In a desert town in sixth century Arabia, a young boy, orphaned at the age of six, is sent to live with relatives among the Hashimite tribe, where he learns to tend sheep.  Eventually, he learns the skills of hauling and trading goods.  Although illiterate, he attracts the attention, and then the attentions, of a wealthy widow twenty years his senior.  She proposes to him. They start a family and settle into a happy and secure life.  
       But the shepherd turned entrepreneur is disturbed by the widespread practices of idolatry among his neighbors.  Leaving his family in town, he heads off into the desert to meditate on what to do with his life.  After nearly a month of solitude, he is visited by an angel who utters a one-word command:  “read!”  He responds, “but I can’t read!” After three such commands and helpless responses, the angel grasps him with overwhelming force.  When released, he begins to recite beautiful, complex textual passages of which he had no prior knowledge. 
       Returning to his family in an inspired state, he plunges himself into religious leadership.  The revelations and recitations continue.   They are transcribed by a growing band of literate followers who find the recitations, now book length, to be tremendously inspiring.  An extraordinary religion is born.
      The shepherd turned entrepreneur turned religious leader is, of course, Mohammed.  The book of extraordinary recitation in this story is the Koran.  And the calendar month during which his transformation began is the ninth one, called Ramadan.  Today, another Ramadan begins.  Over a billion Muslims around the world are beginning a month-long religious observance of fasting, prayer, and communion. 
        Ramadan is a season of intensified, collective effort to achieve closeness with God.  Muslims spend this entire month in sober reflection on how well or poorly their religious values are reflected in their lives.  Much time is spent in houses of worship and in communal prayer.  Fasting is required between sunrise and sundown.  This intensified embrace of piety reaches a climax on a specified date known as the night of predestination – or perhaps night of fate would render the meaning better. Muslims hold this night as the time when God determines the course of the world for the coming year.
        Mohammed’s ancestors were the family of Abraham, of Genesis fame.  We can dispense with the Biblical begats here and just focus on Abraham’s two sons. One, named Ishmael, started a family from which the Muslim tribes of the Arabian Peninsula are descended.  His younger half-brother Isaac started a family from which the twelve tribes of Israel are descended.
        The Jewish side of the family of Abraham has long observed a yearly period of intensified piety similar to that of their Muslim kin.  It occurs during first ten days of the Jewish new year, referred to as the High Holy Days.  Fasting, prayer, and spiritual reflection are the focus of this time.  As in Islam, in Judaism these are community practices.
       The High Holy Days also include a mythic story similar to the night of fate in Islam.  Each new year’s day, God writes in books containing the names of all humanity, recording who will live, who will die, who will have a good year, who will have a bad one.  For ten days, however, humans have a fleeting opportunity to affect their fates by acts of atonement.
       Before addressing any unresolved issues with god, they are enjoined to make amends for wounds they have caused other people and grant forgiveness to those who have wounded them.  On the tenth day of the new year, called Yom Kippur, the divine books are sealed again until the passing of another year.
       Today the Jewish High Holy Days begin again.  The ten-day clock is ticking, counting down toward the Day of Atonement.  Yom Kippur.  Jews are striving to move closer to God, closer to what is holy.
       Other than historical curiosity, what cause do we have to look over our shoulder at these strange-sounding ancestral stories?  My reason for doing so is that I expect to be changed by any story good enough to survive so long.  Something powerful must be waiting there.
      The spirit of Mohammed’s story is so much more interesting than the letter.  I don’t read his story as an empirical description of an angel miraculously appearing out of the sky to begin downloading massive volumes of highly poetic text into the brain of an illiterate man.  I read it as a tale of an ordinary man having a extraordinary, transformative experience -- one that taught him not to read books, but rather, to read the WORLD, and himself in it, in an utterly new way.   Whatever happened out there in the desert, I believe it brought him very close to something so new . . .  that it had to be beyond the realm of experience available in the finite world:  a brush with the infinite, or to use Mohammed’s language, Allah.  God.
       The name I would give to that new experience is awe – a sense of speechless amazement, appreciation, and respect.  I believe Mohammed suddenly saw human life as it really is – a state of being that can be grasped not only through our physical senses but also through our spiritual ones, enabling an experience of the connectedness of the finite and the infinite – in other words, an experience of wholeness.  Of the holy.  Mohammed’s experience moved his feet onto a path of legendary religious leadership.  On that path he not only read but also wrote, in his actions, with a spiritual literacy that dwarfed what is known as literacy in the everyday world. 
