Religious Education Update: September 24

Religious Education Update
September 22, 2006

Forgiveness and Atonement

Our Jewish friends and neighbors are celebrating Rosh Hashanah this weekend. They are honoring the new year 5767, a numerical reminder that the Jewish tradition goes back a very long time. This coming week’s High Holy Days are a time of reflection on the past year, and a time to make amends for the shortcomings and failures of the year gone by.

All of the major world religions contain an element of confession or repenting for one’s sins or personal failings. Catholics may receive absolution from a priest after confessing, Jews begin a fresh new year after the reflections of Yom Kippur. In the Muslim and Hindu faiths, disciplines ask for atonement from God or gods.

The Liturgy in UU congregations is less explicit about asking for forgiveness. It has even been said that, “Unitarians felt that they were too good to be damned.” That is not to say that UU’s feel they are perfect or fail to feel guilt or remorse over past actions. Often, we may even feel overwhelmed with our social responsibility towards global warming or pollution or racism or all the other ills of the world.

UU Tom Stites wrote a confession in a Building Your Own Theology Class:

We acknowledge our imperfections and confess to ourselves, and publicly to each other that we have fallen short in the crucial effort to live lives worth dying for.
We have allowed minutiae and unimportant things to rule our lives and to claim precious hours that should be devoted to concerns that are important to us, to our families and friends, and to the communities that sustain all our lives.

We have given too much power to fears and anger and pain. And in focusing too much on our own wants, we have arrogantly presumed that, despite overwhelming evidence of the vastness of the universe and the infinite sweep of time, we have special importance.

Let us rejoice that in each of us is the power to improve not only ourselves but also the needy world of which we are citizens. Let us seize this moment to renew our commitments to doing the right things and the important things, to confronting our fears, and to bowing in respect to the mysteries of nature.

As we begin this new church year, what would each of us wish to improve in our own deeds and actions?

Wishing all of you a sweet and joyful New Year,

Marlene Abel
Director of Religious Education

(The current issue of Quest, a UU CLF publication was used as a resource for this Update.)