In her book, "Proclaim Jubilee: A Spirituality for the 21st Century," Dr. Maria Harris develops five pastoral themes that emerge from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as essential to our Jubilee observance. Her analysis of these five core traditions, given at a Feb. 28, 1997, convocation of the NCCB Subcommittee on the Third Millennium, has had a formative effect on the official U.S. Catholic Church approach to the Jubilee observance. She will also keynote the CTA National Conference Nov. 5-7, 1999, in Milwaukee. Here is an extended excerpt from her 1997 talk. Her key Scriptural sources appear in the box.

1. Let the land lie fallow

In Leviticus, Jubilee teaching begins with the command to keep a Sabbath for the land. The Dakota and Lakota peoples of North America are good examples of how to engage in such practice. Their care for the nonhuman world is expressed in the phrase "Mitakuje oyasin" which functions in their prayer the way "Amen" does in ours. "Mitakuje oyasin" translates as "for all our relations" and symbolizes care not only for human beings, but for all the beings of the planet: the winged, the gilled, the four-leggeds, as well as the two-leggeds; the trees, the mountains, the rivers, the oceans, the ozone.

The Sabbath command also directs us to rest ourselves, for in allowing a Sabbath for the rest of creation, we necessarily practice a Sabbath, a period of stillness and contemplation, for the created being we are. We rest in imitation of the Creator God who rested when creation was complete. We also rest so that we may give our attention, our prayer, and our worship to this Creator Spirit, continually breathing life into the dust we are. Indeed, some are beginning to speak of the entire year 1999-2000 as a time when they will let the land of their own spirits lie fallow, as a way of making the Jubilee Sabbath complete.

Finally, the command to let the land lie fallow is a reminder of the Jubilee as a time of the Holy Spirit for two further reasons. First, when the Jubilee comes, it is the Spirit who hovers "upon us" and who "anoints" us to Jubilee. It is also because the Holy Spirit is particularly associated in scripture and in tradition with wind, fire, earth, and water.

2. Answer the call to forgiveness

Following on the Sabbath command to let the land lie fallow and to keep a Sabbath, we are then able to listen more carefully and respond more intently to the command of forgiveness.

The call to forgiveness is not easy. One of the most eloquent descriptions I know of this call is found in Sr. Helen Prejean's book, "Dead Man Walking". There, She recounts a story told her by Lloyd Le Blanc, whose 17-year-old son was brutally murdered along with his girlfriend. Mr. Le Blanc said to Sr. Helen that when he knelt in the canefield next to the body of his son, he prayed the Our Father, and when he came to the words, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," he said, "Whoever did this, I forgive them." But, Sr. Helen continues, "He acknowledges it's a struggle to overcome the feelings of bitterness and revenge that well up, especially as he remembers David's birthday year by year and loses him all over again: David at 20, David at 25 ... David, a man like himself whom he will never know. He has learned that forgiveness is never going to be easy. Each day it must be prayed for and struggled for and won."

When the Jubilee comes, the first mention of forgiveness that both the scriptures and the scholars name is the forgiveness of debt. Debt is crushing many in our world today: there are, for example, 32 SILIC nations (severely indebted low income countries), and 24 of these are in sub-Saharan Africa, too poor to give necessary health care and schooling and nutrition to their children; too crushed by debt and by the interest owed on debt to come out from under. In Tertio Millennio Adveniente, the Pope has called for the removal of as much debt as possible, whereas many others in both the Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches are petitioning the World Bank, the IMF, and the richer nations of the world to declare 2000 a Jubilee Year of release from debt. This declaration can begin in our own dioceses, parishes and organizations, and every one of these ought to be asking: "What debts must our diocese (parish, organization) forgive?" and "For what do we need to atone?"

This mourning and atonement can then find a place in our reconciliation services over the next several years, as groups of clergy publicly ask forgiveness for the sins of the official church, as many are doing throughout the U.S. It can also find a place in the prayer for forgiveness that laity wish to make for their own failures.

But the reconciliation and forgiveness sought is not only on the personal level. It includes taking responsibility for our people's sins against entire populations throughout history: our contributions to the continuance of the slave trade; our part in the Inquisition; our responsibility for fostering the conditions that led to the Holocaust; our sins against the North American natives. The United Methodist Church can be a model here for the rest of us, as witnessed by their "Sand Creek Apology," offered in 1996 to the Arapaho and Cheyenne of eastern Colorado for the 1864 massacre of those peoples -- a massacre led by a military man who was also a lay preacher for the Methodists almost one hundred and forty years ago.

3. Proclaim liberty: Proclaim freedom

Yesterday (Feb. 27, 1997) was the 100th anniversary of Marian Anderson's birth. A powerful story is told of her relation to proclaiming liberty. Shut out of Constitution Hall by the Daughter of the American Revolution in 1939, the planned concert of her singing was re-scheduled by Eleanor Roosevelt for the Lincoln Memorial. (Roosevelt also resigned in protest from the DAR.) That night, in an extraordinary proclamation of freedom that was also a moment of forgiveness, Marian Anderson opened her evening of song with these words:

"My country, 'tis of thee/ Sweet land of liberty/ of thee I sing."

