by Peter Selby

The Episcopal Church in 1994 went on record as supporting the biblical imperative of debt relief for the world's poorest countries and in 1998 the Anglican Communion's bishops also wholeheartedly committed themselves to this cause. Still, church members remain largely mystified by the implications of embracing Jubilee as a way of life which brings liberation, but also requires responsibility, as Susan Keller reminds us (p. 28) As Ann Pettifor of the Jubilee 2000 campaign urges (p.8), we will find clues about what is involved the more we openly engage our most taboo subject -- money -- and the dominating role it plays in our lives. We will also benefit from schooling ourselves to see the often disturbing connections between personal or community decisions and the health and welfare of environments and people we may never visit, but whose well-being depends on our placing human values above money. We may find ourselves taking to the streets in the process -- reclaiming a Gospel imperative to place our bodies on the line. Such a body politics may well be the only way to ensure a down-to-earth common good in a globalized world of disembodied greed. -- Julie A. Wortman, publisher and co-editor

It is more than a year and a half since 70,000 people gathered from all over the world to surround the G7 Summit meeting in Birmingham, England in mid-1998. But I haven't forgotten the faces. Thousands of people, almost transfigured. The G7 summiteers thought they had got away by making their escape to an out-of-town hotel. But they didn't escape the force of people who'd had enough of debt.

People with banners came from all over -- people who had never been to any kind of demonstration before, people from countries with huge burdens of debt repayments, children with their grandparents. A priest from our diocese paddled her coracle up the Worcester-Birmingham canal to be there (a coracle is a round boat made of skin that you can carry on your back -- Cuthbert and other ancient missionaries used them).

The faces were the faces of liberty. I walked along the miles of people holding hands, a human chain to confront the death-dealing chains of unjust debt that, in the way we run the world, bring slavery. Afterward, people went home and wrote letters to governments, to the International Monetary Fund and to the World Bank, asking that this crisis be brought to an end.

A year later in Cologne, Germany the faces were there again, wearing the gentle smile of liberty on the way to triumph. By Christmas the talk was of real gold sales to clear some of the worst cases of indebtedness -- and of the domino effect that had begun as governments had to listen to the united and determined voice of their people. Oh yes, there are many dominoes yet to fall, and much understanding yet to be shared. But a process is underway, and you can see it in people's faces.

Yet, the problem goes ever so much deeper than we dare face. For the global economy lives on debt and believes that debt is beyond controlling. In fact, all our money now is promissory notes, IOUs that we cheerfully pass round and round. And we are passing it around at ever increasing speed, no longer in notes but in pulses on computer monitors. And nearly 19 dollars in every 20 that pulse their way round the world's banking system don't find their way into new equipment or resources; they're just going in search of higher or quicker returns.

The debt crisis with which Jubilee 2000 set out to deal is a system of an economic order gone out of control. If the faces on coins and notes are to be exchanged for the faces of freedom -- the face of Jesus Christ -- a decision has to be made. "Globalization," we say, "is the way ahead." But which form of globalization do we want, the one that is created by ever faster-moving quantities of money or the globalization that comes from the gentle and committed love of Christ?

Getting governments to take the debts of the poorest countries seriously was a hard struggle for the Jubilee 2000 campaign, and we are not home and dry yet even with that. Getting the economy to be human, to wear the face of liberty, is going to be the hardest test of all. People of goodwill are beginning to ask the questions that need to be asked about a global economy that exists as an end in itself and not for the benefit of people. As that questioning gets louder so we shall have to discover ways of banding together, not just, as in Birmingham and Cologne, to confront the debts of the poorest, but also to question the priorities of the richest.

We shall have to bear the cost in standards of living which will not steadily grow all the time; but our faces will be the faces of liberty. As we stood by the canal to send Jeni off in her coracle one thing that was said stays in my mind: "This is about the lightness of a feather and the might of the nations." So it is. And it is about the freedom of Christ for all. l

Peter Selby, the keynote speaker at The Witness' General Convention reception on July 9, is the Bishop of Worcester, England, and author of Grace and Mortgage: The Language of Faith and the Debt of the World (1997), <bishop.peter@cofe-worcester.org.uk>.

Planting seeds of transformation on the streets of Seattle

Jim Friedrich

[Jim Friedrich, a priest who lives on Whitbey Island, near Seattle, was one of the protestors on the streets of Seattle last year when the World Trade Organization met -- or attempted to meet -- in that city.]

At 12:30 pm, we took to the streets, marching up Fourth Avenue, to join the thousands more who were already downtown. It was a wonderfully diverse procession: there were people dressed as Santa Claus, sea turtles, trees and even death. But it was not some crazy fringe out there. As one writer put it, "These were the kids at UW, the ladies from church, the guys at Boeing. It was Seattle that was marching this week."

As in all street rituals, there was a playful, carnival atmosphere. Richard Shechner, in his book, The Future of Ritual, observes: "When people go into the streets en masse, they are celebrating life's fertile possibilities. ... They put on masks and costumes, erect and wave banners, and construct effigies not only to disguise or embellish their ordinary selves, or to flaunt the outrageous, but also to act out the multiplicity each human life is. ... They protest, often by means of farce and parody, against what is oppressive, ridiculous and outrageous. ... Such playing challenges official culture's claims to authority, stability, sobriety, immutability and immortality."

In other words, we were exhibiting the same spirit -- dare I say "holy spirit"? -- of playfulness, cameraderie, irony and subversion that was seen 10 years ago at Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall and, during biblical times, at the Red Sea and the Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday. And as faith tells us, the world doesn't stand a chance against the foolishness of God.

There were people on stilts, people carrying giant puppets, babies in carriages and grandparents with canes and walkers. I stuck close to the Anti-Fascist Marching Band, which played soulful New Orleans versions of "America the Beautiful," "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." We all just danced up Fourth Avenue.

We made quite a sight. In the Advent section of his Christmas oratorio, W.H. Auden writes:

The Real is what will strike you as really absurd.

Unless you exclaim, 'I must be dreaming,'

it must surely be a dream of your own.

Official culture is always uneasy at the chaotic upwelling of life in such happenings, and it tries to dismiss their significance, calling them silly or kooky. But they are powerful rituals of liberation, for they mock the pretensions of the old order even as they lift up the possibility of a new way of being. For a few hours on that Tuesday, no one was a stranger. Everything was a You and nothing was an It, to quote Auden again.

If you looked someone in the eye, they didn't look away. Smiles and conversation came easily, and the barriers of money and education and race and age and lifestyle, all the things that segregate us one from another in daily life, these were nowhere in sight. We were one in the Spirit, fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah on the streets of Seattle: "A highway shall be there and it shall be called the Holy Way. ... It shall be for God's people ... and the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their faces; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away" (Isa. 35:8-10).

Like a liturgy, it was a ritual experience -- and though ritual experiences are very real, they cannot be indefinitely extended without returning to the less sublime transactions of ordinary existence. But they can plant the seeds of transformation, out of which God's future may grow. l