OPENING SALVO // EXISTENTIAL DEBT AND SOCIAL WEALTH
Cosmic Debt
What do we owe the universe—and one another?
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
EXCERPT //
Against the backdrop of an abandoned stone barn, its one remaining wall nestled into a muddy bank and woven through with vines, my cousin’s daughter recently took her marriage vows. Her father-in-law performed the jubilant ceremony on the land owned by her parents, who were beaming from the front row. The house she grew up in with her brothers—and the clatter of a large extended family—sat just up the hill.
The trees were glistening from an early fall rain, the creek was gurgling happily, a rainbow was in the works, and much of the audience had cheeks streaked with tears and shoes speckled with mud. It was a picture-perfect Pennsylvania day out near the Pocono Mountains, even if the resident tractor had to pull a few cars out of the soggy lawn later on in the evening. Just two years before, I’d married two friends under the same kind of blue October skies in a beautiful lakeside ceremony. There is a magic in the way things feel just as the weather is turning, especially when it’s combined with so much love and gratitude.
At one point in the ceremony, the bride’s new mother-in-law unexpectedly began singing a beautiful acapella version of the Lord’s Prayer. When she arrived at the point where I have often heard the words “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” or “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us”—I heard something different: Forgive us our debts.
My ears perked up for many reasons. I’d just finished reading two books on the macro-economics of debt as it relates to wealth creation,1 which is not something you want to be pondering at a wedding. But that research led me down a rabbit hole into the history of debt, and how we think about debt in broader terms.
What might we owe, for instance, to the universe—God, if you’re a religious person? This is a kind of existential debt, bigger than anything we can fathom. Just weeks earlier, I’d listened online to a Sunday sermon by the new pastor of Old Swedes’ Episcopal Church in Queen Village, Philadelphia, where I live. He recited a biblical parable: A king forgives a servant a great debt, and the forgiven debtor is punished when he does not then forgive a smaller debt that is owed to him. The size of the original debt, I learned in the sermon, is so specific as to be meaningless to a modern audience, who know nothing about the daily wages of a slave thousands of years ago. But translated into modern money, the amount is important: It’s of a size that could not possibly be repaid by laboring over many lifetimes. There is nothing he could do to truly pay it off, and in that way, it could only be discharged by being forgiven.
Debt. Trespass. Sin. Forgiveness. These words have intermingled in their monetary and ethical meanings in modern times, but I am thinking about them more and more in their multiple dimensions.2 Unlike student loan debt jubilees, these are the ideas you should be pondering at a wedding, when two people are giving themselves to each other in front of their family, making promises to the generational aspects of kinship and communion—including having children and the possibility of building generational wealth.
As their parents had brought them to that altar, freely giving them their life, the newlyweds were committing to carrying our now combined family further into the future. It honors those before us, and gives shape to the generations beyond us. A pledge that is forever paid forward and never called in, so long as we are all collectively committed to the flourishing of the family at large.
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