The bitterness of life from a Spiritist perspective

There are some individuals who don’t accept the so-called Law of Cause and Effect and attribute the bitterness of life to chance.

Thinking this way is equivalent of doubting God exists and admitting that we are all immersed in something that doesn’t have any wisdom or anything similar to what we understand as mercy, given the nerve-racking situations the world present to us at every moment, which would dry our faith out if they couldn’t be explained under the light of Christ’s teachings.

Let’s see the following example.

There was a boy, a simple farmer’s son, who was born in the rural zone and didn’t face any difficulties during his infancy or adolescence. But once getting married he saw his father obligated to use his land because of the unsuccessful harvest and the exorbitant bank interest rates, and then, just like a magic, everyone in his family became salaried ploughmen.

Some time later, he got a job in a sugar cane farm. The tough existence was compensated with a home where five children brought him the joy of living. It was then that, on a fatidic and unexpected moment while he was working in the crop, a short lack of attention made him lose his right arm, his instrument of work as he was a farm labor.

It’s not necessary to say that the employer didn’t come to know the fact, and the humble servant had to leave the farm and look for better opportunities in a big city so that he could survive and sustain his family, although having neither a job nor anybody to hold on to.

The reader knows which situation these people have faced. Obviously that, in the veridical case above, the couple and their five children ended up in a suburb of a big city, more precisely in one of the slums around it, and it was the good people also living there who got sensitized with the family’s condition and helped the construction of a simple shack, made with rests of wood, plastic and paperboard, where the they now live, starting a new phase – with new difficulties – during their short existence on Earth.

It was this way that some people connected to Spiritist social services found them. The young adult works now as a waste picker and cleans up properties and yards, with what he could obtain a few resources, clearly insufficient, to feed and dress himself and his children.

Let’s review the case.

Firstly, he lost his rural property, which used to represent his parents’ and his own solidity and security. After that, he lost part of his body and consequently his job. Then, he started a new life, accepting with patience and resignation the tough vicissitudes whose reasons he certainly unknowns but which will produce incalculable and lasting benefits, considering the transience of these troubles compared to the greatness of the spiritual life, which is eternal.

The vicissitudes of life – as Spiritism teaches – have two distinct sources. One of them has its cause in the current existence while the other source is out of it. In any case, it always has a just and important purpose. “Nothing in this world is done without an intelligent objective and each thing has a reason to be”, as the immortals affirm.

To think the contrary is to admit chance or, even worse, is the equivalent of imagining that God is nothing but a fanciful father who exalts himself with the suffering of his children, while others apparently enjoy life in a big venture.