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

the word for “debts.” But it’s interesting to note that in Aramaic, the Semitic language that was spoken by Jesus, the word for “debt” and the word for “sin” are the same. So you could translate this word as “Forgive us our debts / sins,” or even “our sinful debts,” though no translator has chosen to do this yet.
    If you keep searching on the Web, you’ll come upon quite a few sermonlike blog postings. What their authors generally end up saying is that the debts and/or trespasses mentioned in the Lord’s Prayer are spiritual debts and / or trespasses. They are, in fact, sins: God will forgive the sins we’ve committed in proportion as we ourselves forgive those sins committed against us.
    We are warned by the sermonizing bloggers against making the naive mistake of believing that the debts in question are actual money debts. Here is an excerpt from a blog posting from the Reverend Jennie C. Olbrych of the lovely old Saint James Santee Episcopal Church near McClellanville, South Carolina — I know it’s lovely and old because there’s a picture of it on the web site — and this posting hits all the nails on the head, one after the other.
    “Here I am reminded of the Lord’s prayer,” says Reverend Olbrych, “. . . and remember that financial debt is sometimes a metaphor for sin — forgive us our sin, trespasses, debts as we forgive those who sin, trespass, or are indebted to us . . .”
Owing a lot of money is fairly typical these days — 2.5 trillion $ in consumer debt as of June this year. . . . The average household owes close to $12,000 in credit card debt. If you are a homeowner, you will know that signing a home mortgage or big note is sobering . . . overwhelming if you think about it too much. . . .
In another church I served, I had a couple come for some pastoral counselling . . . they were fighting like mad . . . and somewhere along the way I asked them how much debt they were carrying — it was close to $75,000 in credit card debt . . . their annual income was somewhere around $50,000. They were overcome by debt and could not hope to pay it off. . . . Think how relieved they would have been if someone from MasterCard, the person who had been harassing them previously, called out of the blue and said . . . we’re going to write off that debt. Or, if someone called and said . . . the bank is going to forgive your home mortgage . . . or your student loan debts . . . or your business debt . . . we’re going to forgive it . . . you’d probably be thinking . . . this is too good to be true, no way this is legal . . . it’s probably a mistake at the bank . . . and you’d probably wait and then check your balance . . . and then the statement arrives in the mail . . . or better, yet, the deed . . . free and clear . . . what a celebration that would be! Wouldn’t you be praising American Express or Visa, or the bank to the high heavens . . . because debt really is a form of slavery —
Now, some of you who are practical folks no doubt would be saying — well, that’s nice idea but that can’t work practically because the whole system would fall apart . . . if everybody’s mortgages were forgiven, the banking system would collapse . . . someone has to pay . . . and you are right to think this . . .
To become debt free is a wonderful thing — but more wonderful is to become debt free in a spiritual sense . . .
    Here, in one nicely compact bouquet of meanings, we have: financial debt as a metaphor for sin; the horror and the burden of being in debt; the joy we would experience if all our debts of the financial kind were suddenly to be written off; the impossibility of that actually happening in the world of practical affairs, because “the whole system would fall apart”; and the notion that debt is a form of slavery. If we connect the end to the beginning, we get an even neater equation: financial debt is not only a metaphor for sin, it is a sin. It’s a debt /sin, as in the