The most primordial of social gestures: procreation, eating, giving, killing, speech, art, worship, cultivation of crops, animal husbandry, burial rites, and maybe trade or barter, and certainly theft. We seem wired to create hierarchies and networks or tribes. Giving fits into both the hierarchy (potlatch, partriarch, patron) and the lateral networks defined by the traverse of the gift out, around and back from self, to family, to community. A community is the space marked out by a gift as it circulates. Grace defines all of Creation as a gift. The circulation of grace is love. Sacrifice, propitiation, that is love, I guess. Abraham with the knife. Tough love. Maybe God is an MBA. And St. Peter is his CPA. You know, maybe grace is God's own micro-finance, a kind of Divine Usury. I am in so deep I can never repay what I owe. May my debt be forgiven! Better yet, may another pay the price.
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April 09, 2010
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May my debt be forgiven! Better yet, may another pay the price.
Isn't that the motto of the majority of people in 21st Century developed societies? Wishing for magic or avoidance of accountability ?
I want to go back to primordial.
Posted by: Jon Husband | April 09, 2010 at 05:18 PM
I was thinking of Jesus, actually, and the doctrine that he gave his life to ransom us from sin and death, which was what I guess Caesar's face on the coin maybe denoted.
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | April 09, 2010 at 10:21 PM
Shows how cynical or naive I often am.
Posted by: Jon Husband | April 10, 2010 at 04:23 AM
More like idealistic, Jon.
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | April 11, 2010 at 10:15 AM
a grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and dischargd;
- Satan
Posted by: tm | April 11, 2010 at 08:53 PM
I've been reading about kenosis, via George Ellis, and this word is also used to refer to Jesus' sacrifice. The meaning is "to pour oneself" into something. Grace, I would think, is the means by which such giving of self is redeemed. I think Ellis is right that these are structural aspects of the world, discoverable like mathematics.
Posted by: twitter.com/ddenizen | April 12, 2010 at 12:29 PM
Careful there on hierarchy. Scarcity leads inevitable to dominance hierarchy, but we must be careful not to confuse this with the compositional hierarchy of systems emergence.
Posted by: twitter.com/ddenizen | April 12, 2010 at 12:33 PM
Gratitude can feel like a debt. The gift received yearns to be a gift discharged or passed on. Teaching is like that, and parenting, and artistic traditions.
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | April 13, 2010 at 08:31 AM
"A community is the space marked out by a gift as it circulates."
<- beautiful and illuminating
Posted by: Christine Egger | April 17, 2010 at 06:59 PM
Malinowski revisited.
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | April 17, 2010 at 08:45 PM