Esan: On Karma and Mercy. Part 2

Karma builds on the principle of ‘What goes around comes around’. ‘Esan ko gbo’ogun’. This principle defies physical and spiritual manipulations. Though it is right that on justice lies the principle upon which this world was created, I believe in a power that alleviates, mitigates, leverages or even entirely removes the effect of a negative karma, esan or justice, as the case may be. This power is called mercy. Mercy allows one to do anything and get away with it. Mercy is the king of justice. But before you can utilise mercy rightly, you’ll need to acquire love and humility.

The principle of balancing, often called justice, is the foundation upon which the world was found. You find this littered in various scientific postulations. In Physics we say actions and reactions are always equal and opposite. This has translated into many numerical equations, upon which our scientific and technological and economical age has been built. For instance we can tell of the balancing of chemical reactions in Chemistry and balancing of financial statements in Accounting, to name a few. It is on this pedestal of balancing that all the earthly elements and the cosmos principles are built. Whatsoever you sow you shall reap.

Do not be overly jubilant if you are a righteous man, the genius of this numerical similitude is Mammon, no matter the level at which you excel in righteousness, right from when our first parents Mr & Mrs Adam broke the Pandora’s box and ate the apple, we have been incapacitated in the finite world under the conquest of its prince, oga Mammon. Mammon is an adept at cooking up reasons why we should be punished, and no amount of your good deeds is capable of transcending this just punishment. He is not called the Accuser of brethren for nothing. You cannot beat him at his game; he is a genius of the natural laws. As long as you are finite, you are under his shackles. Ogun gun.

Only an Infinite can translate an ideal into the natural. Infinity is needed before an atrocity can be leveraged, mitigated, minimised or completely obliterated, and before an Infinite can be ideally efficient, it has to thrive within a medium of nothingness. This infinity is Love. On that basis is the necessity of Christ, the God-man and Mary, the wo-man. Christ is this love; Mary is this humility that is nothingness. There is a lot I would like to say regarding these two but for the benefit of the topic I shall resist the temptation to digress.

Christ is the Infinite, Mary is the nothingness. Take it or leave it. To gain victory over a negative Karma, you need to bask in the arena of the infinity of love and the nothingness of matter without succumbing to despair, and faith is the capacity to do this. Faith in Christ enables a rectilinear transcendence without subjectivity under the karma effect of your past deeds, for He alone is the holy one. He alone has paid the price that has enabled Mammon’s capability over everything natural to be subjugated and this is what is called mercy. That is the mercy upon which the Abrahamic covenant between God and man was built and was made infinite by the blood of the Lamb.

As we have said, faith in Christ becomes the capacity of transcending a negative karma, but is it an anyhow faith in him? What is this faith? In what depth and breadth should be the capacity to conquer a billionth year old genius who is referred to as the prince of this world? What we are up against is no child’s play. ‘Omode o m’oogun o n pe l’efo’. This world is vast and its deadly ideologies are deep, the accuser is strong, ‘eni ti Sango ba t’oju e yo’da ni…’ Christ called the faith that is needed for this conquest a mustard seed that moves mountains by words, but few have seen mountains moved, much less by mere words.You need a personal encounter with Christ, but be not deceived by going faith solo, you need to belong to a body, His body, the church . A church tested by the universality of its mission and the depth from which its faith thrives… I rest here for a while.

But remember this: In order to escape from the just principle upon which this world was found, that is: esan, karma, justice et al, you need mercy, but to acquire mercy you’ll need the help of Love and humility, but you’ll need to provide a faith in the only conqueror of Mammon: the Christ, Jesus. And you risk calamity if you dare go solo, you need his body, the church to do this. And to what extent and depth is the faith of your church?

Esan: On Karma and Mercy. Part 1

There is a very justified reason to be concerned about the sanity of our world. For instance, the extent at which our media is littered with homosexuality and anti-life contents, either directly or subtly is a source of concern. Any enthusiast of the latest Hollywood blockbuster would share my sentiment. There seem to pervade within the western media a current culture passionate about enthroning gays as champions of love and civilisation. I wonder what future we are founding for our children.

