The joy of doing penance

 The joy of doing penance.

 There is such a disconnect between our thoughts, actions, sufferings and joy, that we feel lost and unable to find meaning and purpose in life, and for us, or at least for me, meaning and purpose is all I want from life -  well - speaking only on an emotional and intellectual level.

There are riches and pain on a spiritual level as well, but that is not my subject today, whilst I concede our emotional and spiritual wellbeing are intimately connected. And then there are the physical necessities, which I also do not write about today.

What I can see in life is that everything is connected and forms a unified whole, be it good or evil. There are good roots and evil roots, but each in its own way forms the fabric of life. There is nothing unconnected in life, as any good detective will tell you. Investigating a crime is just a process of connecting these dots or flow of thoughts and actions on the canvas of life.

Few things illustrate this better than the sequence of events leading to an accident. We might think that accidents happen in the Here and Now, but they are really just a sequence of events or errors from the There and Then, being manifested in the Here and Now. Accidents have their origins days, years or even centuries before its manifestation as observable events, and we mostly do not know why and where those accident were caused, as we mostly cannot connect the origins and manifestations in a rational way.

I find it quite strange, illogical and mysterious that people like atheists and agnostics, who are the main proponents of determinism, are the ones who refute the sequence of events and therefore the results of determinism as cause and effect. It is rather us who know that we suffer from the root of some evil, that should be determinists, as we fully believe in our Free Will which is the root of that sequence of events. Albeit that our Free Will is compromised, adulterated and poisoned by our Free Want (read 'greed') or some self inflicted wounds.

That is why we have Woke today. Making us feel good for the bad we have done without taking any responsibility or blame. That is impunity on wheels!

The cry of atheists, agnostics and existentialists is based irrationally on one or both of the following arguments:

• The first is that nothing means anything or nothing means something else. In fact to be more exact, there is no meaning in life, as this wondrous creation we see in the skies and around us just happened by chance, or more correctly, by a trillion random brainless chance events. This should have transformed Earth into the chaos of Genesis by a process known as entropy, but is said to have made it almost perfect by a process called disarray.
• The second is that people walking the face of this planet are waiting to be executed and slaughtered by a process of random selection based on the outcome of some lottery or directionless sequence of events. ‘The Case’ by Frans Kafka is a good book on this.

There is nothing in their vocabulary that even connects sin and evil to its outcomes, and it is for the reason of this fallacy that I have chosen the subject of this article as 'The joy of doing penance', as doing penance is at the root of this whole process.

When I refer to penance, I might be misunderstood, as penance have many meanings and applications, thus I elaborate somewhat:

I am writing about the action of taking the responsibility and punishment resulting from our actions, errors and iniquities in a physical, spiritual and emotional way for the sake of extracting the maximum understanding, meaning and strong therapeutical power embedded in this process. It has very little meaning in the spiritual realm as it does not buy our salvation, but it makes us a free people at peace with ourselves.

One other meaning for penance could be the confession of sins in the presence of a witness, which the Catholics practice, and which is known by them as the Sacrament of Penance. Although confession of sins in the presence of a witness is a powerful tool to enhance our spiritual lives, but it has been turned into a fake doctrine by the Catholics, as most of their doctrines are. They have concocted a lot of human interference and corruption into a Godly institution, tinged with a small dose of truth and Scripture embedded in it. Self redemption, purgatory and selling indulgences and holy offices in the church to fund their cathedrals and opulent lifestyles is not a Godly institution.

Secondly, do not confuse it with the uselessness of self redemption as practiced by Catholics who cut their flesh with swords or daggers in private and in public until the blood flows profusely as a gesture of self redemption. It has no rewards or salvation in Heaven and redeems no soul.

I might also have chosen as subject the corollary of suffering which is enjoying peace, quiet and happiness, but we have such a proclivity for the bad and evil, that the fruits of good seldom become our inheritance.