Forgive us our Ecological debts?

It's disturbing, though probably not surprising to discover that our ecological 'debt' is growing: "Last year Nef found that global consumption levels pushed the world into 'ecological debt' on 9 October; this year, it says, we are in debt three days earlier. Ecological debt means that our demands exceed the Earth's ability to supply resources and absorb the demands placed upon it."
I find myself mulling over the co-incidence of this terminology with the Lukan version of the Gospel Prayer: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors". Noting that there are ways in which the economy of grace is not easily compared to the ecology of resources. Though it is worth noting that while we can ask God to forgive us, we cannot 'ask' the earth or the rest of the globe to do so indefinitely: people will start (actually have started) dying to service this debt at some point.

While our 'debts' are ones to do with hurt and pride they have similarity to the digital economy. That is, they can be 'copied' potentially infinitely. and similarly they can just as easily (and this is not to say that it is emotionally easy) be forgiven. Of course the reason that they may be hard to forgive is that they can rest on physical events that cannot reverse time's arrow: a loved one cannot be returned from death and (normally) our words cannot be taken back, and so on.

So we may ask God to forgive our debts and others likewise, but we still have to work with the consequences of what those debts rest on. In this case taking more than our share and robbing our children and grandchildren, and in doing so to be changing the global balance of power in ways that, if we survive, may also be storing up further challenges for our descendants.

We can learn from some aspects of older Christian teaching: the idea of penance, I think, was meant to be about showing the fruits of repentance primarily by trying to make righter the things our sinning had marred. And actually, that seems to mirror a right human instinct. The instinct to make right, and to make or restore justice is served in our own persons as we recognise that we are the ones who need to do so. However, to do so is not to 'buy' forgiveness, since forgiveness can only ever be given (clue in the word itself, folks) never earned: the hurt can never be undone, only 'swallowed' and moved on from by various means.

God may forgive us this debt, and perhaps others will too. But the harm will remain for some time and we need to find ways, corporately to show the fruits of repentance by beginning to make decisions to enable us live ecologically-debt-free and to embed such living into the way we live so we don't even decide any more, we just do it. After all we don't, on the whole, decide to live ecologically in debt; we just do because the ways that lead to debt have been built into our lifestyles in a thousand subtle and 'innocent' ways. It'll be messy and it won't be easy to make decisions and embark on ways that are unambiguously good. These are days that will call for wisdom, forebearance and mutual encouragement: pretty much the qualities that make for forgiveness, in fact...

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