This week, on the day before Yom Kipper, Reverend San-Aset was asked to lead a service at the First Universalist Church of Orange. Her homily is as follows:
There is something about Yom Kippur that has always drawn me in. Perhaps it is the invitation to stop for a moment and look honestly at our lives—not only at what we have done, but at what we have left undone, the words we wish we had spoken differently, the people we may have hurt, and the places where we have lost our way without quite realizing it. There is something deeply human about setting aside a day for this kind of reflection, because most of us carry things we have not made peace with, whether they are things we have done, things that have been done to us, or simply the knowledge that we have not always been the people we hoped we would be.
I was raised Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, and studied ancient mythologies and religions, I have spent a great deal of time looking at the ways different traditions understand our relationship with one another, with the world around us, and with the Divine. These traditions do not tell the same story, and I would not want to make them into one. But again and again I have found myself returning to the same questions: What does it mean to live a good life? What do we do when we have caused harm? And when something in our lives has been broken or brought out of balance, how do we make it right?
This last question brings me to ancient Egypt, and to Maʽat, a way of understanding the world that is very important to me. Maʽat is both a goddess and a concept, often translated as truth, justice, order, or balance, but it is much larger than any one of those words Maʽat is woven into the structure of the cosmos itself. Tides and rivers rise and fall, the sun travels across the heavens, the stars return to their places, and the seasons follow their eternal rhythms. The Egyptians understood that human beings were not standing outside of this greater order, we are living within it, and the way we behave towards one another is part of the same order that governs the movement of the heavens and the earth.
To live according to Maʽat was and is more than following a set of rules. It is an attempt to live in accordance with the truth of the world, to act with justice and honesty, to care for our community, and to understand that cruelty, dishonesty, and injustice disturbs the greater balance of things.
A significant image left to us from ancient Egypt is the weighing of the heart. After death, the heart of the deceased was placed upon one side of a scale, with the feather of Maʽat upon the other. The heart represented the life that had been lived, and the feather represented the truth against which that life was measured.
I have found something quite moving in that image because it is not difficult to imagine standing before such a scale and wondering what our own hearts might reveal. Not whether we had been perfect, but whether we had lived with truth, whether we had treated others with justice, and whether our lives had contributed to the balance of the world….or worked against it.
While before that scale, a deceased soul made 42 Negative Confessions declaring that they had not committed various acts of violence, dishonesty, injustice, or wrongdoing. These can be understood as a statement of one’s relationship with Maʽat, an affirmation that one’s life has been lived within sacred order rather than in opposition to it.
Thousands of years later, we find this same sort of examination of our lives during Yom Kippur. On this day, the Al Khet is recited, this is confession of sins in which the community speaks together. We do not stand apart from the people around us and point toward those who have failed; we say, together, that we have failed:
V’al kulam Eloah s’lichot, s’lach lanu, m’chal lanu, kaper lanu.
And for all these, O God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement!
The Hebrew word Khet is interpreted as missing the mark – we set out intending to do one thing and sometimes find ourselves doing another. We may want to be kind and instead speak harshly, we want to listen and instead become defensive, or we believe that we understand another person’s experience when we have not really taken the time to hear them.
Yom Kippur gives us a place to see these things more clearly. It also introduces the idea of teshuvah, which is translated as repentance, but also includes the idea of returning. The recognition of what we have done is joined with the responsibility to turn back and change what can be changed.
This is where I think the meaning of atonement begins to deepen. Atonement is often understood as payment or punishment, but there is another way to understand it, one that seems to me to resonate with both the ancient Egyptian understanding of Maʽat and the Jewish understanding of teshuvah.
Perhaps the deeper work of atonement is the restoration of what has fallen out of balance: the healing of relationship with one another, with our community, with the Earth, with ourselves, and with the Divine Presence that holds all things within a larger harmony.
Christianity approaches this through the language of forgiveness, mercy, reconciliation, and grace. In the teachings of Jesus, forgiveness reaches into the heart of how human beings are asked to live with one another. It does not mean that harm did not occur, nor does it remove the need for accountability. Sometimes reconciliation is possible, and sometimes it is not. There are wounds that need changed behavior, boundaries, or simply the passage of time before anything can be restored.
Perhaps the hardest forgiveness is the forgiveness we must at times offer ourselves. I think most of us know things about ourselves that we would rather other people did not know. We remember words we wish we had not spoken, choices we wish we could make again, moments when we failed someone we loved. Yet if the ancient Egyptians understood the heart as the record of a life, maybe they also understood something we sometimes forget: a life is not measured by just a single moment.
The purpose of honest reflection is not to discover that we are unworthy, but to understand where we have fallen short and what responsibility comes with that knowledge. There is a difference between accountability and condemnation. Accountability asks something of us while still leaving room for change. We can acknowledge what we have done without allowing a single failure to become the whole measure of who we are.
Atonement doesn’t have to happen in a synagogue or church. Sometimes it happens in a conversation we have been avoiding, in the decision to tell the truth, in the willingness to listen without defending ourselves, or simply in recognizing that something in our lives needs to change. We cannot undo everything that has happened, and some things cannot be repaired in the way we wish they could be. But we can choose what we learn from what has happened and what we will do differently because of it.
Perhaps that is part of what atonement asks of us—not that we erase the past, but that we allow what we have learned from it to shape the way we live from this moment forward.
Excerpt from the Great Hymn to the Aten (circa 1400 BCE) ~ Akhenaten
“How manifold are your works, O unique Source, before whom there is
no other! You created the earth according to your desire, you alone—
with people, cattle, and all wild beasts, everything on earth that
walks on feet, and everything in the sky that flies with wings.
You set every person in their place, and you supply their needs.
Everyone has their food, and their lifetime is already reckoned.
The tongues of humanity are separate in speech, and their characters
are diverse, for you have distinguished the peoples of the earth.
You bring forth the waters to preserve the people alive. For you have
made them for yourself, O Lord of them all, who shines for them.
You bring forth the distant sky in order to rise in it, and to see
all that you have made.
When you rise, they live; when you set, they rest. You yourself are
a lifetime, and we live through you. Eyes see your beauty until you
set, but when you go down in the west, all work is laid aside.
For you give breath to animate all that you have made, and your rays sustain the world.
The birds fly from their nests, their wings extended in praise of your spirit.
The fish leap from the deep to meet your light.
You are the mother and the father of all that you have made.
When you rise, the world wakes to sing; when you rest, the universe sleeps in your embrace.”
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