Atonement?  I blogged last week about Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.  I noted how good it is to take time to reflect on our lives, what we have done well and what we have done poorly and, going forward, what we can do to improve.  We recognize that we are far from perfect or fully mature, and that we need time to consider this fact in the context of how we live our lives.
     Of course, unless we couch our repentance in the shadow of a larger fact in which we can find absolution, we are merely talking to ourselves.  Not that we shouldn't talk to ourselves, but that in matters of morality we spin our wheels if we think we can ponder or implement it apart from the fact of a meaningful universe.  As many a proponent of naturalism will admit, if this universe is all that is, it is not meaningful.  We need a transcendent point to do morality in a credible way.
     Today is also the first day of autumn, in the northern hemisphere, the autumnal equinox.  From this point, the earth, at least in those parts of the world in which seasons visibly occur, slowly sinks into its brumal slumber, letting go of its summer profusion and brilliance, moving into days of cold and darkness.  It is a time of transition and change, a time of passage, a liminal point in the planet's journey.
     Atonement matters.  Transition matters, too.  As we in the northern hemisphere continue to travel into the winter, we remind ourselves afresh of how moments of change encourage us to change as well, to open our eyes more fully to the totality of possibilities that life, and God bequeath us.
     Think.  Pray.  Seek.  If God is there, and he indisputably is, there is infinity to find.