As I stiffly got out of the Jeep after the long drive back from up north, my wife came to help unload a few things and give me the news of the last four days – personal news, that is, not the type that I often seek that divides people into political factions. As someone with a big lawn and large garden, the most important news always concerns rainfall: this time, about a quarter of an inch, mixed with hail, but with no noticeable damage. Good. But there always seems to be one piece of news after a trip that is a shocker. One time, I came back to find that a man had killed his sister and brother-in-law at their deceased parent’s house and then burned the house to the ground less than two miles away from us. A policeman followed up almost immediately, and the killer, hidden behind the flames, had taken a few shots at the cop and then disappeared into the surrounding cornfields. That was two, or maybe three years ago, and he has not been found since.
This time was no different, although the surprising part of the news did not involve violence. Said the wife, “Do you know Michael ------? He’s been calling you. He said you knew him back at U Michigan.”
Yes, I remembered him from 35 years ago. He had lived in the same Co-ops as I had, and as had Mark ------, a man whom I had known who had gone berserk years later and driven a rental limousine into an 18 wheeler, both he and the limo going up in flames. I hoped that this call would not hand me the same sort of news.
It didn’t, but when I returned the call I found that Mike had been through some hard times concerning women. He had divorced twice and married thrice, each time with a woman who eventually developed schizophrenia. I had known the first at the Co-ops, and did not then consider her any more unusual than the rest of us at that place, a housing complex that definitely attracted its fair share of “unique” people. After marriage and a child she had run off with Mike’s best friend. In time, she simply had run off, period, to live out of homeless shelters, joining the army of ghost people who haunt our cities by the thousands.
The second wife did not last too long, but the third is still with him when she is not in the sanitarium. They love each other, he told me, but the disease is an awful one, often leaving Mike alone to provide for the family and care for their tween special-needs child.
After pondering these facts, I hesitated, and then had to ask: Why do you think that you attracted so many women with a similar illness? To which he replied penitently, “Karma.”
Americans and people in Western-culture nations in general have come to understand this word in a certain way: that personal misfortune is due to bad or selfish things that we did in a past life. We are not always certain that we have had past lives, however, but we are certain that we deserve the misfortune. It is a term from India that coincides with Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, but we have clad it on to our own historical tradition of sin, and the need to be punished for our misdeeds. In the former days of Christendom, that meant penance in this life and a form of purgation in the afterlife. Nowadays, punishment for so many simply means irredeemable fate and doom.
This is a shame, although not a punishable one. Certainly, we often have to pay for our sins in this life – getting caught in adultery, for instance, can end up making us pay a LOT – and, for all I know, we do have past lives that must be rectified. The latter is not a Christian belief in general, but more importantly, traditional Christianity does not believe in irredeemable karma concerning misfortune in this life. Instead, a Christian is told to embrace the “suck” as they say in the Army; that is, to look upon misfortune, even that which repeats itself and seems to make no sense, as an opportunity.
“Follow me and take up my cross,” Jesus exhorted his followers, by which he meant, redemption is often only found through suffering that is offered to God. This is one of the hardest concepts to believe in, in Christianity, although some parts of it are easier than others. For instance, if one continues to marry women with considerable mental problems, this might be one’s opportunity to suffer through helping these women and the children who are engendered. Another part, the biggest part, is a lot tougher and is sort of a karmic boomerang. In this, we are told to believe that suffering comes not from our personal actions, but from our collective actions – or what we might call the collective unconscious – started, mythically, by Adam and Eve. To redeem us from this collective sin – our collective karma – Christ came to physically suffer for us; and to redeem ourselves in our own personal way, we are told to suffer for humanity as Christ did. Thus, if we somehow were to have no suffering, we could not join Christ in saving humanity. On the other hand, if we have abundant suffering, we have abundant opportunities to save ourselves, often by offering ourselves up in saving others.
Suffering actually does have something to do with real karma. According to the Buddha, the only way to relieve ourselves of karmic burden is to deny all attachment to everything. This, we are told directly, will take away all our suffering, as suffering is caused by attachment. From both a Christian and Buddhist perspective, the material world is either nothing or, with Christians, “meh” compared with heavenly glory. It is this assessment of our reality that allows us to either remove all attachment to it, or offer ourselves up in suffering and service. In both cases, we are rejecting the primacy of the things and pleasures of this world; and it is only in this rejection that we can free ourselves from the pull of gravity and fly at last and for all eternity with the angels.
So, Mike, the many sufferings that you have somehow been chosen to endure might be obstacles to your happiness now, but are also major opportunities for you to help achieve a far greater happiness later. Not that I would want them or any other suffering, mind you, but no one can live a full life in this world without eventual suffering. It might be schadenfreude, but it is still true: the richest and most privileged among us often suffer the deepest forms of suffering, from the Kennedy-type tragedies to the dark sorrow of wealthy families broken apart by greed and resentment.
Our sufferings, then, must be seen not only as generic karmic consequences of being human, but also as tests offered that, when passed, allow us to further our spiritual careers. Otherwise they will simply be seen as a punishments - in which case, they might make us sadder or wiser, but not necessarily better. But we have been shown the better way: for who can argue with the one master who told us that attachments make us miserable, and with the other, that the giving of ourselves to others and to God above and beyond personal pleasure and profit brings us greater love, which brings us closer to God, who is the very definition of love? In the former we see the negative and in the latter, the positive induced by suffering, but in both there is meaning beyond brut suffering - beyond brut karma.
Good luck to us all then, and when that fails, may we seize the opportunities, the ones no one wants, that bring us the greatest fortune of all.
