[the following has been written under the influence of oxytocin and a glass of clarete]
I am the third of four siblings. I was born in the late 1980s to a couple of baby boomers.
At home, in the dining room, there was a sound system and a modest collection of vinyl records, cassettes, and CDs that could only be described as eclectic: ranging from classical music, opera, and military marches to country, pop and French folk. All of them are, to me, what Rivers Cuomo once called “heart songs.”
Lately, one of those heart songs has returned to my mind: Hard Headed Woman by Cat Stevens. The lyrics (which sound suspiciously like a pop paraphrase of Proverbs 31) say something like:
“I’m looking for a hard-headed woman,
One who’ll make me do my best.
And if I find my hard-headed woman,
I know the rest of my life will be blessed.”
It turns out that I found one — or, more precisely, she found me.
Today, on the 19th of March, the feast of Saint Joseph, my wife has given birth to our sixth child.
An Italian scholastic, Bernardine of Siena, wrote a marvellous sermon on Saint Joseph which contains this beautiful passage:
“This is the general rule that applies to all individual graces given to a rational creature: whenever divine grace selects someone to receive a particular grace, or some especially favoured position, all the gifts needed for that state are given to that person and enrich him abundantly.
This is especially true of that holy man Joseph, the supposed father of our Lord Jesus Christ and true husband of the Queen of the world and of the angels. He was chosen by the eternal Father to be the faithful foster-parent and guardian of the most precious treasures of God, his Son and his spouse.
This was the task which he so faithfully carried out. For this the Lord said to him: ‘Good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Lord.’”
Saint Joseph is the perfect model of a father who cares and works. It is an ideal to follow. At the same time, it is reassuring to think that the graces required to live up to such a task are also given.
Charles Péguy once wrote that parents are the true and only real adventurers. It may sound exaggerated, but in reality parents put their own skin in the game (ipsi)— and that of their children too (alii patitur).
Most of my professional life has been spent working for alternative investment fund managers. From that world I have borrowed a simple idea: portfolio theory. From a purely selfish perspective, I may simply be maximising the chances of being well attended after retirement.
In a time when fertility rates suggest that the supply of the labour factor is steadily shrinking (or becoming redundant due to the raise of AI), I may simply be doubling down on investing in an undervalued asset class. Bernardine of Siena is sometimes considered a proto-economist. I am not entirely sure what he would think of this particular allocation model.
Another perspective comes from the Orthodox staretz Seraphim of Sarov:
“Accumulate the capital of God’s grace. Deposit it in God’s eternal bank, which brings immaterial interest — not four or six percent, but one hundred percent for one spiritual rouble, and infinitely more.”
This transcendent market works in a way completely different from the markets we are used to. G. K. Chesterton captures the idea in his essay about St Francis Assisi:
“All these profound matters must be suggested in short and imperfect phrases; and the shortest statement of one aspect of this illumination is to say that it is the discovery of an infinite debt. It may seem a paradox to say that a man may be transported with joy to discover that he is in debt. But this is only because in commercial cases the creditor does not generally share the transports of joy; especially when the debt is by hypothesis infinite and therefore unrecoverable. But here again the parallel of a natural love-story of the nobler sort disposes of the difficulty in a flash. There the infinite creditor does share the joy of the infinite debtor; for indeed they are both debtors and both creditors. In other words debt and dependence do become pleasures in the presence of unspoilt love; the word is used too loosely and luxuriously in popular simplifications like the present; but here the word is really the key. … It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be forever paying it. He will be forever giving back what he cannot give back, and cannot be expected to give back. He will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks. … the truth is in that riddle; that the whole world has, or is, only one good thing; and it is a bad debt.”
So in the end it turns out that I am a debtor — happily unable to meet my debt, and undeserving of the many blessings I have received from the beginning until now: parents, brothers, hard-headed woman, children, friends, and colleagues.
And yet, like any diligent debtor (the Spanish Civil Code and in general, Civil Law systems traditionally have the standard of care of the bonum pater familias, common law equivalent being the reasonable prudent man), I suspect I will spend the rest of my life trying to repay it.
Deo gratias.
Almayer’s Folly 