OPENING SALVO // EXISTENTIAL DEBT AND SOCIAL WEALTH
Cosmic Debt
What do we owe the universe—and one another?
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
Volume 5 // Issue 2 // Fall 2023 // RUST
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. I’m lucky to be from one such family, and know how much it’s made a difference to my own life. While my parents both grew up extremely poor—my mother the first in her family to go to a four-year college—I have opinions on which versions of the Bach Cello Suites I prefer. Her grandchildren are getting straight A’s in some of the toughest biomedical engineering programs in the country. The children in our family are heavily invested in, and the results, within two generations, are formidable.
And who is our larger family? What circle of care do we draw around us? One hundred years ago, neither of the weddings I’ve spoken about would have taken place—a same-sex or mixed-race wedding would have been unthinkable. We have made social progress here, too, within our own family and in our larger culture, even if pockets of fear still thrive.
But we’ve also lost ground, and it’s actually killing us. In his book Fragile Neighborhoods, Seth D. Kaplan argues that the neighborhood is a critical unit of organization for functioning societies, and we’re out of the habit of caring for them via interpersonal connections and community institutions such as churches, clubs, and schools. Even with strong families, some biological and some chosen, we still need connection to our larger community, or we face the disintegration of social norms and mutual care, feeding instead a cycle of dislocation, despair, and dysfunction. In Pennsylvania, the leading cause of death for those aged 18 to 44 is synthetic opioids.
But we have agency here. While we face global and national challenges at which most of us will throw up our hands—it is hard to know what to do to help stop the heartbreaking cycle of violence and retribution in the Middle East, or what might convince America’s Congress to do its job—there is work we can do to rebuild the country, bridge by bridge and block by block, literally and metaphorically.
We might be one of the millions of electricians, plumbers, and other tradespeople needed to rebuild our roads and buildings, many of my family included. We might be the one to extend a hand to someone of a different ethnic, class, cultural, or political persuasion. We might be one of the people who reclaims or reforms old institutions—or builds new ones.
All of us can ensure that we live next to neighbors and not strangers. We need to focus more on building the kind of generational wealth that is measured not in property and gold, but in a place where sidewalks get shoveled, meals are shared, and children and the vulnerable are collectively cared for.
And we can look in our own hearts—especially where we find that the debt is unfathomably large—and come, nonetheless, to forgiveness.
It’s impossible to say what good might come of it if we collectively re-oriented ourselves to what we owe the universe, our families, and one another—debt that we are incapable of truly repaying, but in the effort of trying to do so we might contribute to the larger project of human flourishing. If we want the people of the future to forgive us for what we’ve missed the mark on, they have to know that at least our aim was true. //
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