Karma is not the judgment of some distant God perched on a throne, tallying sins and virtues with heavenly ink. No... karma is colder than that, truer than that. It is not divine favoritism, but law. It is gravity on the soul, cause and effect written into the bloodstream of the universe. It has no eyes, yet it sees. It has no hands, yet it shapes. Karma is the echo that returns from every word we speak, every act we perform, every seed we plant in the soil of time.
And yet, within that law lies freedom. For we are not puppets dangling at the mercy of unseen strings. We choose, though our choices are shaped by the echoes of our past. Free will is the instrument, but history plays upon it. As James Baldwin would tell us, we cannot escape what came before; it stands in the room with us, shaping every gesture. Karma, then, is not simply mystical, it is historical. It is the living past, finding its way into the present, reminding us that nothing we do is ever lost.
There is a moral energy at work in the world. What we pour into it must return. Dr. King called it the "moral arc of the universe," bending toward justice, not by chance, but by law. For cruelty sows cruelty, and love sows love, even if the harvest comes long after the sowers have turned to dust. The hand that strikes cannot escape the wound it inflicts upon itself, just as the hand that lifts another cannot escape the blessing it receives in return.
Karma does not rush. It is patient as eternity. A whisper of kindness may ripple outward for generations, unseen but unstoppable. A lie may fester for decades before its rot bursts into the open. Like gravity, karma does not pause to ask whether you meant to fall... it simply ensures that what was set loose returns home. And this is why the ancients said: karma has no menu. You eat the meal you prepared, whether bitter or sweet. The universe does not keep debts; it balances the scales. Always.
But hear me now: this is not comfort for the oppressed to sit back and wait for cosmic revenge. That would be too easy, too cruel an evasion of responsibility. Karma is not an opiate to make injustice tolerable; it is a fire that insists on accountability. It does not promise that the wicked will collapse tomorrow, but it guarantees that no lie, no hatred, no violence can stand forever without turning upon its maker. Another way of saying, "Evil carries the seed of its own destruction."
And let us not pretend the examples are abstract. Look at a man like Charlie Kirk... a man who built his platform on venom, who sharpened his tongue on the bones of the vulnerable, who mistook cruelty for strength. He laughed at the marginalized and cloaked his hatred in the language of patriotism, but beneath the mask was only fear, only rot. And karma came for him; not from the heavens, but from the hand of another man, an assassin’s bullet finding his neck, just as it did Dr. King. But the irony was bitter: King fell as a prophet of love, Kirk as a merchant of contempt. Both silenced by the same wound, but their legacies could not stand further apart.
Yet even in death, the law does not rest. For when Kirk crossed into the spiritual realm, stripped of ego, stripped of applause, he saw himself... saw the wreckage of his words, the hatred he fed like a fire that consumed others and himself. His higher self, ashamed, demanded balance. And so, in another life, on another Earth, he will walk as the very thing he once despised: the poor, the dark, the outcast. He will taste the bitterness of his own contempt, not because God decrees it, but because truth demands it. Karma has no escape clause. The boomerang cannot help but return.
But let us be clear: karma is not vengeance. Its design is not to destroy, but to awaken. It is the mirror we cannot shatter, the teacher we cannot silence. Baldwin told us nothing can be changed until it is faced. King told us hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Karma tells us both truths at once: that what we have sown we must face, and that only love can change the harvest.
So we stand here, each of us authors of our own return. Every choice, every act, every word is a seed. The harvest may come tomorrow, or lifetimes hence, but it will come. The question is not whether the law works, but whether we will learn. Whether we will love. Whether we will rise. For karma is not just a mirror of consequence, it is a summons to become more than we have become.
