When karma meets grace

When karma meets grace

September 2016

By Punya Srivatsava

Even though we may be beset with dire challenges, grace comes to our aid by strengthening us, creating propitious circumstances and sending people and opportunities with which  to overcome it, says Punya Srivastava

In the summer of 2003, I contracted typhoid and was down and out for two straight months, missing a valuable chunk of school semester. During those two months, my parents had consulted a number of doctors, but nothing seemed to work. Already a weak child, I had grown painfully thin in those few weeks. Then someone guided my father to a seer in a distant corner of Delhi who assured me that I would be all right very soon. That night, I had a vision of a dense black figure hovering midair, while a frisson of joy passed through me. I jerked open my eyes and as suddenly as she had come, Goddess Kali faded away. Within a week, I was on my way to recuperation. Years later, an astrologer told my parents that I was destined to a childhood plagued with bouts of serious illnesses. How fortunate that this destiny was leavened by healings from divine sources.

ParamahansaYogananda wrote in one of the early chapters of his Autobiography of a Yogi, “How short is human memory for divine favours! No man lives who has not seen some of his prayers granted.”

His book is full of thrilling accounts of how grace entwined itself into both the small and daunting challenges of his life, and rescued and supported him.  Divine grace manifested in his life when his faith was tested by his elder brother. Sent penniless to Vrindavan from Agra, he was to survive the whole day in this new place without revealing his predicament to anyone; without asking for food, money or help, and return to his brother the same night. Brimming with an absolute faith in the Divine Mother, Mukunda (his birth name), along with a doubting friend, courageously set out to complete the task. No sooner had the duo boarded the train than Divine grace got things rolling – the young lads were taken to a hermitage by rank strangers for a sumptuous meal, followed by a chance encounter with a seeker who showed them around the holy land, and arranged for their return journey. The Divine Supreme had honoured this earnest devotee’s unshakeable faith by paving his every step with grace.

Countless number of people from all walks of life, have time and again encountered divine intervention in trying times. Undoubtedly, every one of us – exalted and ordinary alike – has to undergo our share of ups and downs. But mostly, the sailing gets smooth midway or even if it remains tough, the strength to endure it miraculously infuses us. Or, circumstances conducive to our situation are astonishingly conjured.

In fact, it would not be too much to say that when challenges or karma visit us, grace comes along too.

Swaddled by Grace

When the going gets tough

My college friend Ritika stood strong against excruciatingly trying circumstances at a very young age. Married to her high school sweetheart at the age of 25, she faced the biggest blow of her life when within one year of marriage, her husband succumbed to lung cancer. They both came to know about his cancer within three months of their marriage, and by then Ritika had conceived their baby. Things worsened thereafter, and a few months after their daughter’s birth, he passed away. “Nitin was the axis around which my life revolved. We were together since seventh standard and I had dreamt of a ‘forever’ with him. He was the only one who mattered to me,” says Ritika.

While he was still around, the couple would often try to find a reason behind their misery, going over their past actions and decisions and trying to locate the source of this sudden ordeal that life had dealt them. “Most nights, we would cry ourselves to sleep,” she says.

Usually, when faced with a sudden crisis, we agonise, “What did I do to deserve this deluge of suffering?”  If we understand that all that comes to us is the fruit of our past action (which includes our thoughts and words), perhaps we would begin to find meaning in our suffering. According to the sages, our destiny in each lifetime is the sum of our praarabdha karma, or the karma that has ripened and is meant to be voided in this lifetime. The point to remember is that these challenges come not to punish or destroy us, but to give us an opportunity to grow through them and therefore allow the karma to leave us. The challenges that have arisen out of our past actions, can be confronted and overcome through our present actions. These actions also include the fortitude with which we bear it, and our willingness to learn our lessons.

And the beauty of the whole design is that grace is our active and willing partner in this project. We are not alone. A benevolent Creator is rooting for us to succeed in overcoming our karma, and He sends us grace to support and strengthen us.

Karma is a law of compassionate teaching

One of the ways grace works is through the timing.  Generally speaking, most challenges come to us when we have the strength to endure it, or our circumstances are propitious for us to go through the situation.

“Every time I decide to give up on a challenging situation, a tiny hope emerges from nowhere and everything falls back into place as if nothing had ever gone wrong. And when I look back and see that I have triumphed, I feel blessed to been granted this mighty strength,” says Bhumika Thakkar, a Pune-based entrepreneur. Grace is the Universe’s way of telling us that all is not lost, that even if our destiny is dire, it is up to us to exert our free will and overcome it.

A picture of grace and beauty

Suparna Bannerji, a lecturer in a prestigious college at Delhi University, also displayed tremendous fortitude when fate dealt her a tough hand. “We might not be able to see the source of our current situation but no one gets what they don’t deserve,” she says. Her husband had to take a voluntary retirement from his job when the MNC he was working with instituted lay-offs. Their only child, a dyslexic primary school girl, was going through a terribly tough time in school. “I worried for all of us, and yet I never thought that I had been shortchanged by life,” she says.