A Yoruba proverb says ‘Bi omode ba subu a wo iwaju, bi agbalagba ba subu a wo eyin wo’. Simply put: ‘When a young person falls he looks ahead to the future, but when an elderly person falls he looks backward into history’. Before we descend into any adjudged superficial sentimentalism, I invite us into the position of adulthood and eldership and beckon us to look at history and the primordial causality of this momentous gay-ish experience that is descended upon us today and thus reposition our actions and attitudes as responsible adults, if at all we are passionate about bequeathing a sane posterity.

I take us back to the 2nd World War. It is very easy for us to remember the holocaust as a systemic murder of the Jews but very few remember or have learnt about the brutality meted on the gays by Hitler. And this was not the beginning; when you delve into history, you will find it littered with the inhumane atrocities meted out down the ages on these people by all the 3 Abrahamic religions, from which the present sentiments against homosexuality are derived. I don’t know if this was same before Abraham.

I argue that the present day gay prevalence is borne out of the past callous and nonchalant punishment meted on them in the past. Hate, even of one’s enemies changes nothing; it simply turns things round, returning one often back to square one. It is easy for the ‘sane’ majority to turn blinded sensibility on the often justly meted out punishment on the ‘insane’ few. He who kills by the sword dies by the sword. Even when we feel a natural satisfaction over a just sentence pronounced on whoever we perceive as wrong , the extent at which the punishment is callous and devoid of mercy and love is that which it serves as manure feeding both the justly and the unjustly punished. For instance those who argue for the murdering of homosexuals are simply turning back the tides of time. What if their children become one tomorrow?

History is littered with examples to buttress my point. I’ll start from home. Both the Oyo and Benin empires settle waverers, criminals and slaves by the coasts of the Atlantic. These people are often useful when human sacrifices are necessary for the oceanic gods or goddesses, whence comes the name ‘ije-ibu’, that is, food for the ocean. Lagos’ history is filled with stories of criminals dimmed unfit for the society, thus either sold as slaves or rendered as food for the ocean. Fast forward to our age, it seems the destiny of Nigeria as a whole is dependent on how Lagos performs, an area once considered fit for waverers; and Ijebus remain national champions of the economy, even today. Call no man unfortunate. This reminiscences how the British once treated the Australians; today, many Britons beg to resettle in that land.

I am indeed not arguing for the morality of the case considered as criminal. What I am pointing out lies deep in the heart of those who hold power and of the desire of the populace to either support callous punishment or to be nonchalant about them. When you refuse to punish in love, you risk a boomerang -sooner or later-from the hand of the offender.

Let’s move a bit abroad. For more than 300 years after Christ, the Christian sect was deemed unfit for the contemporary society and were either curtailed or slaughtered, but the whole western civilisation is today built on Christian principles. The protestant sect was a cult of heretics, deemed either to be thrown into prison until recantation or burnt at stake, but today Protestantism is booming massively. The Jews, right from after Christ were being ostracised and battered from right, left and centre, by Romans, Christians and Moslems alike, the culmination of which was the murdering of over 6 million Jews at the holocaust. Now Jews hold universal supremacy in science and economy.

That is why I don’t give up on my skin. For over 400 years there has been series of injustice and slavery meted out on the Black race and I know it’s only a question of time before Blacks find the right pedestal for universal supremacy. Majiyagbe. Esan ko gbo’oogun.

I hope my argument can be deciphered. History is on the side of the punished, even when they are wrong. Heartless and callous punishment has no synonymity with truth; it only serves to fertilize the strength and power of the punished who are helpless at defending themselves. The harm of the past is done, and while I am not against punishment, we must, individually and collectively introduce love and mercy more into our punishment or we run the risk of it boomeranging against us. ‘Oko t’aa so m’ope l’ope n so mo ni’. Judge not and you shall not be judged. That is some of the rationale behind some nations’ rejection of capital punishment.

In part 2 of this write up I shall deal with the capacity to circumscribe this esan and karma, to do something and get away with it by either liaising with a Man of great love or hiding under the canopy of people with great Faith. Forget what you think you are, God decides this capacity . God bless.