The Dharma, Karma and The Cross
Between birth and death stretches the quiet field of a human life.
What came before our birth remains hidden from us.
What lies beyond death is equally veiled.
But between these two mysteries we are given a journey.
Many traditions have tried to understand this journey.
Some speak of dharma, the duty and order into which we are born.
Some speak of karma, the consequences of what we do within that order.
Together they form the path each person must walk.
In another tradition, Jesus Christ spoke of the Cross.
“Pick up your cross and follow me.”
Perhaps these ideas are not so different.
The cross may simply be the life already placed upon our shoulders.
We did not choose our parents.
We did not choose the family or circumstances into which we were born.
We inherit an emotional world, a culture, a language, expectations and responsibilities.
From there the road continues:
education, work, relationships, marriage, children, duties, disappointments, hopes.
This is the shape of our cross.
Yet human beings often try to exchange the cross given to them for another of their own making.
We choose careers that are not truly ours.
We form relationships for reasons that do not belong to our deepest self.
We run away from responsibilities that seem too heavy.
For a time it feels like freedom.
But often it is only a detour.
Life has a patient wisdom.
Sooner or later it brings us back to the unfinished task we tried to escape.
And then we begin to understand something simple but profound.
The real question is not which cross we carry, but how we carry it.
Every tradition teaches this in its own language.
The path may be called dharma.
The consequences may be called karma.
Or the burden may be called the cross.
But the truth beneath them is the same.
We must live the life that has been entrusted to us.
For my own heart, the path I have chosen is the way of the Cross of Jesus Christ.
Yet the deeper lesson remains universal.
We did not choose our cross.
But we can choose the spirit with which we carry it.
In that spirit lies dignity.
In that spirit lies faithfulness.
And in that spirit lies the quiet possibility that even the heaviest burdens of life may become a path toward meaning and peace.
