Daily Meditation: Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Family, natural - and spiritual family

03/08/2011

The natural family is one thing, the spiritual family another. You can be related by blood to a family whose members are not of the same spiritual family as you. Despite these blood ties, they are not really your relations; you are not responsible for their actions, nor are they responsible for yours. It says in the Old Testament that those who have sinned are not the only ones to be punished; their children and their grandchildren to the fourth generation are also punished. But what have those children done to suffer so? Their father or their great-grandfather sinned, not them. Isn’t this punishment unfair? No, because those who pay for their parents’ faults by inheriting the same vices or the same illnesses are indeed of the same family. If they belonged to another spiritual family, they would not suffer. Criminals have been known to give birth to saints, so children are not always affected by their parents’ crimes. When they are, it is because they have gone the same way in the past and have, therefore, been drawn to reincarnate among their like and suffer the same ills.