LIKE RAIN IN A PARCHED LAND...

Although it was there in plain sight for all of my life, I saw last week for the first time something that I had missed, something important. I remain startled and fascinated by an observation and insight that others obviously have seen all along. I saw the word “atonement” as if I were seeing it for the first time. I came across the following paragraph as I was reading the fifteenth chapter of Bishop John Spong’s book, “Jesus for the Non-Religious”:

“Human beings all live with an experience of separateness, aloneness and alienation born, I believe, in the trauma of self-consciousness. It is manifested as the anxiety of meaninglessness that accompanies the external human drive to discover and appropriate ultimate meaning for human life in its transitory existence. It feeds our sense of guilt and fear. It constitutes a major piece of what it means to be fully human. No one escapes this reality, and every religious system has some way of addressing it.”

Of course, those ideas aren’t new. The essential alienation and aloneness of us all has been the subject of art through the ages. I like what Spong has to say, but he says it no better than Shakespeare or Faulkner. The revelation for me came a few paragraphs later when he breaks the word “atonement” in ways that I had never seen or thought of it. Instead of a-tone-ment, Spong talks about at-one-ment. He goes on to explain the idea of atonement as it developed in the Christian church by discussing the ancient Jewish story of the Passover and the observance of Yom Kippur. His discussion deals mainly with what he considers the need of every human being to be connected to a god source and to other humans. I don't agree or disagree with him in the matter. What startled me and still fascinates me is the new meaning of atonement that I will now always carry around in my head. Heretofore my thinking about “atonement” has been centered around the church’s requirement that I believe and accept that all humans are born with original sin and that we are “lost,” that we have been turned out from a state of perfection because of sin and that we live perpetually “east of Eden” and will remain “lost” unless we allow the church to guide us back to Eden, to the Paradise that was lost. Atonement, “at-one-ment,” for me now will be about personal wholeness, about keeping the pieces of myself together, about integration, about countering the societal influences that tend to move me toward disintegration. It’s not about my connection with God or even with other people. It’s about, as they say on the street, keeping my own shit together.