There are analysts of historical epochs that see every day in every life of every woman, man, or child as the stuff of economics. I once thought those analysts were dead wrong, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in economics. But I now think that the problem was mine, that I thought “economics” way too narrowly. Certainly, there is more than money, more than buying and selling, more than profit and loss, more than investment and return, in every day of everyone. However, “economics” is more than that, too, or at least it may be understood as more. Long before there was the widespread use of money, there were economic relations. People worked, hunted, gathered, built, used, managed, ate, drank, made and cared for babies, and otherwise attended to one another. All of that is technically economic, whether or not some exchange of coins or more concrete goods is involved. Of course, there are different ways of doing those things, some of which cannot be contained in any ordinary economic categories, but what is done—when working and building and using, when eating and making babies and attending to one another—is economic. To imagine that we do something else, something non-economic, is to imagine us without these bodies. And we aren’t to be imagined without these bodies. That is, we don’t just have these bodies; we are these bodies . . . and these bodies work, i.e., they keep us entangled in a world of economic bodies.
Allowing for now that all those assertions might stand after cross-examination, what might they mean in this time of “social distancing,” of historically high “unemployment,” of “sheltering in place”? What is economics without a day at the office, without a paycheck, without weekends, vacations, and retirement?
“Economics,” from “oikonomia,” is a Greek word for taking care of a household. Long before it was used to speak of GDPs or stock markets, “economy” was used of the way God is at work in the world, as if the world were God’s household. In this same way, whenever we work caring for a household, caring for God’s world, our labors are economic, i.e., whether or not that household has a mortgage attached to it or a lease, whether or not we get paid.
Huddled, say, with a spouse and children at one or another address, we find ourselves thrust into an uncertain spiritual and economic space. There, perhaps, the Holy Spirit—the agent of God’s economy—would have us . . . fast, have us consciously and prayerfully set aside the old economy of last year’s demographics. Of course, in a certain sense, we fast these days whether we like it or not. Sheltering in place is a demand imposed on us from the outside. Yet it need not be only that. Deprived of habitual money-in/money-out, of casually institutionalized shopping and consuming, of using and throwing away, we start each day differently than once was our custom. The world has become ominously insecure. Now, stores are like bad neighborhoods with high crime rates, other shoppers or cashiers are like threatening figures in the shadows of dark alleyways. In this world we suddenly find ourselves without—the way we might be without food or drink or some other familiar object of desire, say, during a time of fasting, perhaps during Lent, the time when we remember that we will one day die. Perhaps this is a good time to imagine life ordered by an economics with neither money nor ownership, with neither investment nor return, with neither debit nor credit. That is, perhaps this is a good time to imagine life—life together with friends and strangers—during a time of Jubilee.
A prayerful meditation on such an economics would put us in a particularly helpful position to imagine those who lack a slot in the order that held us fast in the time before—and may well hold us fast in the time after—COVID-19. These are men and women and children without domestic security, without food security, without health security, people on the move, people with no place to lay their heads. As we are unsettled, oddly by being shut indoors, we might think of those who are unsettled by having no home to be shut within. And in thinking of them, by imagining life without the security of regular money-in/money-out, we might pray both for them, the wanderers, and for us, tempted as we are to imagine that we have a secure home and a secure homeland—that as the ordinary late capitalist economic order slowly opens back up, we might remember that to love our neighbors is to love those who work, hunt, gather, build, use, manage, eat, drink, make and care for babies, and otherwise attend to one another in via, on the way, far from home.