But then you immediately feel uneasy. What kind of life would it be if you are independent of other people? Debts actually create relationships and are a living expression of our interdependence and solidarity with one another.
I heard of a tezvara recently who said he would be suspicious of a mukuwasha that paid all his lobola at once. Such a man would surely be hiding something? He would be declaring independence of his in-laws and somehow saying I dont need you. Keep out of my life.
Never to be in debt may sound virtuous but it could equally be a sign of selfishness. When it comes to God it is obvious we can never be out of debt. We are in debt to our parents, our friends, our teachers all who have made us who we are.
There is a request embedded in the Our Father about it forgive us our trespasses (Matt 6 and Like 11), which some translators like to render forgive us our debts. Like everything in the Our Father this is an expression of an on-going relationship rather than a once-off act. We have to ask for forgiveness 77 times just as we can never tire of asking that his kingdom comes. These perpetual requests, these unsatisfiable yearnings, keep us real and humble and open to the future.
In fact life teaches us that we become more dependent, not less, as we grow older. How many over seventies have financial security or freedom from health worries? It is a time of accepting limitations and the closing off of more and more possibilities. T. S. Eliot wrote in Ash Wednesday:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Desiring this mans gift and that mans scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
This is an expression of acceptance of limitations and of dependence. We are always in debt to one another. As another poet, W.H.Auden, put it, we live at one anothers expense.
Post published in: Opinions