One World or Many?

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 3rd of March, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
after a week both balmy and freezing,
to worship, to claim together our place
as citizens of the world
and to lift up both the beauty and the demands
placed upon us by being alive in this era.
Love, participate in our celebrations
and hold us close to our deepest values.

(together) And may our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become..

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

(all the metropolitan areas in the world, from the largest in strict order down to Columbus)

Tôkyô New York-Philadelphia México Seoul São Paulo Ôsaka-Kôbe-Kyôto Jakarta Dilli (Delhi) Mumbai (Bombay) Los Angeles al-Qahira (Cairo) Kolkata (Calcutta) Manila Buenos Aires Moskva (Moscow) Shanghai Rhein-Ruhr-Koln (Cologne) Paris Rio de Janeiro London Tehrân Chicago-Milwaukee Karâchi Dhaka Istanbul Beijing Lagos Krung Thep (Bangkok) Nagoya Xianggang (Hong Kong) Bogotá Taipei Washington-Baltimore Lima Kinshasa-Brazzaville San Francisco Boston Chongqing Tianjin Chennai Baghdâd Randstad (Amsterdam Metro Area) Shenyang Detroit-Windsor al-Khartûm Bengaluru Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) Haidarâbâd Santiago Lahore Toronto Guangzhou Dallas Madrid Johannesburg Miami Sankt Peterburg Ahmadâbâd Houston Singapore-Johor Bahru Wuhan Harbin Belo Horizonte al-Iskandarîyah (Alexandria) Pusan San Diego-Tijuana Sydney Fukuoka-Kitakyûshû Milano Yangon (Rangoon) Atlanta Abidjan Berlin Barcelona Guadalajara Pune Bandung al-Jaza´ir Surabaya Ibadan Porto Alegre Manchester-Liverpool ar-Riyâd Napoli Kuala Lumpur Seattle Roma Montréal Kano Caracas Monterrey Recife Ankara Toskent Melbourne ad-Dâr-al-Baydâ (Casablanca) Chengdu Hamburg Kyyiv (Kiev) Athína (Athens) Birmingham Dalian Salvador Pyeongyang Phoenix Cape Town Nairobi Nanjing Cleveland Hangzhou Medellín Taegu Fortaleza Minneapolis-Saint Paul Medan Xian Tel Aviv-Yafo Zibo Sûrat Curitiba Cali Santo Domingo Accra Denver Kânpur Rhein-Main (Frankfurt metro area) Changchun Guayaquil Jiddah La Habana Saint Louis Katowice Luanda Âddîs Âbebâ Lisboa Budapest Esfahân Guatemala Rawalpindi Châttagâm Puebla ´Amman Kaohsiung Qingdao Ha Noi Jinan Dar es Salaam Pittsburgh Kolamba Halab Anshan Dakar Izmir Jaipur Tampa Durban München Stuttgart København-Malmö Lakhnau Nâgpur Tarâbulus Harare Portland Sapporo Bucuresti Warszawa Faisalâbâd Zhengzhou Kâbul Taichung Brasília Baki Mashhad Wien Cincinnati San Juan Juárez-El Paso Vancouver Kunming Niznij Novgorod Belém Guiyang Taiyuan Lanzhou Bayrut Barranquilla Maracaibo Alma Gujranwala Kansas City Sacramento Hai Phong Quito Minsk Shantou San Salvador Donets'k Patna Brussel al-Mawsil Valencia Port-au-Prince Lille-Kortrijk Montevideo Lusaka Goiânia Beograd Shijiazhuang Salt Lake City al-Kuwayt Kharkiv Indore Lyon San´â Tunis Maputo Hiroshima Qiqihar Stockholm San Antonio Norfolk-Virginia Beach Torino Nanchang Taejeon ar-Ribât Indianapolis Orlando Conakry Palembang Buffalo-Saint Catharines Santos ad-Dammâm Changsha Columbus

silence

As citizens of one of the great cities of the world, but as human beings before we are citizens, we turn to the personal communities of which we are a part, the families and circles of friends and colleagues. We name them as citizens of our heart…those whom we miss, those who are far away, those who occupy our concern. We bless them by remembering them in this common place, either in the continuing silence or aloud.

naming

The teachers of ancient Greece remind us that our whole earth, with all of its cities however large or small, and all of its mountains and deep oceans, is still just one note in a vaster music. A music of the spheres, they called it, a harmony of the cosmos that our human music only echoes. Ah, but how beautiful is that echo as it moves through our longing hearts.

First Reading [Next] [back to top]
The First Reading comes from Galileo, a play by Bertolt Brecht written in 1940. This is from the earlier version of two. The play is presently being staged in Columbus this weekend at the Jewish Center This is a speech put in the mouth of Galileo as he talks to Andrea.

