Learning Atonement Anew...

  

                                

                                                                                                   

                                                 AT ONE MENT

     Just after breakfast a Mourning Dove perched on my window

ledge three stories above her earthly comfort zone.

    Upon seeing her there almost instantly ‘atonement’ came to mind.

Not the bloody kind theologians and scholars have steadily tried

to convince us of over the centuries…

    Instead, the at-one-ment of sensing her not afraid of me,

now only a foot away with a camera in hand that whirrs and buzzes. 

Nor me afraid of her, flapping and fluttering on my ten-inch wide

window ledge calling to her children or her mate in the familiar

“hoo – hoo - hoo.” Rather, we’re here together face to face without fear.

    She and I are one it seems; her purpose and mine the same.

Both of us learning to be and to become who God made us to be

before we were assigned a genus and species... like Zenaida macroura

or homo sapiens. And before we had names like Mourning Dove and

Kathleen, here now discovering our oneness with the Divine Being

from whom we came; and with each other.

    This is the Truth of atonement which Christ embodied, enabled and revealed; and which I’ve learned afresh in this sacred space of Gethsemani where

it seems all God’s creatures experience atonement.

Life wholly in Spiritus Sanctus.