Excellent reviews and fine actor James McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland) drew me out to see “Atonement” and I haven’t been able to stop thinking of it since.

Although it starts off as yet another British, class-crossed romance, it quickly becomes something else entirely. A love story, yes, but also a film which captures in one stunning extended shot the macabre, surreal beauty of war.

Most importantly, it stills and silences one through its exploration of how words once spoken can destroy a moment – or a life – in ways that can never be fully healed.

Watching the film reminded me of this story about the town gossip:

“The gossiping man was sorry for what he had done and went to the rabbi to ask him how to repair the damage. The rabbi asked, ‘Come back tomorrow with your pillow.’

The man returned to the rabbi’s house the next morning with the pillow. The rabbi stood on the porch and took out a large knife. He cut the pillow open, and feathers flew everywhere, carried away by the wind in all directions.

The rabbi told the man, “Now go collect each one of the feathers.’

“But I can’t!” the man said. “There are so many feathers and they have flown so far away, I will never find all of them.”

The rabbi said, ‘Though you truly want to correct the wrong you have done, like the feathers, your words have spread throughout the village. You cannot truly take back your words once someone has heard them.”

Today is Eid-ul-Adha, the day on which we reflect on the past year and renew hope for the next. The day, as Umm Farouq so beautifully says, “symbolizing a rebirth of the soul in worship, a chance to purify oneself, to be benevolent, and to have a second chance. God is all about second chances.“

While the door to second chances is always open with God, that’s not always the case with the people around us.

On Eid and as a writer, today I’m reflecting upon the power of words and the effects my words, spoken or written, may have had in the past year and could have in the next. It’s deeply uncomfortable to admit the need for atonement because it means taking responsibility for myself and actively trying to right the situation, even when I know that it can never be fully set right.

I hurt two dear friends with my angry words, and then lost a decade with one and thirteen years with the other. What seemed so self-righteously crucial to be said at that time diminished in importance as each year passed by, unforgiven. After awhile, it was embarrassment at the sheer span of years and my own silence therein that continued to seal my lips.

But recently, by God’s grace and through my embarrassed but sincere attempts at atonement, they have forgiven me. We are friends of a sort again, but a once-broken relationship is never the same as that in which trust is unbruised. I was lucky to get a second chance, but there is no way to get all that time back. I will always regret those lost years.

The power of the tongue and pen is great, and with it comes the responsibility of using it with intellect and wisdom. I can love, disagree with or even greatly dislike someone without resorting to a wounding word, because, once spoken or written, words don’t simply wash away no matter how hard I may try to atone.

We live in an era where Lee Atwater’s political strategies are commonly used but his deathbed recantation is forgotten. And now the Internet allows our words to spread fast as a plague, and caches them forever no matter how many times we may hit delete later.

So, today, I’m renewing my pledge – to myself, to you, to God – to write more thoughtful words, to find more compassion in speech and action for those I love and for those I don’t, and to wield my pen and tongue with more conscious benevolence.

The choice is ours to make.

A blessed Eid to all.