Vengeance

As I typed that heading, I heard the phrase ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord’.  Yes, it does come from the Christian bible.  Once in the Old Testament as well as in the New Testament.  In both cases it is telling people that those who have wronged you, God will repay in his own way.

I used to have trouble with that repayment bit.  Mainly because, as I have heard many people say, those people who have done harm to others seem to go on to do very well in life and never receive any payback.  But then I got thinking, and came up with an answer.

Now what I am going to say will be considered very controversial.  But to me it makes a lot of sense.  I have always believed in reincarnation.  We are all born again to learn something about ourselves and help others.  I have mentioned before that I have been very fortunate.  I had great parents and have a wonderful husband.  We were never wealthy but never suffered desperate poverty.  My life has been fun, interesting and blessed.  I still don’t know what I did to deserve that, but I often tell people I must have been a Nun in my previous life, and a good one.

Now here is my thought.  If I have been repaid in this life for the goodness I did in a previous one, why shouldn’t someone who has been really selfish and mean to others in a previous life be made to experience the same thing against them in their next life?

I’ve met people whose lives have been sad, and lonely, and I wondered why.  Especially as my life has been so good.  Don’t tell me it is the luck of the drawer.  Everything happens for a reason.  If someone has to experience what they subjected others to in a previous life, then what better way of doing it than in their next life?  Going through certain experiences is generally the best way to learn what it feels like. 

This reminds me of the tale of the Blue eyes and Brown eyes experiment, which changed many children and people’s lives when they played the game.  But those people who learned from the experiment, never forgot it and made them better people.  For those of you who have never heard of this game, I will tell you what happened.  A teacher by the name of Jane Elliott, in 1968 was asked by her students why someone would shoot Martin Luther King Jnr.  She taught them about prejudice and discrimination by getting members the class to take turns in being in charge depending on whether they had blue or brown eyes.  The blue-eyed children were first, and they had a week to be boss.  Some of them were kind but some got really nasty and pushed the brown eyed children around.  The next week it was reversed.  What happened?  Some of the brown eyed children took out their vengeance on how they had been treated the week before, but many suddenly understood what it was like to be in the other person’s shoes. They were lucky. They discovered what it was like to be treated differently and as a second-class citizen at an early age, whereas many people live their whole lives being treated with cruelty.  Maybe it takes them a long time to realise what is happening and how to change things.

Being in a position where you are constantly used and abused, can make you very angry and want to take vengeance against those committing the crime against you.  And I am sure, like me you understand that.  But it doesn’t solve any problems. 

Several years ago, I listened to Julia Gilliard, Australia’s first female prime minister, being interviewed and talking about her life as a lawyer prior to entering politics.  She told of several times people had come into her office with huge piles of papers all about what someone had done to them.  They had been to several lawyers, but in each case, the lawyers had told them what the other person had done, was nothing illegal and sent the complainant away.  They were going from lawyer to lawyer in the hope that they could get back at what this person had done wrong to them.  Julia Gilliard said although she would tell these people to just get on with life and put what went wrong behind them, she knew these people would never let it go.  They would go to their grave still being upset about what this other person had done.

It's in cases like this where one hopes there is justice in the next life.  Just think, with all that energy these people were using to get back at those who had wronged them, could had been used to tell others how one can be hoodwinked by people and made the rest of their life more useful.   Maybe these people when reborn will go through something similar again, but this time hopefully will learn and use their time more wisely.

So maybe there is something in those phrases in the bible.  Maybe we should take notice and realise no matter what we do, we cannot repay bad behaviour as well as that person receiving the same experience in their next life.  But we can forgive and forget.  Life must go on, and spending your days worrying how you can repay someone for the bad things they did to you, will never make it right.  And as t is Christmas time.  The time for forgiveness and goodwill towards men, surely, instead of trying to payback someone for the harm they have done you, the answer is to get on with life.  You will find it a happier experience than filling your days with hate. 

Julie Finch-Scally ©