YOM KIPPUR
Homily by Forrest Church
September 20, 2007
The days of Awe culminate in a day of Atonement, a word that at its root means At-one-ment. With the book of our lives open for revision, we seize this solemn occasion to amend its text, and then open our next chapter with a clean slate.
Atonement, or at-one-ment, has three dimensions. To atone is to be made one with ourselves, with our neighbor, and with our God, or the ground of our being. Honest with ourselves, we cleanse our lives of self-deception. This completes the first circle of At-one-ment, the circle of integrity or inner-peace. The act required here is one of confession. We acknowledge our failings, both deeds done over the past twelve months that compromise our integrity, and deeds left undone that begged our doing. By confessing, by being honest in our personal inventory, through an act of inner union with our higher selves we participate within our very souls in the saving action of at-one-ment. Atonement in this case is another word for integrity.
The second circle of atonement is reconciliation. We become one with our neighbor. Sometimes to do this we must beg forgiveness. Those we ask may not forgive us, for to forgive another is sometimes very hard. But to acknowledge our need for forgiveness in itself can be saving work. So long as such an acknowledgement is coupled with a vow to change, our world is changed by it, because we walk through the world differently than we did before. And for us to forgive another carries the same, saving power. With reconciliation too comes at-one-ment. Having made peace with ourselves, we extend the circle of oneness to include our neighbors.
Finally, in its highest sense, atonement is the way in which we make our peace with God, the Holy, the sacred, the spirit of life itself. In short, we bless the creation. To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy's, "Here on earth, God's work truly becomes our own."
The Jewish High Holidays tap into the idea of atonement more profoundly than does almost any other religious festival. On Rosh Hashonna, the beginning of a new year, the book of life is opened. On Yom Kippur, it is sealed. Having made peace with the past, we commit ourselves to script a new future. Put simply, we turn the page.
Think, for a moment, about what happens when we get stuck in life, when we get trapped in one place, when we can't turn the page.
Look at it this way. You are reading a book. And then you get stuck. I know it's happened to you. So often it's happened to me. I read a page and then realize I wasn't paying attention. My mind wasn't tracking. So I go back to the top and read it again. Simple, right? No, not so simple. Because, more often than not, when I go back to read the page again I get even less out of it than I did the first time. I go into a kind of trance. I concentrate harder, but to no avail. I read sentence after sentence, and then get to the bottom of the page and again realize I haven't caught the drift. So I go back to the top. This time I really concentrate. I read it word by word. I hear the words ring in my brain, but they don't even compose sentences. The harder I try to get through this page, the more completely incomprehensible it becomes. I am in a trance, increasingly frustrated, more and more lost.
In life, as when reading a book, whenever you are stuck, when the harder you try the less you comprehend, when you have read the same passage three times with diminishing returns, my suggestion follows the logic of this sacred season: "Turn the page."
Yes, you will probably have missed something. But sometimes trying to find something you know you have missed just delays you from discovering things that await you when you turn the page. New characters. A twist in plot. Or the development of character, which almost never happens when we are stuck--when we are going over the same old page, again and again, caught in a trance, looking for paragraphs and finding sentences, looking for sentences and finding words. Not able to go on. Not able to turn the page. Reading the same words, the same thoughts, the same feelings over and over again, hitting bottom and then going back to the top of the page, the same page, where we are stuck with ourselves or with others or with our lives.
So that's my message this evening, and the message of the season. If you've read some recent chapter from the script of your life over and over again, if you keep reading it over and it's making less and less sense, seal the book, turn the page. Don't get stuck. Don't assume that you have to have absolutely everything right with the past and the present before you dare go on to an unknown future. Don't focus so hard on your life that your focus blurs and the images double, twice the problems, twice the troubles, and it has to make sense and you just can't make it, so you read it again and again. Turn the page.
That's what spiritual growth is about. Not getting life right down to the last detail, but making peace with what it, forgiving and accepting forgiveness, turning the page.
We are doing that work here, right now, this very night, in this very liturgy. The work of confession. The work of forgiveness. The work of new beginnings. By accepting ourselves, reconciling with our loved ones and neighbors, and embracing the cosmos, we achieve integrity, togetherness, and wholeness. In short, we perform the work of Atonement. At-one-ment. God's holy work becomes our own. And so we begin anew.
Amen. Happy Holidays. I love you. And may God bless us all.