text: Joan - Thank you so very much.  I read Richard Rohr's daily emails and over the last six months, he was so brilliantly presented this.  For me (and I was a RC seminarian for 10 yrs with a Master's in Theology), the "atonement" theory just never worked.  At best, I saw it as God not getting over  "Adam and Eve" and at worse, child abuse.  I remember one day when I was in third theology, before a class, one of my classmates look at the cross on the wall and said to me.  "If he did that to his son, imagine what he has in store for us."  I actually wanted to throw up b/c I had been thinking the same thing for a long, long time.  
  
  As you so well state, the Christ event is Plan A - there is no Plan B.  I truly believe as St. Paul so eloquently states, "nothing can separate us from the love of God."  Nothing, not our foolishness, arrogance,or sin.  Nothing.  My mother loved me dearly fully knowing my faults and failings.  I refuse to believe that God the Father loves me any less than her.