A surprising title for an atheist blog about grief, but I find both concepts fascinating. I’ve wondered for years why we need them, why we created them in the first place.
I joined a friend at a Unitarian Universalist service this morning, and was thrilled that the speaker did his whole talk about the notion of salvation and sin. He was grounded in the Christian tradition, so of course there was a lot of references to god/spirit entities, but he discussed these concepts in very secular terms.
He used a definition of sin originated by theologian James Luther Adams: “sin the act of ignoring the demands of mutuality.” Salvation is the removal of sin, that is, the act of acknowledging mutuality which, I suppose, in the Buddhist tradition is simply practicing compassion.
We seem to complicate these ideas needlessly by filtering them through religion and philosophy.
I trip over these concepts a lot in regards to grieving, because so many people try to ease the pain of grief by implying that the dead person is better off, with the presumption that their soul has gone to heaven or “a better place”. The whole concept of religious salvation is most often understood as otherworldly — salvation is something that awaits you later, after you die. Or that earning salvation in this life grants you special privileges in the after-life.
But I think salvation is another word for enlightenment, which is itself another word for “being present, being compassionate, in the moment.” And this is important for grievers, because it is easy to get swamped in our emotions and forget that we are part of a greater whole. As long as we are alive, we are members of our society and our family and our planet’s biomass. We ignore the mutuality of our lives at our own peril. This is the “sin” that non-deists need to be concerned with.
Being “in the moment” does not mean wallowing in pity. There are times when emotional windstorms sweep you under and there is nothing you can do other than try to stay afloat. Those moments pass, though. Then we are left to drown in our sorrows or to confront our place in the world with whole-hearted compassion.
I don’t fear religious words like salvation and sin because their source is often a reflection of basic humanity. We can take these terms and use them as short cuts to deal with our own emotional world, without conceding to supernatural/paranormal entities.
How are you practicing sin? Where is the salvation in your grief?