       Ramadan is a celebration of the awe and joy and power of closeness to the infinite, experienced by Mohammed.  We UUs aren’t sure what to make of this.  We are a skeptical bunch, rarely awe-struck; a language-loving people rarely visited by speechlessness.  And when I say “we,’ I do mean “we.”  But as a religious people, we can’t escape the fact that like our Abrahamic relatives, we are in the awe business. 
       Today Jews and Muslims throughout the world are focusing their attention not only on awe itself but also on the spiritual practices that bring people to awe. They believe that through highly intentional spiritual practice, humans can evoke an experience of closeness to the holy, rather than having it be something that strikes them only rarely, and unbeckoned.  As a religious people, we UUs are in the spiritual practice business too. 
       Signaling the importance of one such spiritual practice, the holiest of the Jewish High Holy Days is Yom Kippur, the Day Of Atonement.  Once again I find myself more interested in the spirit than the letter of the sacred texts.  I don’t read this Jewish story as an empirical description of a God who enters judgments about each human in eternal journals, and then sets up a legalistic process by which humans have ten days to appeal these judgments by generating fresh evidence of good conduct.  I read it as a tale of fate and freedom. 
       Fate is that which we cannot change.  God gives us the world, or, if you don’t find favor with the word God, we at least can say that the world is given to us.  As given, it is an accomplished fact, a fait accompli.  Our fate.  It is where we must start, but it need not be where we end up. Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, represents two bold religious claims: first, that humans can chart a path in life toward a destination of their own choosing; and second, that the wish lying at the bottom of every human heart is to choose a destination of healing, wholeness, connection with the holy.  These are the conditions that bring us to awe and make life joyful. 
       Atonement is about changing ones path by making amends.  Judaism teaches that making amends for wounds inflicted on other humans must precede any plea for reconciliation with God.  This is for the benefit of the injured party, to be sure, but also for the sake of the atoner, who has wounded himself by dishonoring his own heart’s connection with others.  There can be no ultimate healing, no all-encompassing wholeness and connection with God, if healing with oneself and ones neighbors is left out. 
       To many UUs, atonement is a heavy-sounding word, resonant of judgment and reproach.  When we hear it, we picture ministers moralizing about sinners in the hands of an angry god.  One cannot have atonement, of course, without having something to atone for; and the traditional word for that something is sin -- a word conveying such repellant associations with christian fundamentalism that it has become taboo in unitarian universalism. 
       This allergic reaction is an overreaction.  We can embrace atonement without dishonoring our values.  The word atonement entered our language on account of the struggle of a man named William Tyndale to translate the Bible into early modern English in the sixteenth century.  Not finding just the right word among the existing choices, he put “at” together with a now-archaic English word:  “onement” –meaning a state of being one.  At-onement.  Atonement.  So, to atone is to move into a state of being at one with others, with the universe, with God if that usage serves you.  It is a “Journey Toward Wholeness” – an idea with impeccable UU credentials. 
        As you can see, I read the story of the High Holy Days with admiring eyes.  My reading isn’t complete, though, unless it comes to terms with that peculiar clock that sets a deadline for atonement, starting to count down on New Year’s Day and hitting zero on Atonement Day ten days later.  It won’t surprise you that I don’t feel particularly bound to take that part of the story literally either.
         I don’t read the High Holy Days as a story of using acts of atonement to fend off divine imposition of capital punishment.  I read it as a cautionary tale about yet another critical word in religion:  mortality.  What would life mean to you if you only had ten days to live?  Unless we have had a near-death experience, we can scarcely imagine mortality being so real and immediate.  Without an experience of mortality, of finiteness, it is impossible to have an experience -- or even a glimpse -- of the infinite.  Without that glimpse, we cannot even imagine life as a connection of the finite and the infinite, as an experience of wholeness.  An experience that brings us to awe.
       And I wonder if atonement would look different too, from that ten-days-to-live perspective.  We all know many stories of regret, told by people who did not clean up old hurts and estrangements; people who only appreciated the value of atonement after  important people in their lives were dead and gone.  If you only had ten days to live, wouldn’t completing things with the important people in your life move to the top of your list? 
