[Karma]
Dear Donagh,
I keep hearing the word karma a lot lately. Does it mean bad luck? Is it a superstition? I never heard the word when I was growing up, but my son often comes out with it. He hasn’t rejected his religion, I think. At least I never heard him talking against it. Could he be replacing it with something else, some pagan religion? It worries me. it’s impossible to talk to him about religion. He clams up. Could you throw some light on it for me. Thanks for your website. I read it regularly. Joan
Dear Joan,
‘Karma’ is an idea that is normal in Hinduism, Buddhism and some other oriental religions. At its simplest, the scholars tells us, it means the law of cause and effect – but with different shades of meaning in different religions. The general meaning is that good actions have good effects, bad actions have bad effects. This is just common sense, of course, but there have been thousands of years during which people have introduced great subtlety. What has come across to Christians is just the basic meaning.
For Christians the traditional word to cover this area is the word ‘sin’. Isn't this enough, you might ask? Why bring foreign ideas into it?
We were brought up to think of sin in juridical terms. To sin was to break God's law - to break one of the Ten Commandments. Sin, the penny Catechism told us, was “any wilful thought, word, deed or omission contrary to the law of God.” This juridical way of thinking about sin helped to keep many people stuck in a childish phase of moral development. For very young children something is right because their parents approve of it, and wrong because their parents disapprove. Amplify it a little and approval becomes reward, disapproval punishment. Obviously this could not be a formula for the rest of their lives. As they begin to grow towards maturity they begin to see the reasons why some actions are wrong in themselves, and some actions are right, no matter who might approve or disapprove. But in the religious domain, we tended to get stuck in immaturity. The punishment for mortal sin (“hell for all eternity”) was so extreme that it left no room for any other consideration. It violently shifted the emphasis right out of this world and into eternity. The eternal consequences of sin were so extreme that there was less energy left to see its present-life consequences. An essential aspect of morality was missing, and this, I believe, is why karma is now making its appearance.
When a lifelong cigarette-smoker is suffering from lung cancer or heart disease, we don’t say – unless we are very strange people indeed - that God made a decision to punish him. Being of normal moral development, we say he is suffering the inevitable consequences of smoking. We are talking about the law of cause and effect: ‘karma’ for short – since the Catechism gave us no credible alternative.
Still, there was the awareness that sinful ways have bad consequences for us not only in the next life, but also in this life. This was the need for some idea like karma to make its appearance. But what did we call it? We called it “the temporal punishment due to sin.” This ‘temporal punishment’ could be worked off in this life by good deeds; or it could wait for a settling of accounts in Purgatory. Purgatory was conceived as a place of punishment (even though the word itself means ‘purification’). We were unable to think in any other way than judicially.
The effects of sin are real enough, however we describe them. Sin destroys our capacities: it brutalises our sensibility, pollutes the mind, weakens the will…. This is not even to begin to estimate the damage it does to others. Through sin we become incapable of God and of proper human living. If the word 'karma' helps to call our attention to the present evil of sin, it should be welcomed, as many other foreign concepts were accepted into the Christian faith over the centuries and redefined as necessary. If ‘karma’ sounds foreign, how about ousia, hypostasis, logos, physis – all of which were used in attempts to understand something about the Trinity? And there are swarms of other words introduced from Plato and Aristotle and other non-Christian sources. Karma may soon be seen as a naturalised immigrant.
Here are a few words that may help you to make peace with karma. In one of the forms of the Penitential Rite at the beginning of Mass, the text says, “You [God] heal the wounds of sin and division.” This is a recognition that we wound ourselves and others through sinful living; we don’t just add to our charge sheet. When Jesus saw a paralysed man he said to him, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven” (Mt 9:2). This says that sin paralyses us, just as really and visibly as smoking damages our physical health.
Finally, Joan, here are a few lines from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (not the penny Catechism for children, but a hefty volume published in 1992 for people seeking an adult understanding of the faith). “Punishment… must not be conceived as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin" (pp 331f).
I hope this may be of some help to you, Joan.
Donagh