To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

Karma and/or Grace / 79
this ought to be happily met, for aºiction is a welcomed
opportunity to clear the slate and set to right ancient
wrongs. Equally significant, all that we have longed to do
and to be, all the silent, unrecognized yearnings to be a light
in the darkness of our environs, are faithfully entered on the
imperishable records of eternity, to return in due season as
blessings, a gift of grace for ourselves and others, flowing
forth in strict harmony with karmic law.
We can view the dogma of Jesus’ ‘‘dying for our sins’’
from another perspective. The fact that great teachers are
sent forth at cyclic periods to work among this or that people
suggests that they come for a sacred purpose: to stimulate
aspiration in the souls of all who will heed the call. The
appearance of such an incarnation of a divine radiance
marks the descent of a divine energy on earth which coincides
with the upsurging call from human hearts. The intersection
of human and divine cycles thus has a twofold
purpose. As the spirit-soul of the chosen vessel fuses with
divinity there occurs an explosion of such tremendous potency
that the lightning of the gods bursts upon mankind,
to energize our thought-world with divine-spiritual magnetism.
It has happened in the past; it will happen again
when we call it forth.
There is a linkage of karmas all along the way, a linkage
between the god-worlds and ourselves. Tradition has it that
divine beings or avatāras enter earth as a kind of underworld,
and thus ‘‘die’’ to their own high realms, and by so
doing undergo an initiation — a majestic thought. In deliberately
taking birth among earthlings, a part of them
dies — there is a ‘‘dying for our sins,’’ literally and meta-