secret holes” on the rivers they fish. We can be quite hush-hush about these places. Likewise, we often have secrets of the heart that we keep deep inside and tell no one.

As Christians, it is sad that we often try to hide who we are. We harbor our secrets. We remain on a stage performing and afraid to reveal what we are really thinking and feeling. We think we need to always smile parroting religious clichés.  Yet the sharing of our secrets is our “humanness”, part of our life story, and can be a place of deep connection among believers. Our deep inner secrets, or more so, the “general” secret of who we really are can bond us together on a level that the pretending will never achieve. Maybe this is the secret, that what we present to others is always somewhat different from what we truly know about ourselves.  

It seems that even when I try to tell people who I really am they will often disagree. I am not sure why it is this way.  “Oh no, you are not like that”, they will say. Perhaps my outward persona is quite “effective” in fooling people and it keeps people from being close to me.

For me, a big secret is my general sadness with much of life. Therapists might call this depression and perhaps they are at least in part correct. Perhaps melancholy is simply my natural disposition and a part of the human condition; “I know the earth and I am sad” said the poet Pablo Neruda.  In addition, no doubt part of my sadness simply stems from   my own shortcomings and at times, my own ungratefulness. But, all these reasons aside,  I think at least  some of my sadness has to do with a great spiritual truth.  And that truth is simply that Jesus was a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”, and as Christians, this man of sorrows lives with in us. Somehow I think if we really believe in the life of Jesus then in some very real way we all share in that sadness and brokenness and somehow that is part of the secret that we all share in together but we don’t want to reveal because we think we have to always appear “together” and happy.

Being unable to share this secret of our sadness is perhaps what keeps us from being as close and connected as we could be and perhaps what even limits us from understanding the heart of God. It is a paradox in that deep down we want to be accepted for who we really are but we are also scared to death if we show our true selves to each other and even to God that we will be rejected.

Frederick Buechner says it this way, “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 more acceptable than the real thing.”

I personally have grown weary of the edited version of myself and I have grown bored of the edited versions of others. Maybe, (and I need to start with myself), we can learn to share the secrets of our hearts with one another and that might somehow make our own lives and our relationships with others a bit more authentic. And then we would all share in a similar knowing in the same way that when we reveal our secret fishing holes we would find out that everyone already  knew. It was not a secret after all.