Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online

fifteen dollars here, fifteen dollars there — or took out small loans from the bank — fifteen dollars here, fifteen dollars there. Not such small sums either, come to think of it, when the bread bill for the entire month was a dollar twenty and the milk bill was six dollars. The debts are always paid back within weeks, or a few months at the latest. Once in a while an odd item appears —“Book,” two dollars and eighty cents; “Luxury foods,” forty cents. I wonder what the luxury foods were? I suspect they were chocolates — my mother told me that if they happened to come by any chocolates, they would cut each one in two so they could both sample all the flavours. This was called “living within your means,” and judging from the debt TV shows, it’s a lost art.
    AS THE TITLE of this chapter is “Debt and Sin,” I’d now like to recall the moment when I first connected the two. This happened in a church — specifically the United Church Sunday School, to which I insisted on going despite the trepidations of my parents, who were worried that I might get religiously addled too early in life. But I was religiously addled already, since in my part of Canada at the time there were two taxpayer-funded school systems, the Catholic and the public. I was in the public one, which was interpreted then to mean Protestant, so we did a certain amount of praying and Bible-reading right in the classroom, presided over by a portrait of the King and Queen of England and Canada in crowns and medals and jewellery, watching us benevolently from the back of the room.
    Since we had religion in the classroom, my Sunday-school caper was an add-on. As usual, I was propelled by curiosity: wouldn’t I find out more about religious knowledge in a Sunday school than I could in an ordinary school? Not likely, as it turned out — the most interesting parts of the Bible, those dealing with sex, rape, child sacrifice, mutilations, massacres, the gathering up in baskets of the lopped-off heads of your enemy’s kids, and the cutting up of concubines’ bodies and sending them around as invitations-to-a-war were studiously avoided, though I did spend a lot of time colouring in angels and sheep and robes, and singing hymns about letting my little candle shine in my own small, dark corner.
    It will no doubt astonish you to learn that I won a prize for memorizing Bible verses, but such was the case. Among the things we memorized was the Lord’s Prayer, which contained the line, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” However, my brother sang in an Anglican boys’ choir, and the Anglicans had a different way of saying the same line: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.” The word “debt”— blunt and to the point — was well fitted to the plain, grape-juice-drinking United Church, and “trespasses” was an Anglican word, rustling and frilly, that would go well with wine-sipping for Communion and a more ornate theology. But did these two words mean the same thing really? I didn’t see how they could. “Trespassing” was stepping on other people’s property, especially if there was a No Trespassing sign, and “debt” was when you owed money. But somebody must have thought they were interchangeable. One thing was clear even to my religiously addled child mind, however: neither debts nor trespasses were desirable things to have.
    Between the 1940s and now, the search engine has providentially come into being, and I’ve recently been trolling around on the Web, looking for an explanation of the discrepancy between the two translations of these Lord’s Prayer lines. If you do this yourself you’ll find that “debts” was used by John Wycliffe in his 1381 translation and “trespasses” in Tyndale’s 1526 version. “Trespasses” reappears in the 1549 English Book of Common Prayer, though the King James 1611 translation of the Bible reverts to “debts.” The Latin Vulgate uses