Karma

This is part of a series of blog entries...I’m just feeling as if I only have the time and attention for short posts right now, but read all of the posts so you can get what I mean. Of course, I’ll need to start from a beginning...now which beginning will it be???

Ok, I’ve got one.... A while ago...a year, maybe longer...I was a sort of a "guest teacher" in a class for youth of the congregation of which my wife and I are a part. Anyway, the youth were doing a series on other religions and I was taking a part of the class time to talk about comparative religion (which may show up as a blog entry at some point). Since I was also talking about Asian religions, one of the questions I got from one of the youth was about karma...a question something like "so what about karma"?

Now, before I go offending anyone’s sensibilities, I know the following description is simplifying the matter somewhat. Although I might easily offend people of several different faiths with what I’m about to say, I certainly mean no offense. Hopefully you won’t find it offensive or over-simplified to the point of error, but I’m sure you’ll let me know if you do :). So, anyway, on with the show....

Karma, by itself is really a pretty simple concept...I think that most westerners misunderstand it because they often closely association it with reincarnation and dismiss it without consideration. Of course it doesn’t help that people often talk about it in terms of destiny or fate – Americans are especially fond of freedom so they’re (usually) not inclined to accept something that runs counter to that – but I think the worst of all is when it’s talked about in terms of pay-back.

Karma is not pay-back. It is, however, similar to a very Christian concept that the apostle Paul talked about in his letter to the church at Rome. Paul said…well, ok, I’ll give you the typical translation...the wages of sin are death. "The wages of sin are death"...as translations go, that’s about as bad as they come. You see, you don’t "earn" death and Paul most certainly didn’t say that you do. For the philologists in the audience, the Greek is teleos, so that would be like translating a phrase as "the wages of an acorn is an oak tree," which makes no sense, at least not to anyone who knows an oak tree or an acorn.

By now you probably see where this is leading…karma is the concept that the oak trees we’ll see in the future come from the acorns we’re planting today…a concept which also holds true if it’s wild oats you’ll be sowing rather than acorns.

As anyone who’s sown a few wild oats can tell you…you’re better off sticking to acorns.