Walls and crystal spheres and immobility! For two thousand years we believed that the sun and all the stars of heaven turned around us. The Pope, the cardinals, the princes, scholars, captains, merchants, fishwives and schoolchildren thought they were sitting, stationary, in this crystal globe. But now we're emerging from it, Andrea.

For the old age is through, and a new age is upon us. During hundreds of years it has been as if we awaited something. The cities are narrow, and so are brains. But now the word is: since it is so, it does not remain so. For everything moves, my friend.

On our old continent a rumor has arisen: there are new continents. And since our ships have sailed to them, the saying circulates on the laughing continents: the great, much-dreaded ocean is just a puddle. And we have come to take great pleasure in searching out the causes of all things: why the stone falls when it is dropped, and how it rises when it is thrown into the air.

Every day something is found. Even the oldest of people have the young shout in their ears what new thing has been discovered. Much has been found already, but more can be found in the future. And so there is still much for new generations to do. The old teachings, believed for a thousand years, are on the point of collapsing… But humankind will soon be properly informed as to its dwelling place, the heavenly body where it has its home…

All the world says: yes, that is written in the books, but now let us see for ourselves. The most celebrated truths are tapped on the shoulder. What never was doubted is doubted now. And thereby a wind has arisen which blows up the gold-brocaded cloaks of princes and prelates, so that fat or skinny legs are seen beneath, legs just like our legs. In the markets, the stars are talked about. It was always said that the stars were fastened to a crystal vault so that they could not fall. Now we have taken heart and let them float in the air, without support, and they are embarked on a great voyage - like us, who are also without support and embarked on a great voyage.

The universe lost its center overnight, and in the morning it had a countless number of centers. So that now each one can be regarded as a center and none can. For, suddenly, there is a lot of room.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
this morning comes from Svetlana Boym's remarkable recent book, The Future of Nostalgia

In Europe those who resist globalization American-style often appeal to the traditional European social structures of welfare, a balance of work and leisure, market values and cultural values. The most recent movements that have emerged in 2000 often have the word slow in their names, such as the movement for Slow Eating, which is a part of the Gastronomic Left, who try to influence the future through gastronomic nostalgia. Having begun, predictably, in Italy and France, the movement focuses on the politics of food, and protests what they call "Frankenfood" made with utmost efficiency for fast consumption. Yet even the movement against globalization that culminated with protests in Seattle and Washington was organized globally and widely used the World Wide Web for the dissemination of information. Some activists tried to argue that they were not against globalization altogether; rather, they were against technological and economic globalization and for globalization with a human face (and the freedom to eat slowly). Nostalgia in fact has always spoken a global language, from the nineteenth-century romantic poem to the late- twentieth-century e-mail.

Sermon: One World or Many? [Next][back to top]

Last week, when I gave a sermon on global warming, I talked about some of the surprises surrounding my visit to the city of Punta Arenas, in the Tierra Del Fuego area of Chile, a city so far away from everything else in the world, they literally think of themselves as living at the end of the world.

One of the surprises I didn't talk with you about last week had to do with the kinds of restaurants I found in Punta Arenas.

Here at "the end of the world," I had my choice of three kinds of Chinese food, Mandarin, Hunan and Szechuan, Yugoslavian food from the Dalmatian coast, Italian food from both the north and south of that country, Japanese sushi, as well as fast-food type North American hamburgers and hot-dogs, and all the various Chilean dishes, like pastel de choclo, a kind of corn pudding, and cebolla, a sort of king crab.

Fifty years ago, all you would have been able to get was local southern Chilean food. Now, the whole world can be found there, thriving in the streets of a city with penguins waddling on the local beach.

And of course, no North American visitor to France fails to be amazed by the sight of the McDonald's or the Poulet Frit a la Kentucky on the Champs Elysee in Paris. Like one of those famous canaries in a coal mine whose death warned miners of imminent air-quality disaster, our attitudes toward food anticipated the globalization that runs away with our lives more and more every day.

Then there are the eternal icons of Coke and Pepsi, fast food, fast cars and sexy movies flexing with Schwarzenegger violence and military explosions. As the second reading by Svetlana Boym reminds us, a lot of what is now called globalization looks an awful lot like Americanzation to many folks in Europe…and beyond Europe. And it's often not the prettiest side of the United States of America either.

Of course, the idea of globalization itself is hardly new. It has reached high gear in our day and age, but the ancient Romans themselves noticed the effect of the world at their doorstep, when they stopped to note that orange-robed Buddhist missionaries from India walked the streets of Alexandria, and that reports kept coming in from the East of a fabulous land which we now call China. And this early globalism worked both ways too…it's well known that Greek sculptors influenced early Buddhist images of the Buddha in India. Global issues have dogged our human tracks for centuries now, demanding that we be less local and more universal in our sympathies.

