Article 1 - "The Day of Atonement" NOVEMBER 2006 edition of First Church of The Streets

    The TV droned on as I left the house. Another school shooting, it announced, the third this week. This time, the carnage was at a one-room schoolhouse in the Amish country of Pennsylvania. I was out the door before I learned much more, but heard one of the news commentators stating that the Amish had guns to live off the land, as though that somehow explained everything.

    This day, it happened to be Yom Kippur. I'm not Jewish, so I had a tendency to confuse that day with Rosh Hashana, not knowing which was the day of atonement or the Jewish New Year. Later, I found confirmed that yes, it was the day of atonement, or as many people like to chirp the word, at-one-ment. The concept of at-one-ment, tying it into atonement, rang true to me. Atonement, where one is reconciled to God, making reparations to repair a damaged relationship through repentance. And in the Christian Bible, where Jesus says in order to reconcile with God, you need to reconcile with man. If you forgive others, your Heavenly Father forgives you as well. If you don't, the pain of the offense will remain, for the forgiveness of God will be withheld. A reconciliation with a many point plan.

    I thought about this as I traveled throughout the day. For whatever reason, the idea of God's forgiveness withheld unless one forgave never disturbed me. I presume on some level that God has already eradicated the debt in his mind. I doubt God is standing up there, fuming over every little thing that man messes up on. But if man doesn't forgive his brother or sister, then in a way, man cuts himself off from God. It's like the concept of serving two masters. The Other Master doesn't always have to be money. Isn't anger a god if it dominates all my thinking? And if all I do is feed its conflagration, doesn't it turn into a bonfire that wipes out any other reality? If this is true, isn't this a god onto its own, one that swipes the Heavenly One in the flames? Receiving the grace of God would be nearly impossible if I have through my own actions wiped him out of my own consciousness. My own choice to forgive is important if I want to ever receive the reconciliation with God.

    Soon enough, the fallout from the school shooting trickled out, the media acting as triage. First the casualty rate, that eventually fixed at eleven girls shot, with five dead and six wounded. Later, the darkness of the dead killer's mind was probed, the disturbing motives revealed, with no hope for rebuttal because the killer was already dead. Dark as that was, what seemed to interest many of the media was the reaction of the Amish people themselves. One of the Amish had been reported as saying, we must not hate this man. Another who agreed to be interviewed, when asked, do you hate this man, promptly responded no. Was he angry, did he want revenge. Again, the answer was, no.

    This seemed to confound the reporters more than the proclivities of the killer. Maybe, in a way, the media had desensitized itself to darkness. After all, some of the top shows on television seem to be about serial killers. But forgiving a killer of children? Especially with the perverted inclinations of this man? This was a news story in itself, or so it seemed.

    And yet again, to me, it made sense. Certainly if one was inculcated with the message of nonviolence, as the Amish were, one may simply be acculturated to choose to forgive. But then, why wouldn't they? To choose to forgive would enter them into the grace of God's mercy, especially as far as the Bible was concerned. Wasn't it Jesus who said to love your enemies as well as your friends? After all, if God only loved his friends, then why would God ever bother to forgive anyone who ever fell from grace?

    But what about the killer's widow? As devastating as the attacks were to this community, I wondered of her isolation. I thought of how easy the tendency would be to scapegoat her, the why-were-you-married-to-such-a-monster mode and how-could-you-possibly-not-known mentality that seems to creep up in these kinds of situations. The Amish community had each other, other Amish, and being the innocent victims, the sympathy of the world. But what of her, and her anguish, to be stripped not only of her husband but also his identity?

    Blessed are the peacemakers, because they will be called sons of God: and to hear that the widow was invited to the funeral of one of the little girls, to remember that the manifestation of forgiveness extended to all no matter what the state of the soul was or if it had been cast aside. The act of forgiveness had been offered, waiting for it to be received. So the Heavenly Father offered, as did his children, the sons of God.

    So there it was: as I watched the Amish man conduct the interview, I saw the atonement. The killer's widow being invited into fellowship with the grieving with the community was another atonement. Atonement: as I searched for more about the word, I found a curious definition. More than at-one-ment, the Christian Scientist definition was revealed to me. Oneness with God. In the forgiveness of debt, there the atonement was found, on earth, as it is in heaven.