The spiritual practice of atonement, asking and offering forgiveness, is a practice that actively builds and sustains a robust and healthy beloved community.
When we are willing to take the risk of showing up to each other in all of our gloriously imperfect humanity and begin again and again in love – we are being faithful.
When we are willing to go deeper with our friends and family and neighbors, willing to understand their fears and difficulties – to do more than work with them side by side for years without knowing what causes them pain or brings them joy– we are being faithful.
In Jewish tradition, the Book of Life is sealed on Yom Kippur, not to be reopened for another year at Rosh Hashanah. For Unitarian Universalists, the book is never sealed. Each day is an opportunity to begin again in love, repenting and offering forgiveness as often as is required for the health and well-being of this beloved community.
What harm have you caused in the past year that requires repentance? What do you need to forgive yourself for? Who needs your forgiveness?
There are so many reasons to be filled with grief: the four diplomats whose lives were cut short and the families devastated by the amputation of a beloved person from their midst. The loss of trust between partners in the US and Libya working for peace and freedom. Our national sense of violation and vulnerability from an attack by extremist Muslims on our most tender, damaged day.
But more than that, for me there is the grief that once again the violence inherent in narrow-minded, domination-centered, triumphalist forms of religion has bubbled to the surface once again. I do not forgive the Libyans who turned offense and outrage into murder. I also do not forgive the America-Israeli filmmaker who set out to cause offense and incite mayhem. Yes, killing people is worse—far worse—than hateful, bigoted language. But the inciter and the rioters came from the same place: a belief that their religion is right, that everyone else is wrong, and that their religious supremacy deserves to be accepted and honored.
I do not forgive. But as we approach the Days of Turning, the time between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur when Jews are called atone for offenses they have given and forgive offenses committed against them, I wonder if maybe we aren’t all called to atone. I know that the person who created the offensive film is no more representative of Christianity than the murderers in Libya are representative of Islam. But I suspect that all of us, whatever our faith, are in some way complicit in this tragedy.
I don’t suppose that anyone reading this message has vilified another religion, let alone physically harmed another in a religiously-fueled rage. But I wonder if all of us might not have moments when we treat the religious convictions of others with contempt, or let ignorance lead us into saying things that are offensive. I wonder if all of us haven’t fallen into some easy assumptions about who is right and who is wrong, who is good and who is bad. I wonder which of us is free, not from violence, but from the underpinnings of violence that assume that we can make others conform to our view of the world.
There is plenty to grieve for today and in the days to come. May our grief lead us toward the deep sources of peace rather than the temptations of violence.
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“Who will journey to the place we require of humans?” asks the poet, Sonia Sanchez. This question from her poem “Aaaayeee Babo (Praise God)” has become scripture to me in recent months. I have read it and re-read it, reflecting on its implications for my life, longing to answer “I will. I will journey to the place we require of humans.”
There is a profound ground of unity that is more pertinent and authentic than all the unilateral dimensions of our lives. This, a man discovers when he is able to keep open the door to his heart.
This is one’s ultimate responsibility, and it is not dependent on whether the heart of another is kept open for him.
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What, I ask myself, does it take to live in at-one-ment? I can imagine the road I need to travel from where I am now to a place of living in at-one-ment with myself, with my friends and family, with my neighbors, with the world…
And then the spots where I need to turn toward some different course of action or practice tell me what atonement looks like in my life right now.
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Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, many be the source of one of the most…um…surprising religious traditions I know of. Surprising, as in a nice way of saying downright strange. Although only a few Orthodox Jews do it any more, it is traditional on Yom Kippur to do kapporot.
And what is kapporot, you might well ask? Well, basically it’s swinging a live chicken around over your head.
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…Speak out the paralyzing secret
and begin to come back to yourself. Read more →
September 2012
“The beginning of atonement is the sense of its necessity. ” —Lord Byron
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As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.