The amazing speech of Galileo in Brecht's play also reminds us of both the excitement and the terror which accompany this historic move away from the national toward the international. It speaks of whole new way of looking at things, a reframing of everything we ever thought we knew. Galileo reframes the terrifyingly vast Atlantic into a mere puddle. The crystal spheres on which the fixed stars used to hang broke when Galileo struck them with the club of his telescope In a single generation, the stars and planets were no longer circling the earth as if we were the center of things ..instead, they floated loose. And localized philosophies and religions, began to lose their moorings too, as those days moved forward, so that by the time of Emerson, in the US of A, religious liberals were reading the Bagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, and Hindus like Ramakrishna were reading the New Testament for the first time.

But remember, this new way of looking at things caused as much nausea as it called out joy and excitement. These cross-cultural, globalizing tendencies led to a panic attack among, and within, many cultures. This panic attack we now call by the label "fundamentalism." Fundamentalism is a way of looking at the world, but more importantly, it's a way of defending a certain way of looking at the world, and it leads automatically toward what might be called totalitarian thinking… "our way or no way." As you know, this approach to things can be found all around the world now, in various religions and even political forms. It did not, contrary to some popular opinions, exist per se before the early twentieth century; and its birth stems entirely from the fears generated by the early forms of globalization, the meeting and interpenetration of culture with culture.

There are many factors that have contributed to this tremendous event, which, like the discovery that the stars were not fixed, inspires both wonder and deep insecurity.

One is the growth of cities. A thousand years ago, cities like London and Paris in Europe, and Cahokia in Illinois, and Beijing in China, were really very tiny. Thirty to forty thousand, max. Smaller than Clintonville.

In the twentieth century, everything changed. In the early nineteen seventies, Lagos, Nigeria was a small city, much smaller than Columbus. Now, only thirty years later, it is one of the largest cities on the earth, with over 15 million people.

This has happened a hundred times across the globe in the last thirty years. We are just beginning to learn how to live together in such vast concentrations, and right now, as global conflict spreads from nation to nation like some perverse wildfire, we are obviously not doing very well. Not in the Middle East, not in Africa, not in South Asia, and not even in these United States where systemic crime, incarceration and poverty still obscure "the American dream."

Moreover, the mere fact that technology connects so many of us makes this global violence all the more perverse, too. Since getting on e-mail, total strangers from Ushiaia in Argentina and Moskva (Moscow), Russia have written me to talk about liberal religious ideas. These have become real people to me, though I have never met them. And yet, despite the amazing global connections I find in my life, this e-communication aspect of the new globalism is still largely an illusion. For, despite that nearly magical global reach, only one and a half percent of the population of the world actually owns a computer with which to get on-line.

Secondly, globalization is signified by shifts and vast enlargements in democracy. For example, in the last thirty years, the number of people who routinely vote in this supposedly democratic nation of ours has gone down. Cynicism about our national government is rife, both from the right and the left. Democratic decisions are routinely overturned by the courts in the US of A. Such democratic malpractice has become the hallmark of many industrialized nations. This is in sharp contrast, however, to nations like Chile, for example, where every vote counts and counts a lot. Way over ninety percent of the citizens there routinely vote in even the smallest elections. The folks down there constantly bombarded me with questions about why United Staters refuse to vote. Quite frankly, they were bewildered by our practices.

Furthermore, democratic notions, that is, participation in the life of communities by the people who live in them, are making their way across the world. For example, in the present thrust of globalization, more and more women are playing roles in nations that only thirty years ago did not welcome so much as a peep from them.

Another sign of globalization that both excites and terrifies people, depending on their points of view, is the drastic change we are witnessing in the shapes of families. These shapes are now visible all over the world, a fact that alarms fundamentalists everywhere. Because the twentieth century gave us the means to separate sexuality from necessary childbirth, whole new forms of family life are being tested. In Italy, for example, the land of la madonna and bambini, the average family now has only one child, if that. Italy, in fact, has the lowest birth rate of any nation in Europe.

The separation of sex from childbearing also has allowed for expressions of alternative sexuality all around the world, especially gay and lesbian cultures, but including bisexual and transgender expressions too. Fundamentalists all around the world find such expressions as taboo as the authority of women, and thus their strong speeches against such things. When Robertson and Falwell blamed the attacks on the Trade Towers "on feminists, gays and lesbians, abortion doctors and ACLU types," they were damned as foolish by almost everyone, but in fact, they were also clearly linking arms with fundamentalists all around the globe who are nauseated by these changes, caused by the present changes in social life that mark the march of globalization.

