What book are you currently reading? I am reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I am thoroughly enjoying. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, poet and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In her writing she synthesizes and balances her scientific inquiry and indigenous heritage and insight in a writing style that is very engaging.
Early on in her book, the author reflects on the term, “Indian giver” and demonstrates how this term developed out of a, “cross-cultural misinterpretation between an Indigenous culture operating in a gift economy and a colonial culture predicated on the concept of private property.”
When gifts were given to the settlers by the Native inhabitants, the recipients understood that they were valuable and were intended to be retained. Giving them away would have been an affront. But the Indigenous people understood the value of the gift to be based on reciprocity and would be affronted if the gifts did not circulate back to them. Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again.
From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the “gift” is deemed to be “free” because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of the gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached.
I believe that God approaches us in terms of “gift economy”. We have been given the gift of salvation in Christ, but this gift does not free us to do whatever we want; the gift is not “free” in the distinction that Kimmerer makes, the gift draws us directly into relationships and responsibilities towards all of our brothers and sisters, towards the truth of who we are, towards creation and towards God.
In the images that our Lord gives us about the Kingdom of heaven in today’s gospel (Mt. 13: 44-46) there is an important truth given – the man sells all he has and buys the field containing the buried treasure, the merchant sells all he has and buys the “pearl of great price”. They make the choice to freely and fully set their lives by the gift that they have been given, that they have found. They allow the gift to direct and focus their lives.
This is part and parcel of what it means to receive the gift of the Kingdom of God. The gift of the Kingdom of God is not “free”. The gift, by its very nature, moves us into reciprocity and relationship and, in this, we find the fullness of life.