       In opening the gates between the finite and the infinite, this ten-day clock, this annual Jewish ritual of mortality, invites us to live every day as if there were only ten days to live -- to be in awe of the extraordinary confluence of a finite human life and an infinite god.  The mythic rituals of mortality re-enacted every year on these High Holy Days represent the essential truth about life – that it is fleeting, precious, hanging by a slender thread, and undervalued by most of us until we are in jeopardy of losing it.  We all may have only ten days to live.  The High Holy Days ask us to consider whether living life as if that were so might be transformative, awe-inspiring.
        On the eve of last year’s Ramadan and High Holy Days [CHECK], The President of our religious movement, Bill Sinkford, wrote a pastoral letter in which he suggested that as a faith community, UUs should celebrate an annual day of atonement.   Bill likes to make provocative suggestions, and this certainly was one of those. All of this praying and emoting and soul-baring in unison by Muslims and Jews is pretty much against our UU grain.  We pride ourselves on our individualism. 
       I wonder, though, whether our Abrahamic siblings are onto something with their communal rituals.  Reaching “at-onement,” coming to awe, looks to me like something we need to do in the company of fellow seekers.  And I wonder if even praying and atoning in unison might look different, from that ten-days-to-live perspective.  Rugged individualism sound romantic, but I don’t know anyone who can face death alone.  There is consolation in being closely connected to a loving community at such a difficult time.  There is consolation in knowing that what one is facing has been faced by humans for thousands of years.  Communal ritual, with its quality of constancy over time, gives us this. 
       And I don’t know anyone who can face life alone either.  In particular, to confess to having injured someone might call for some support – perhaps in the form of a holiday in which all are atoning at the same time.  With our human frailty that makes us tremble at being the one to go first, to risk looking foolish or weak, mightn’t we be in need of  that kind of support?
       The celebration of holy days is a way to make sacred whatever brings us closer to the holy.  We mark something as sacred by setting it aside.  For over a millennium now, billions of our Muslim brothers and sisters have set aside an entire month for practices and rituals of awe and atonement.  By making declarations of what is sacred, Muslims and Jews have affected the way their lives are lived in the expanses of time between these annual observances.  The annual cycles of Ramadan and the High Holy Days are emblematic of the cycles of a single day and an entire life.  Their message is a wonderfully mixed one -- that in matters of awe and atonement, it is always nearly too late and, at the same time, never quite yet too late.  Not in a single day, not in an entire lifetime, not even after thousands of years of toxic accumulation of unatoned wounds.
       These rituals, these communal practices, are worthy of a place of honor in our own tradition.  A place established by the telling of stories and fashioning of rituals of our own unique making.  Reading and writing the world as we see it.  We should do what Bill Sinkford suggests, not only for our own sake but also for the sake of a world bereft of atonement, a world in which awe and joy have been overwhelmed by grim pessimism.  A world in which, ironically, Jewish Isaacs and Muslim Ishmaels continue to slaughter each other by the thousands. 
       Shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley established an Islamic Studies task force.  This happened only because of the prophetic leadership of the smallest of the Union’s member seminaries – the Unitarian Universalist one, Starr King.  The only member seminary that had already been offering courses in Islamic religion. 
       There is an old Jewish saying – that a prophet is someone who knows what time it is.  Indeed, and who also knows that, no matter what time it is, it is usually later than we think.  Prophetic leadership comes from unlikely sources.  For recovery of an ethic of atonement, that leadership might have to come from a source as unlikely as a small religious movement like ours – skeptical by temperament, leery of tradition, and yet committed enough to spiritual wholeness to find its way back to awe and atonement.
       Awe and atonement.  mortality and community.  ritual and story.  We look over our shoulders to give thanks to our Abrahamic heritage.  And we ask, how can we bring awe and atonement into our own religious tradition?  Given what is at stake, how can we afford not to?  Is there anyone here today who is not carrying the weight of unatoned injuries, old wounds suffered or inflicted?  Who does not also carry unspoken hopes for reconciliation with someone, maybe even someone sitting right here in this sanctuary?  For the sake of such hopes, may we take our own small steps, right here in this church, to begin again in love. 
       Amen. 

 

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