This story is a reminder that in the United States, the proclamation of freedom has always been championed, but has often been found wanting. In the light of the Jubilee it is significant to remember that on one of our most sacred symbols, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, words from Leviticus 25 are inscribed: "Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. Lev. 25:10." I believe it is also significant to remember that the Liberty Bell is cracked, flawed -- as is each one of us. That, however, is no reason to refrain from proclaiming freedom throughout the land, and indeed, throughout the earth.

The jubilee, moreover, liberates us for particular freedoms:

a) It frees us to go home; to make a pilgrimage, even as Jesus did to Nazareth, and as many Catholics are preparing to do toward Rome when the Grand Jubilee of the Year 2000 is upon us. It also frees us to go home to our place and to our people, and in imagination and memory, meet and re-meet the people who have made us.

b) The jubilee frees us to remember. Three and a half times in the Leviticus text, the voice of God reminds us to remember our story (in part of verse 2, and in verses 38, 42 and 55). The story is this: "I, your God, brought you out of the land of Egypt and into the land of Canaan." The metaphorical power of this memory is great because all of us have Egypts; all of us have Canaans. Indeed, it is even more complicated than simply associating Egypt with slavery and Canaan with freedom. For sometimes we need to flee to Egypt, as the infant Jesus did; and at other times we must admit to plundering others in order to enter the Canaans of our stories. The freedom to remember is a source of dangerous memories.

c) The jubilee frees us to re-create. Insisting on the recreation of Sabbath, and on release from debts and returning home, Jubilee offers us new life, and often a new life where we are free to reshape and reform our lives. This applies to our re-forming of the church ("ecclesia semper re-formanda"); it also applies with special force to two other groups. For the Jubilee grants to us the freedom to re-create the institutions and the situations that fetter prisoners/captives/slaves and we have the freedom to re-create the institutions and the situations that fetter children. Prisoners and children: the Jubilee directs us to work for those things that will make them free. In a country where prison sentences are overloaded onto the backs of the poor and of people of color, the same country where millions of children are oppressed by violence and by poverty, Jubilee freedom gives pride of place to these two groups. As Leviticus teaches, "They, and their children with them shall go free." (Lev. 25:41).

4. Practice justice

There are many ways to speak of justice, from Rabbi Abraham Heschel's reminder that prophetic justice echoes the "pathos" of God, to the 1971 Synod of the world's bishops reminding us that justice must be a constitutive element in the preaching of the gospel, to the 1986 pastoral letter of the U.S. bishops, Economic Justice for All.

When it comes to the particular meaning of justice that Jubilee stresses, however, the phrase of biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann resonates most clearly as specifically jubilarian justice: here, justice means that you find out what belongs to whom and give it back.

In ancient Israel, this referred -- as we can see from Leviticus, from Isaiah, and from Luke's gospel -- to giving back land to its original owners; to the refusal to keep people in debt once the Jubilee time of amnesty was upon them, and to the understanding that families were not to be doomed to poverty forever because of the debts of their ancestors.

The phrase we use today to embody this teaching of justice is "redistribute capital." Here, land and money are still considered capital -- I know of one mutual fund called "Leviticus 25:23" ("The land is mine, says the Lord, and you are but stewards of its gifts"). Participants in the fund give their money to be used by those who can't get credit elsewhere, but who want to start small businesses, especially among poorer people.

Besides land and money, or in addition to it, those of us who are not poor have considerable capital: literacy; access to health care and dental care; running water; heat in the winter; the privilege that accompanies white skin or male gender or Christian religion; the social capital of belonging to groups that will see us through; the educational skills that make it possible for us to get paying jobs. It is up to us to find ways -- again in our dioceses and in our parishes -- to discover processes that will redistribute this capital.

Finding out what belongs to whom and giving it back has particular resonance in another part of life too: in our relations with our families, both the generations coming after us to whom we must give over responsibility for themselves, and to the generations before us whom we must return to the earth as we bury their ashes and their bodies.

5. Hold a great Eucharistic feast

For it is a time of thanksgiving (the meaning of Eucharist); of celebration; of a meal in community, of joyful shouting, and of song.

Everything we know of Jubilee reminds us that when it comes, we must pause for a great feast, for a Sabbath of joy and delight. This feast is especially attuned to liturgical celebration but the celebration might include passing a cup from which we remove drops to remind the celebrants that no feast can be complete while others are suffering -- as is the case in our world.

Still jubilation must be a part of Jubilee, or the stones will cry out, and having allowed the land to lie fallow, and responded to the commands of forgiveness, freedom, and justice, it is now time to join Jesus and John the Baptist, in shouting, "Listen! Turn your life around and hear the Good News! The Kingdom of God is in your midst."

John Howard Yoder makes the point that when John and Jesus made that proclamation jubilee-centuries ago, people knew that kingdom was a public, political term. But they were less likely to know that "good news" and "gospel" were also public terms. The good news of the gospel wasn't any old good news. Instead it was the kind of news you entrusted to a runner, a keryx or herald, who then shouted out the message at the center of the gathered community.

Today, we are the runners; we are the heralds. We carry the lighted torch of the Jubilee kerygma much as the runners did into the Olympic Stadium at the opening of the games last summer. We run underneath the stands, and then out into the open, and finally we hold the torch aloft -- although, like Muhammad Ali, we may be broken and bruised by life and by circumstance.

Still, we are the runners. And as the trumpet sounds, we realize we are here to summon one another to the great Jubilee Liturgy of the year 2000 of this common era.