Psalm 2021

NOW when we die, others celebrate our life.

Don’t you need to celebrate your life and all life every day?

Why would anyone celebrate your life if you didn’t find it worth celebrating when you were alive?

To Life!

I raise my half full mug of room temperature Cafe Bustelo and toast the Williamsburg Bridge and the World Trade Center beyond.

A shadow falls on the sky, the low ceiling of a menacing 

storm —

There isn’t time to celebrate life, says the cloud. 

There is work to do. You need to pay off your debts.

Debts? What debts? I’m all paid up, I say to the cloud.

You were born in debt, son of man, the cloud replies. You live in debt and sell your time to pay your debts.

And when you cease to live someone will pay to deal with your remains and all the paperwork of dying. We have a system here that is powered by debt. You are all paid up, are you? You’ve mailed the rent check and Con Ed has automatically extracted your monthly payment from your bank account. You know Social Security won’t cover what you spend much longer and that you will be in debt and now you are in debt because you don’t think about it as much as you are supposed to. Our economic system — Free Enterprise — demands that you fear debt as well as be in debt — fear of debt and guilt about debt and all you owe or think you owe — guilt which is fear that you will be punished and that you are already being punished for unknown crimes. You are afraid because you are following the rules, and the Rule is Debt, and the Rule is You Must Be Afraid. Because debt is a vacuum that sucks the celebration out of life. Rule of the System of Debt is that kind of parasite, the money parasite that sucks the life out of the earth and out of the sky and leaves behind a toxic dump.

We are given life-giving breath.

Life breathes into us every day.

Breathe in life and celebrate the gift of consciousness and experience and growth.

Welcome to life. Life is free. They want you to follow so many rules — but life is free. The human childhood is so long because it takes so long to learn all the rules and they keep changing them so you can’t learn them all.

As you grow you might learn to question the rule givers and rule enforcers and if you get to the heart of the matter you might challenge the systems that rule us all and lose the fear of the Kingdom of Debt and learn to breathe in a community of Love with a gospel of prosperity for all. There is more than enough for all.

Revolutionary lovers, you are given transformative power, and your names are holy.

Here comes the rule of love, and here comes the will to love, and imagination to cultivate paradise now.

You who are life, who give life, give us the means to live and be alive.

Free us from the rule of debt, forgive our debts, and give us the will to share what we have.

Guide us away from deception,

and liberate us from evil.