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.
The Celtic Monk Musings 