Atonement or At-one-ment?

Today many Catholic churches offer adoration of the Cross. It's a moving liturgy whereby one is invited to walk up the aisle, come face to face with the cross, and make some gesture of adoration (kiss, bow, kneel, etc). For me, this gesture helps me to see how "off" I have been and how grateful I am and should be for the Death of Jesus, our Lord. However, I've been pondering the meaning of the cross further of late. I wonder if in some ways, we miss another meaning of the cross.

I remember from my graduates studies being struck by the notion that Atonement theology was more a product of medieval culture, and while useful, it is certainly not the only, nor I believe, the best approach to seeing the cross. Atonement theology, touted by St. Anselm, basically emphases a theological paradigm whereby God, being all good had ordered the world in goodness and perfection. Man, due to the Fall, threw off the divine compass, as it were, and created a cosmological skew, an off balance, that needed to be fixed. God then sent Christ to fulfill the great reckoning, to realign the cosmos. However, in order to do this, there needed to be a sacrifice, the Sacrifice, which would take all the bad that Man had done and allowed to happen (sins) and negate it through an Act of perfect surrender and love. Thus the terminologies, "Christ died for our sins", "He carried our sins to the Cross", "the Sacrifice of the Cross" were born. St. Anselm, like all theologians, built a Christology that speaks much more about his own historical time and place. A commonly held worldview of the medieval period was that social order followed a divinely inspired outline which was headed by the King and was "tailed" by the peasants. Those who lorded over the peasants were dukes and land owners. If a peasant did something against his or her land owner, then reparations were needed to rectify the situation. That is, somehow a skew in world happened and the cosmology was thrown off. In order to realign the cosmology, something must be done. This world paradigm was etched in every fabric of the social life, from the micro to the macro. For St. Anselm, then, it made sense to approach the Cross in the same way. God was the landlord, so to speak, and Man, the peasant. Since the peasant was in no way able to repair the damage he had caused, God had to send his Son to do the job.

Is this a bad theology? I don't think so, and it can be helpful if it takes a person (or better yet, an institution) to realize his or her own ego issues and admit failings. But I don't think that happens so much. In my view, emphasizing Christ's horrible death on the cross from the standpoint of worship tempts us to thank Jesus, keep thanking him and thanking him, but not actually living as he did that put him up there. If God had to send himself down to earth to fix the mess, then that leaves little for real empowerment for conversion but rather enables us to continue living unexamined lives as long as we know that his Sacrifice covers(ed) us. To me, atonement theology is too mired in redemptive violence and too enmeshed into a patriarchal mindset.

What if the cross is seen as metaphor for a new social order on the macro level and an invitation to deeper connection to one's real self on the micro level. Expounding on the latter, I am convinced that most human misery is caused by people (me too) who do not realize that we've become so dependent on our own image of ourselves that we'll fight to defend any perceived slight against us. We live our lives almost entirely in a false image that we've constructed for ourselves, often tied to our occupation or material success or our different roles. The false self is easily offended and is always protective and defensive. The true self, on the other hand, is connected to the present moment without ties to future success or past failures. It is "at one" with God because our deepest self is God as we are material manifestations of Christ's Body in the universe. Some theologians reinterpret "atonement" for "at-one-ment" whereby we risk the pain of having our false self burned off to find a core self that is at one with God. By burning off our false image, I mean that when I am offended by what someone said or did, I must look first at myself to see what is below the offense. Pausing and being mindful before reacting helps me to discern if truly an injustice was committed that merits a response or did the "offense" touch a nerve because it injured my pride or ego. Sometimes I may need to react but it will come from a place of love and my ego is not tied to the outcome of a confrontation. Can the cross be seen as the Invitation to realize that my false self needs to constantly die because it's just not life giving to me or others? When I am acting at one with my false self, I am "killing" others and myself. When I am in one with Being, I am operating from my real self which means that I had to suffer real pain to get there (suffering can lead to wholeness). On the macro level, we must admit that systems and institutions are necessarily and always conservative because they were constructed to provide an order for which to operate, think, and affect the world. This fact is not bad in itself, but most systems or institutions have huge collective ego problems and can't handle challenges to their authority or power without a good fight. Unfortunately, some of the systems in which we live are so expansive and pervasive that we don't know the harm they cause much less how we contribute to the harm. But it was precisely these kinds the systems or institutions that put Christ on the cross to begin with. He always challenged the power structures, not because structures are bad, but because they weren't honest in their ultimate goals: to maintain power for a few and keep the poor (physical and spiritual) dependent and "less-than." Our systems largely do the same thing today and we don't even know it most of the time. For example, while capitalism begets creativity and efficiency, it also demands that there be an economical order with a majority of poor at the bottom supporting the top. The theory is that if the top gets richer, it should trickle down and pull the bottom up too. But this doesn't happen very often because those at the top (myself included) are tied to our false images of ourselves and we make decisions that keep the gap widening. Another example is how the Church leadership often falls to the temptation to serve the interests of itself by keeping the "poor" dependent on them rather than offering empowerment whose goal is to foster mature and adult spirituality. Mature, adult spirituality privileges a formed conscious grounded in practical lived experiences as a way to encounter God rather than a top-down approach. In earnest, both are needed but the institution of the Church still seems to be too concerned with it's own power. For me the sexual abuse crisis is the greatest blessing that has happened in the American Church, at least, because it has served to some extent as a leveler between the powerful and the laity. Denial has become less of an option, it seems.

The Cross, for me, is a symbol of what happens when an individual or an institution lives out of their own image and ego. It hurts others and ultimately crucifies the owner of the image. At the same time, the Cross is an invitation to die to oneself, to one's ego needs, and admit the plank in our own eye. At an institutional level, it is a constant reminder and check point to evaluate whether or not it is serving life or death.