Atonement from What?
Today is the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. It is the holiest day of the year in Judaism. It is on this day that those who practice Judaism ask God to forgive them for all the sins they may have committed during the year, and once again inscribe them into the Book of Life for the New Year.
I was born and raised Jewish, and used to attend services every Yom Kippur, and as is tradition I would fast on the day of. I did this for years, in part because I felt I had a duty and an obligation, and in part because there was something about participating in the services that felt right.
Some years back, I was attending a Yom Kippur service. This was on the heels of some rough patches in my life, and a crisis of faith where I shifted from Conservative to Reform Judaism.
I am sitting in the synagogue, on the Day of Atonement, and I admit it likely didn’t help that the cantor was singing flat. But what really struck me was the rabbi’s litany.
If you are not familiar with the notion of Yom Kippur, this is the day where those of the Jewish faith fast, neither eating nor drinking from sunset to sunset, in order to receive atonement from God for all of their sins.
The rabbi is asking for God to forgive us for the sin of this, or the sin of that, or the sin of the other thing, and sin upon sin upon sin. All transgressions against the will of God, since it is he we need to seek to forgive us.
It was here I came to realize that I do not believe in sin.
From whom do I need atonement?
For the record, I believe in a higher power. I do not know what it is, but I tend to refer to it as the Powers that Be. It is not my belief that this higher power is necessarily divine nor omnipotent. Instead, I believe that it’s the greater oversoul from which all of us originate.
Since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but transmuted, it doesn’t feel hard to believe that we all originated from the same source. Energy is the one thing we all have in common, which we also share with both grains of sand and galaxies.
My philosophy thus explained, I cannot fathom us sinning against the oversoul, as it has a consciousness that is far different from our own. Since we are all one, and all of us are composed of the same stuff, then whom are we seeking atonement from? If there is nobody to sin against, what do we need to atone for?
Don’t mistake this notion for denying the ideas of right and wrong. More often than not, of course, it’s either grey or rainbow-hued, rather than black and white. For example, stealing to gain more coin for the sake of coin is wrong. Stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving child is still wrong, because it is stealing, bit it is not the same.
This gets into the tenets of morality, spirituality, and religion. All are individual, and we can have any one, or combination of the three we ascribe to. Let’s be blunt here, a lot of the so-called religious people out there in the world today are amoral and lack spirituality.
So if this is a question of spirit, morality, and/or religion, then to whom do we need our atonement? Simple…ourselves.
Seek atonement for your own doings
We are all our own harshest critics. Nobody can beat up on me better than I can. There isn’t anyone else in the world who is as harsh a critic of me. Nobody speaks as ill or me as I do, nor gets frustrated with me when I screw up as much as I do.
Because consciousness creates reality, if I believe that I am a screw-up, unworthy or undeserving, then that’s the reality I am creating. When I get mad at myself because I do not live up to an ideal I have set for myself, I tend to create more situations where I can fail. This is the law of attraction in action.
A great many of the mistakes, wrongs, and injustices we perpetrate are borne of fear, the lack and scarcity mentality of our society, and our own feelings of inadequacy. Particularly ugly forms of this come in the guise of guilt, jealousy, and shame. Nothing like a good, old-fashioned guilt trip to make you feel the need to atone for…something.
There is, as such, nothing wrong with seeking out atonement. But it’s not so important that we do so for the sake of God, as much as we do so for our own sake. The person we tend to most need to forgive is ourselves.
Forgiving ourselves is not easy. In part because we do not feel we necessarily deserve forgiveness, and in part because we feel unworthy in the eyes of our contemporaries, be they coworkers, friends, or family. We screw up, we lose our rights to good things.
Atonement is an apology for a wrong
On this Yom Kippur, I am going to work on asking for forgiveness to myself, for all the wrongs real and perceived.
It is my desire to be forgiven, by my self, for being lazy, failing, messing things up, unjust anger, and any other mistake, error, screw-up or wrong I have committed. I need to atone, to apologize to me for being so hard on myself.
Dear self, forgive me. I am sorry I have treated you so badly, and that I continue to think ill of me. With this apology, I desire to let this go and better recognize my worth. From here, I will strive to recognize that I deserve all the good life can give me. In atoning to myself, I believe I can empower myself to manifest an amazing life.
May we be forgiven by ourselves for being imperfectly perfect human beings.
Whom do you seek atonement from?
This is the three-hundred fifty-first entry in my series. These weekly posts are ideas for, and my personal experiences with, walking along the path of life. I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world along the way, and empower myself and my readers with conscious reality creation.
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