Cheon Seong Gyeong Ⅱ - 324. Indemnity through penance
4 Penance is the way to subjugate the body. This is why Jesus said, “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” (Matt. 10:39) This means we need to sever from what the body craves; we need to remove what the body covets. (039-053, 1971.01.09) 5 It is wise to seek the most demanding and austere religion in history. Religious life consists of the conscience occupying the body like a torturer, shouting, “You depraved body, you depraved body,” pummeling the fleshly desires into extinction, never to rise again. Our mind has to torture our body, t, (261-303, 1994.07.24) 6 Why is penance necessary in religion? Why do we need to carry the cross? Why do we need to serve and sacrifice for others? These tasks are loathsome to us, but they are how religions urge us to leave this fallen world. We have to deny everything completely. Blessing in the Unification Church comes from seeking complete self-denial. We have been denying everything from the level of the individual to the levels of the family, tribe, people, the world and even its ideology. The higher one’s level of self-denial, the more one’s value accumulates. Our value increases; this is the reason for self-abnegation. Hence, religions advocate renouncing the world and leaving one’s home. (140-117, 1986.02.08) 7 Religions walk the path of penance, rejecting bodily cravings. When you seek what your eye covets, your spiritual eye will dislike you. The spirit will completely oppose you. We have thought that human beings are naturally self-contradictory because we did not know about the human Fall. The origin of the contradiction within our conscious self is a grand discovery, greater than any other discovery in history. Nevertheless, an even more amazing thing is to understand how the Fall took place. If there is a path leading out of this confusion, we must follow that path, however arduous it may be. Fallen human beings have to follow this course of responsibility. (161-113, 1987.01.11) 8 It is restoration through indemnity, not indemnity through restoration. There cannot be indemnity through restoration. The concept that restoration could bring forth indemnity cannot exist, not even in the Garden of Eden. If it had, God would have acted as He pleased with Adam and Eve. The problem is that the Fall caused a change of lineage; the seed changed. We have to indemnify this. (427-087, 2003.12.04) |