Ritika too left no stone unturned in finding a way to bring their life back on track despite herself being in  need of care and support all this while. “We were not prepared for a baby so soon, but then decided to go along with life. In retrospect, it was a conscious decision, made with the hope that the baby would restore normalcy in our life, maybe entice life to turn in our favour. After Nitin passed away, I often wondered whether fate brought us together only so that this baby could make her way into this world,” she says.

What is grace?

“Grace is His way of showing He is. It is His style of connecting with you, answering your questions, protecting you, being by your side, watching out for you,” says Om Swami, a mystic, non-traditional monk and author of If Truth Be Told: A Monk’s Memoir. According to him, such grace, in the form of wisdom, may help you to walk the noble path; in the form of blessings, it may assist you to stay the course regardless of challenges.

My mother’s life is a testimony not just to the steely strength with which she has met her challenges, but also to the grace that blessings can earn you.  My father was in and out of jobs most of my growing up years. At that time, it was my petite and fragile-looking mother who, like a hero, took on the responsibility of running the household which included three kids, on herself. Even while being an exemplary mother, she completed her masters and B.Ed., and took on extra jobs to supplement her teacher’s salary, all the while discharging her duties towards her inlaws. Never once did she ask, “Why me?” or agonise over her situation. My mother tended to my dying grandfather, and took on the responsibility of my grandmother in her last days when she was bedridden for almost 18 months. And in return, life has showered her with blessings. My grandfather loved her dearly and on his deathbed, blessed her, saying, “Even though plagued with hundreds of problems, none will touch you. Everytime, help will appear out of nowhere.” True to his words, she would inexplicably find support and help as soon as any problem arose. And keeping faith in the power of these blessings, she resiliently carries on in life, doing good without any expectation. In the process, she has bloomed from a naïve small-town girl to a confident woman unfazed by any difficulty.

Among the ways Dr Rajan dealt with her situation was to consciously strive to learn its lessons. “I realised that I had unresolved anger issues. I practised a lot of forgiveness at that time, and worked on my anger issues. I would send lots of positive messages to myself. I dropped judgments and criticism from my life,” she says. Believing in the concept of grace instills humility within. It also keeps us from going into the vicious vortex of victimhood.

Karma and grace

Many of us have often wondered about the relation between karma and grace. If all I get is the fruit of my past karma, then what use is the blessings of God and elders? Explaining the relationship between the two, renowned Saint Thyagaraja expounded that the faith, reverence and devotion that a person carries within himself or herself are counted as positive karma and God’s grace is the fruition of that positive karma. But, as Om Swami observes, grace does not make God directly absolve one’s karma and karmic debts. “God is not going to stop the rain for you. Praying is your method of connecting with Him, and Grace is His method of connecting with you. If your faith is unshakeable, He will source an umbrella for you,” he adds.

This unshakeable faith in the Divine saved Suparna’s mother, the late Kalyani Chatterjee’s, life in 1972. Suparna’s mother underwent menopause abnormally early, at 39. However, after a few months she suddenly experienced a heavy discharge. Puzzled, she decided to see a gynecologist the next day. That same night, she dreamt of Sri Anandamayi Ma standing before her. When Mrs Chatterjee bowed down before her, Sri Ma pulled out a blood-covered object from her body and threw it aside. Being an ardent devotee of the enlightened guru, Mrs Chatterjee took the cue and rushed to Kolkata railway hospital from Dhanbad. There, one of her nieces who was a pathologist, conducted her biopsy and got a positive result. Unfazed, she again conducted the biopsy and this time the result was negative. However, not wanting to take any risk, the surgeon decided to remove the uterus. Her deep faith in Sri Ma guiding her decisions, she readily consented to the surgery. Her niece, who was present in the OT, immediately took the discarded uterus to the lab and tested all the 29 tumours present in it. None showed a positive report. “She was astonished to see that the cauliflower-shaped cancerous tumour, from which she had conducted the first biopsy, had completely vanished,” supplies Suparna.

Anahita shares a similar instance wherein the blessings of the Mother of Pondicherry, came to the aid of her brother. Around seven-eight years back, she got a call informing her about her brother’s sudden heart attack. Her brother, based in the Middle-East, was all alone at home at the time of the attack, while his wife and kids were out of the country. Since Anahita’s passport had expired, she couldn’t reach out to him urgently. “I was beside myself at not being near him at that time of crisis. But then I realised that this was doing him no good; I was sending him negative vibes in the form of worrying thoughts. I started generating positive thoughts and sent him my prayers,” she says. In the following days, Anahita, a devotee of The Mother, couriered him some photographs of the master to give him some strength. Incidentally, on the day of his angioplasty scheduled in Mumbai, the doctor testing his heart parameters was wearing a ring with the Mother’s symbol. “The Mother had once said that even if one person becomes her devotee or follower, she takes care of his or her entire family, and this is what happened in my case too. She was signalling her assurance and her blessings in our lives. The angioplasty went well with his family around him,” says Anahita. After some time following his surgery, her brother, who had once scoffed at her faith in the master, visited the Mother’s ashram in Pondicherry and became a devotee.

