A blog post by Sue Wilson, CSJ, for KAIROS, a joint venture ecumenical program administered by the United Church of Canada. 

At first glance, the Jubilee Debt Cancellation campaign evokes a sense of compassion.

Many of the world’s lowest-income countries have debts they cannot possibly pay. The interest rates are so high that money, which should be going to basic goods such as health care and education, or climate change adaptation and mitigation, must be channeled to interest payments.

But if we scratch the surface of the Debt Cancellation campaign, the justice concerns come quickly into view. For example, current financial structures both perpetuate unsustainable debt (making interest payments just another way to extract resources) and fail to recognize the ecological debt which wealthy countries in the global North owe to countries in the global South as well as Indigenous peoples.

Ecological debt is the cumulative environmental damage from climate change and resource extraction, which leave behind devasted bioregions, pollution, and human rights violations. Aside from Canada’s  links to mining devastation, our ecological debt also includes not doing our fair share to cut emissions or to help finance climate change mitigation and adaptation in the global South.

Cancelling the debt is not about charity. It’s about justice.

Connecting the dots between these justice concerns points us to an even deeper level of meaning in the Jubilee Debt Cancellation campaign. It draws us toward the interconnectedness of life: How we choose and act in Canada affects the wellbeing of the people and the biodiversity of many regions and countries. Ethical questions emerge:Who owes whom? Who gets to decide? 

And now we are in an ethical space that connects us to the early Israelites who first stepped into the grace of Jubilee.

Throughout a long journey out of slavery in Egypt, a diverse group of people came to a sense of shared identity and grew in a relationship with God. They began to intuit the presence of a deeper Mystery carrying and guiding them. It seems they were asking themselves some probing spiritual and ethical questions: What does it mean for us to say that God is the true owner of the land to which we journey? (c.f. Book of Leviticus, Chapter 25)

The Israelites had come to a vision of their relationship with God, each other, and the land which was different from other peoples around them. In their community, debts would not go on forever; slavery was not for life; and land was a relationship to be nurtured.  

By holding up this vision, the Israelites were intentionally entering a space of transformation.A space of personal and communal transformation.

The Israelites would never have used this language or concept but, looking from our perspective, weren’t they intuiting a new consciousness, and opening themselves to be pulled further into this new consciousness by their efforts to act differently? And this internal urging, to act and choose differently, seems to have drawn the Israelites deeper into meaning, and deeper into union with God and each other.

Again, the Israelites would never have used this language but, from our perspective today, and using the lens of integral ecology, we might say they intuited the interconnectedness, or the hidden wholeness of life. They recognized that their unity with God was interconnected with their efforts to create relationships of justice and compassion. And so, they made the vision of Jubilee an ongoing part of their life.

Back to us. Yes, the Jubilee Debt Campaign is about our ethical obligation to do justice. But more deeply, this doing of justice is a way for us to ”accept the world as a sacrament of our communion,” as Pope Francis writes in Laudato Si. It is a call to participate in something greater than us, but something that is also connected to the inner-most core of who we are. Like the early Israelites, with this year’s Jubilee call, we are being urged to enter a space of transformation. Let’s do so out of a desire to meet the sacredness of this moment; a desire to be drawn more deeply into the hidden wholeness of life.