People tell me their secrets, you know. It must be abnormal, the amount of times people tell me about their personal life, about their feelings and relationships and regrets. Maybe it’s the years of experience in a confessional, knowing what telling secret sins to a stranger feels like—or maybe it’s just that I ask the right questions. But over and over, I find myself on the receiving end of unspeakable thoughts. Even people who are strangers to me, or mostly strangers, do so. Though I never know what to believe.
I have a secret that I will share beyond the walls within which it was shared with me, and only because I don’t know enough details to incriminate anyone, and I don’t know the sharer of the story, and I think it’s a good lesson anyway. I’ll tell you this secret as a parable—a teaching moment in being open to people’s beliefs while standing by your own. This is a parable about having caution for what you hear (You see, by making myself Jesus here, I absolve myself of the guilt of telling a secret, because now I am a sinless, ageless God who exists beyond worldly interpersonal connections).
I once met a man who told me he witnessed a murder. A murder of a person I knew of, a person who many people I know knew of. That person is, in fact, dead.
I was sitting at a desk, sorting papers for my internship, and the man approached me. I don’t remember his name, though really, the name he gave me was a nickname. A weird nickname, so it’s curious that I don’t remember it. We somehow started speaking of the dead, offering condolences of the loss of a good man.
But then the conversation turned. The nicknamed man, with no transition, said to me,
“I saw him get shot in the middle of the street.”
I froze, and he continued.
“I heard the gunshot, and thought it was a random tragedy, but then recognized his face. The police and ambulances came, they carted him away, and the next thing I hear is that he had died from heart defects.”
I paused, not sure what to say, because I too had heard the guy had died of heart defects.
The man went on, despite my sparse response. “It made me doubt what I had seen, because all over the news there wasn’t a breath of any murder, just natural causes, but I know what I saw.” He whispered this all to me, like I was the first person he ever told. “How does a middle aged guy with no history of health issues just drop dead?”
“Oh my god,” I nearly prayed. I don’t have the seminarian experience to dole reconciliation. How do I absolve him of his fear and silence?
I especially don’t know how to absolve because I think the nicknamed man is wrong.
I think he saw the wrong face. I think his grief and fear warped a moment of witness into a way to explain the unexpected loss of a friend. In all my time with the people in this community, I never heard a whisper of murder. No one else had ever talked about this, and it is not something that could have been hidden. Gunshot wounds don’t disappear when the body gets to the hospital, after all. I had been told stories by other friends and family about his last moments in the hospital room, sitting up and talking to people, not dead on arrival and gurneyed as a corpse from the scene.
But this nicknamed man, it was truth to him. It was his deepest secret he was sharing with me. All I could say was, “I can’t believe it,” to him, because I couldn’t, honestly. All he could say to me was “I don’t believe all of them,” because he didn’t.
I still haven’t run across the man since that interaction, but I still think about his secret. That was, probably, the worst day of his life. He saw a friend gunned down across the road. But the worst day of his life could be based completely on a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation. His friend is, of course, still dead, so that gut-wrenching, life-altering fact remains, but I wish the man could release himself of his bystander role in a murder that probably didn’t happen. I wish I could release him.
I think we are as true as we can be to ourselves. We speak with authority on what we believe. But our beliefs are not always true. My belief, that the nicknamed man was mistaken, has the potential to not be true. Maybe that was the truest thing I’ve ever heard. But I stick to my guns about that belief, and he to his. When information comes your way, overheard or confessed in a hushed tone, believe that the storyteller believes themself to be true, but throw in that grain of salt. Allow for the margin of error between fact and belief.
I’m being preachy, but as Jesus, I’m allowed to be.