However, it is the economic realm which proves the most complex and difficult of all the issues surrounding globalization. This is because one of the signs of globalization is that national boundaries mean very little any more, in many ways. Corporations are merging every day into vast transnational corporations. The World Bank and The World Trade Organization are not nationalized, but international in scope. Slowly, their critics fear, their aggressive claims will stretch more and more universally around the globe. Their goal is a totally integrated world economy. Since many of these international corporations live outside the restraints or local needs of the nations, there is no need for the profits of the multinationals to be "invested back in the community" since there is no community. The profits are apparently for the enlargement of the international corporations. It also appears to most critics to be an integrated world economy, but one with little expression of values in support of a healthy earth. Corporate health can often be at the expense of a healthy earth. Our precious rainforests, for example, can just go fish, except that the fish are all dead, too, from both over-fishing and toxic waste.

The power of these world organizations is self-anointed and totally removed from the heartening localized democratic expressions found elsewhere. It's the casual contempt of these organizations against their socially-minded critics that has helped to generate those recent violent demonstrations in places like Seattle, Quebec City and Genova in Italy. Even the auto companies of my youthful hometown are slowly out-growing Detroit and spreading over the world. They hire cheap labor, damn close to sweatshop style slave labor, in foreign nations so that our cars will be affordable. This practice, multiplied a thousand, thousand times, is slowly cutting a huge gap between the northern and southern hemispheres on the earth. The equator is slowly but surely becoming a line that distinguishes wealth from poverty on a global scale.

Furthermore, unionization is more and more condemned by the international corporations because the demand for fair wages here competes with the ease of finding unbelievably cheap labor elsewhere. Deregulation and privatization have also contributed to a general concentration of corporate power that in many ways both transcends and distorts the very real power of the old nations.

Some of this transnational power is revealed, as I said earlier, in the spread of homogenous culture everywhere on earth. Fast food in Tierra Del Fuego, McDonald's in Beijing, Gap Jeans in Tokyo, Coca Cola T-Shirts in Jerusalem itself, both in Arabic and Hebrew, rock concerts in Kinshasa or in Moscow nightclubs, Nestle's chocolate in the shadow of the Taj Mahal and Schwarzenegger films blowing up everything everywhere…this is a quick sketch of the surface of the new globalized world. But the underbelly of all this dazzle sickens the soul…the vast poverty, the tiny concentrations of power, the dissolution of former dignities everywhere. Worse, it's important that we never forget that the exporting of the swift or sweet or fashionable is not confined to chocolate and coke and cinema…our own cynical government sold the famous Taliban real weapons (instead of the fake ones used in movies) long before we disapproved of their ways of governing. No wonder so many confuse globalization with Americanization.

That the world will continue to globalize goes without saying. As Galileo puts it succinctly: "For everything changes, my friend." But we are not condemned to be passengers on a runaway train. Our role as liberal religious people is to help throw a few switches and get our speeding train on more level tracks. This we do by lifting up deep and rooted values found in our principles…the inherent worth of every human being whether they live below or above the equator, equity and compassion for everyone, not just the transnational leaders who anoint themselves our guardians; respect for the earth of which we are part; the right of conscience; the goal of world community, not global conformity; and this, with liberty and justice for all. These are mighty values, rich and corrective. Think of them, in Svetlana Boym's language, as a form of nostalgia…not nostalgia for the past, but nostalgia for the future. Sure, I agree, our values sound terribly abstract, but that is hardly an excuse for refusing to embody them concretely.

As Svetlana Boym reminded us in her reading, we might want to let food predict the way back to a saner kind of globalization, by deliberately growing and eating slow food instead of fast food, or by working to shape technology so that it improves, and links, the many worlds that make up our world, instead of boring holes in the ozone. But in any case, as Galileo reminds us, there is "plenty of room all of a sudden." Room for some fear and nausea, yes, but also room for the excitement that the more positive results of globalization bring as potential gifts to us all. And now may we have enough confidence in our principles and excitement to live them out and announce them to the whole world, from Punta Arenas to Vladivostok, from Nome to Capetown. Yes, exactly, you know which world I'm talking about, that same world hanging in space which our astronaut brother Russell Schweikart reminds us is a perfect whole…so beautiful, so small and so fragile. Ah yes, indeed, upon this small round earth, Dona Nobis Pacem. Grant us Peace

Prayer for an Island in Space   [back to top]

Dona nobis pacem. Peace for us all, I pray.
Not just for some of us, please note,
but all of us.

OK the oppressed first, yes,
but then the oppressors too, who will find their
first peace in a lifetime by refusing to control and harm others or bend them to their will.
Peace for all on this island glowing in the abyss,
this small ship tossing on infinite waves!

Peace for the poor first, of course,
and then the ones who claim
to own everything, even our souls;
for in releasing their ownership, they too will
know freedom for the first time, and peace.

Dona nobis pacem, Amor

Peace, please, for us all, O Love,
Not as a golden gift from above, but as unexpected wind for our sails and sacred provisions for our journey…
the provisions of friendship, anger, joy, and fierce honesty.

Amen. Amen. Dona Nobis Pacem

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