So, I've been thinking hard over the last few days about a weird change I've been noticing about myself this past semester: I'm telling everybody I can corral for ten minutes about what happened when Matt was murdered. And, I'm starting to wonder: is this necessarily a healthy thing? It really started with my minister friend back in August. We were having a theology discussion at a local bar (yes, we do that sort of thing) and he was trying to come up with topics for a lecture series on campus.
With what fruit, then, O my Lord... do I confess, not only in your presence but to men also by these writings, what I now am, not what I once was?
--Augustine, Confessions Book X, Ch. 3
"What about a roundtable on theology and homosexuality?" He asked innocently. I leaned over the table and thumped my finger on his legal pad.
"Absolutely not. You might as well lob a grenade in the middle of our campus as do that," I answered.
Later, I apologized and explained to him why I was a little sensitive to that issue, and he was really surprised. Then, when the Laramie Project: 10 Years Later came to our town, I told "Joe" the entire story, and then the cast. It's sort of snowballed from there. Each time scared the utter heck out of me, but then I've felt so much more... liberated, I guess. And I keep doing it.
Reactions have been mixed. Some people just sort of edge slowly for the door, like I'm going to pounce on them. One colleague suggested that I needed a vacation. And then one of my classmates just opened up and shared with me the trauma in her own life she's been silently packing around for seven years, and I was stunned. She and I have started talking a lot.
So I find myself in the twenty-ninth year of my existence in the middle of an all-out confession fest. Why? I have never really felt impelled to air out my dirty laundry for the world. In fact, one of the hardest things for me has been that whole "Confess your sins to each other" business in the Book of James (there's a reason Protestants don't like that book.) But I'm starting to wonder just a little bit about this little glut of storytelling: is all this some kind of exhibitionist tendency, or is it something more-- or something worse?