"KARMA IS NOT AN EQUATION"

That title has been plagiarized from the October 8^th edition of the Toronto Star. It headed a column on ethics written by a friend and colleague of mine, Ken Gallinger. Most likely, the headline had been written by someone else, as is the normal practice in the newspaper business.

Be that as it may, my friend’s advice was not to equate good behaviour with

blessings while also believing that bad behavior is inevitably punished. “It’s

obviously not true,” he wrote, “that people who do good always get good. But it

is true that people who are generous, kind, faithful in their relationships –

people who love, keep promises, work hard – tend to be happier, more peaceful

and more hopeful.

“They have friendships that last. They deal with adversity with more equanimity.

 They laugh in the daylight and sleep soundly at night. They do, overall, have more
 fulfilling lives ... even when the math doesn’t work out as precisely as we might
 wish.”

Was my friend being overly optimistic? Certainly more so than I would have been. Or was he contradicting himself?
His comments reminded of another article by a well-known Canadian humourist,

Scott Feschuk, in a recent issue of Maclean’s Magazine. He made the sly comment
that “these are prosperous times for pessimists.” Feschuk was writing about the
current global economic malaise and the threat of a double dip recession. For most
people this isn’t funny at all.

By sheer coincidence on this same day, the Nobel prize for economics was awarded to two Americans, Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims. Working separately in the 1970s and 1980s, they developed methods for answering questions such as how economic growth and inflation are affected by a temporary mandated increase in the interest rate or a tax cut. By even greater coincidence, all this happened on our Canadian Thanksgiving Day.

Was it coincidence, or what our scriptures keep reminding us: a touch of God’s

almighty hand in the history of our times?

That is a metaphorical expression, a poetic and theological way of saying what the Bible takes for granted. God's almighty hand - aka Providence - is in all human affairs. Theologians struggle to find new ways of describing the same religious experience in terms of an expanded view of human consciousness without a literalist approach to biblical metaphors of that Transcendent Reality we call God. 

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