Karma Vs Grace

From self-reliance to surrender.

Our current spiritual playground seems to be made up of two choices: The first is referred to as karma. This is a distinctly eastern philosophy based on the spiritual law of cause and effect.

To dive in a little deeper into karma, we learn that it is self-powered. Your life, its lessons and outcomes are up to you. You get what you deserve. If your deeds are good, good will come back to you, but if your deeds are bad, than bad will come back to you.

It is a closed system of justice. A sort of cosmic, spiritual wheel that keeps spinning until, they say, you step off. You step off when all of your debts are paid; when you’ve healed your wounds, closed the gaps and mended the inequities.

Then, and only then, does karma - or the wheel of samsara - end.

At its foundation, karma declares that we must save ourselves.

Grace, on the other hand, is unearned, undeserved love. It is God’s gift, freely given, not because we are good, but because HE is good. Our understanding of grace is that when we’ve had enough of trying, striving and fixing, there is an open door to another reality.

The heart of that reality is a relationship. Not with a law or a doctrine but a person. It says, you can’t save yourself, because you have already been saved. It is a surrender to something that wants nothing from you but YOU.

Where karma is the law of balance, grace is the law of love.

I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to heal myself.

Through diets, energy healing, vibration-shifting, trauma healing…there was always some new, shiny practice to embrace. If only I just did more. I believed there was a finish line, a bubble to burst, a very particular scratch to itch…

In this worldview, that I and so many ascribed to, there was always another layer to peel back, another past life to access, a new psychedelic to try, cold plunging, macrobiotic diets, smudging, spirit animals…and all under my own control!

How liberating!

How exhausting.

Karma told me…if I wasn’t better by now, than I simply hadn’t done enough. If I was suffering, maybe I had caused it. If I was sick, than I had to find the answer.

Karma was a mirror I could never clean.

Then somehow, Grace walked in my door a couple of years ago. Had I called it in? Or had it just opened? I’m not sure.

Grace didn’t ask me to be ready, better, deserving or even prepared. It found me face down, worn out and broken.

It said: You don’t have to earn this.

It’s been the relief of a lifetime.

The only time I feel restless, broken or exhausted now is when my old worldview creeps back in. After decades swimming in its waters, it’s a hard habit to break. I had built an entire cosmology around spiritual cause and effect.

And in a warped twist of irony, isn’t this precisely what happens at the moment of any trauma? A little inner voice whispers, you caused this. You deserve this. That IS the trauma, my friends.

And then we spend the next 40 years on a hamster wheel trying to right the wrong; trying to make up for our perceived sense of brokenness.

We might want to reframe what it means to be broken, then. Is brokenness what happens to us? Or is brokenness the tragic belief that we did something to deserve it all? That at our core, we are unlovable.

If there is even a small voice within you that believes this, than the karmic path is simply your attempt at righting your wrongs; an endless carrying of a weight you cannot bear.

There is a better way.

You were never meant to save yourself. In fact, it’s not possible.

Grace offers you something entirely different. A person. A relationship with Love itself. His message to you is: Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. - Matthew 11:28

He wants you as you are. Broken, messy, unhealed and lost. He’s not asking you to fix yourself within some self-powered, closed loop of justice.

That is the law of karma.

If trauma is the blocking of love through the belief that you somehow deserved what you experienced, than Grace is the renewal or the restoration of that love through relationship.

By its very nature, love is relational. This is precisely why ALL trauma involves the removal of love, on some level.

Every, single, time.

All healing, than, is love, reignited.

This cannot be done alone. Nor can it be done within a closed loop of justice, as in the law of karma.

It must be done through relationship.

It has taken me a long time to see this and experience this. Grace initially pulled me into its embrace and I could feel the rest and reprieve that it was offering me. I could feel the relief of a weight being removed from my shoulders.

But it has only been recently where I have felt, more and more, a kind of love that I had not previously experienced. This has come through repeated surrender. Where my neural pathways want to jump in, control, do something!!…He almost immediately steps in and says, Remember…I’ve got you now. You can rest. I love you.

And that is it. Right there; that is turning - inside out - my entire life.

Where karma keeps the score, grace gives freely.

Where karma binds, grace restores.

You have the choice as to which way you go.