As I stiffly got out of the Jeep after the long drive back from up north, my wife came to help unload a few things and give me the news of the last four days – personal news, that is, not the type that I often seek that divides people into political factions. As someone with a big lawn and large garden, the most important news always concerns rainfall: this time, about a quarter of an inch, mixed with hail, but with no noticeable damage. Good. But there always seems to be one piece of news after a trip that is a shocker. One time, I came back to find that a man had killed his sister and brother-in-law at their deceased parent’s house and then burned the house to the ground less than two miles away from us. A policeman followed up almost immediately, and the killer, hidden behind the flames, had taken a few shots at the cop and then disappeared into the surrounding cornfields. That was two, or maybe three years ago, and he has not been found since.
This time was no different, although the surprising part of the news did not involve violence. Said the wife, “Do you know Michael ------? He’s been calling you. He said you knew him back at U Michigan.”
Yes, I remembered him from 35 years ago. He had lived in the same Co-ops as I had, and as had Mark ------, a man whom I had known who had gone berserk years later and driven a rental limousine into an 18 wheeler, both he and the limo going up in flames. I hoped that this call would not hand me the same sort of news.
It didn’t, but when I returned the call I found that Mike had been through some hard times concerning women. He had divorced twice and married thrice, each time with a woman who eventually developed schizophrenia. I had known the first at the Co-ops, and did not then consider her any more unusual than the rest of us at that place, a housing complex that definitely attracted its fair share of “unique” people. After marriage and a child she had run off with Mike’s best friend. In time, she simply had run off, period, to live out of homeless shelters, joining the army of ghost people who haunt our cities by the thousands.
The second wife did not last too long, but the third is still with him when she is not in the sanitarium. They love each other, he told me, but the disease is an awful one, often leaving Mike alone to provide for the family and care for their tween special-needs child.
After pondering these facts, I hesitated, and then had to ask: Why do you think that you attracted so many women with a similar illness? To which he replied penitently, “Karma.”
Americans and people in Western-culture nations in general have come to understand this word in a certain way: that personal misfortune is due to bad or selfish things that we did in a past life. We are not always certain that we have had past lives, however, but we are certain that we deserve the misfortune. It is a term from India that coincides with Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, but we have clad it on to our own historical tradition of sin, and the need to be punished for our misdeeds. In the former days of Christendom, that meant penance in this life and a form of purgation in the afterlife. Nowadays, punishment for so many simply means irredeemable fate and doom.
This is a shame, although not a punishable one. Certainly, we often have to pay for our sins in this life – getting caught in adultery, for instance, can end up making us pay a LOT – and, for all I know, we do have past lives that must be rectified. The latter is not a Christian belief in general, but more importantly, traditional Christianity does not believe in irredeemable karma concerning misfortune in this life. Instead, a Christian is told to embrace the “suck” as they say in the Army; that is, to look upon misfortune, even that which repeats itself and seems to make no sense, as an opportunity.
“Follow me and take up my cross,” Jesus exhorted his followers, by which he meant, redemption is often only found through suffering that is offered to God. This is one of the hardest concepts to believe in, in Christianity, although some parts of it are easier than others. For instance, if one continues to marry women with considerable mental problems, this might be one’s opportunity to suffer through helping these women and the children who are engendered. Another part, the biggest part, is a lot tougher and is sort of a karmic boomerang. In this, we are told to believe that suffering comes not from our personal actions, but from our collective actions – or what we might call the collective unconscious – started, mythically, by Adam and Eve. To redeem us from this collective sin – our collective karma – Christ came to physically suffer for us; and to redeem ourselves in our own personal way, we are told to suffer for humanity as Christ did. Thus, if we somehow were to have no suffering, we could not join Christ in saving humanity. On the other hand, if we have abundant suffering, we have abundant opportunities to save ourselves, often by offering ourselves up in saving others.
Suffering actually does have something to do with real karma. According to the Buddha, the only way to relieve ourselves of karmic burden is to deny all attachment to everything. This, we are told directly, will take away all our suffering, as suffering is caused by attachment. From both a Christian and Buddhist perspective, the material world is either nothing or, with Christians, “meh” compared with heavenly glory. It is this assessment of our reality that allows us to either remove all attachment to it, or offer ourselves up in suffering and service. In both cases, we are rejecting the primacy of the things and pleasures of this world; and it is only in this rejection that we can free ourselves from the pull of gravity and fly at last and for all eternity with the angels.
So, Mike, the many sufferings that you have somehow been chosen to endure might be obstacles to your happiness now, but are also major opportunities for you to help achieve a far greater happiness later. Not that I would want them or any other suffering, mind you, but no one can live a full life in this world without eventual suffering. It might be schadenfreude, but it is still true: the richest and most privileged among us often suffer the deepest forms of suffering, from the Kennedy-type tragedies to the dark sorrow of wealthy families broken apart by greed and resentment.
Our sufferings, then, must be seen not only as generic karmic consequences of being human, but also as tests offered that, when passed, allow us to further our spiritual careers. Otherwise they will simply be seen as a punishments - in which case, they might make us sadder or wiser, but not necessarily better. But we have been shown the better way: for who can argue with the one master who told us that attachments make us miserable, and with the other, that the giving of ourselves to others and to God above and beyond personal pleasure and profit brings us greater love, which brings us closer to God, who is the very definition of love? In the former we see the negative and in the latter, the positive induced by suffering, but in both there is meaning beyond brut suffering - beyond brut karma.
Good luck to us all then, and when that fails, may we seize the opportunities, the ones no one wants, that bring us the greatest fortune of all.
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