When grace worked its magic

Almost two-and-a-half years after her husband’s death, Ritika has found in her daughter the sole reason to carry on with life. “There are times when bitterness seeps in and threatens to engulf my peace of mind. But then, I am gratefully reminded of all the people that I am surrounded with who have always been supportive, and motivated me to get back to life, especially my parents and my brother and sister-in-law,” she says.

She decided to resume work as a guest lecturer in a private college in Delhi where she had been working before her marriage, but found herself shortchanged and uncomfortable. Grace stepped in miraculously, in the form of an accommodating director of the Mass Communication department of another college. “When I approached the director, there was only one full-time vacancy and the college was some 20 kms away from my home. My daughter was six months old at that time, but everything fell into place once I accepted the position,” she says. Though it was a challenge to manage a full-time job with such a small child, Ritika, never one to sit back and cry, carried on, with the help of supportive colleagues who would sometimes take turns to pick and drop her. “The director got transferred within two months of my joining. It was as if he had been sent by the Universe to make things easier for me at that harrowing time – he played his part and went away. The new person who took his place made every other faculty redundant save me. This came across as nothing less than Divine grace for me,” she says.

How can one invite grace in life?

“God wants us to evolve in life and move towards enlightenment. Grace manifests in the form of opportunities which help us move towards our goal. Even calamities are due to grace. We need the vision to acknowledge the presence of grace in every situation,” says Swami Nikhilananda, Head of Chinmaya Mission, New Delhi.

Dr Rajan’s attitude of gratitude serves as a perfect example of inviting grace in our lives.“When, after the first surgery, my cancer resurfaced, the oncologist and surgeon in Chennai told me that there was no guarantee of chemo and surgery working in my favour. That was the worst I had ever felt. But then, by the evening I found back my equilibrium and decided to let the Universe run the show,” she says. Within days, miracles manifested. “I would think of a person and the Universe would conspire to make them text or call me. Just a few days back I was thinking about a friend from the USA whom I last met in 2011, and lo! there was a call from her within a day,” she says.

Everyday afterwards, she would thank God for giving her one more day to cherish. “I also feel grateful for the fact that I could tick off things from my bucket list – teaching in a foreign land – before I was confined to a wheelchair,” she says optimistically. Recently, the Universe fulfilled another long-held desire of hers when a friend of her niece sent a team of five people to do a professional photo-shoot of hers! The miracles didn’t stop there. Everytime an acquaintance would visit a holy shrine, they would bring back prasad for her too. Her colleagues would hold regular prayer meetings for her. A friend from Bhutan, Rev MynakTulku, asked some nuns to recite the ‘medicine Budhha mantra’ for her.

“My siblings tease me about the number of friends I have, but in all honestly, even I didn’t realise that I had been gathering such a huge circle of friends and well-wishers until now,” she quips. But the biggest blessing, in her words, has been the coming together of her whole family – her parents and three siblings. “I feel as I have been ensconced in a cocoon of care and comfort. My family is taking care of everything – I just have to go through my treatment. One of my sisters observed that whatever I desired or needed, has been manifesting for me instantly,” she says. Dr Rajan, who is now on Tibetan medicine, further shares how she is dropping off all attachments from her life – a beautifully done up flat, a great set of friends and family. “I have made peace with the fact that life will go on even without me at its helm,” she says.

According to Swami Nikhilananda, by living a dutiful, compassionate and responsible life, we can ensure a steady supply of grace in life. “Grace manifests within in the form of peace and happiness and in the world outside in the form of opportunity to express our inborn potential. By the grace alone we come across right people at the right time,” he adds.

And that is how Suparna’s life took a turn for the better. After her husband’s voluntary retirement, she was trying her hand at many things, keen on finding a steady job. Destiny took her to Mysore to pursue a short-term course in education and there, in a chance encounter, she met a senior from her college days. It was Grace pulling the correct strings and sending the right people her way. Within months, through her college senior’s reference, she got the opportunity to be a guest lecturer at two of the most reputed colleges of Delhi University. But the story didn’t end here. Grace played a role in getting her daughter admitted to the very college where she had bagged a temporary position. “I feel that God created this whole set-up just so that my daughter could get admission here and start her life afresh – leaving behind the trauma of her school days – and pursue what she was meant to,” Suparna says.

Isn’t it true, then, that the Law of Karma is filled with latent grace waiting to be released?