After Modernity?: Secularity, Globalization, and the Reenchantment of the World

11. Celebrating the Church Year as a Constructive Response to Globalization

h 219 Scott Waalkes Celebrating the Church Year as a Constructive Response to Globalization Chapter 11 A few years ago, I pulled a Granny Smith apple out of our family ’s refrigerator and began to peel a thumbnail-sized sticker off its waxy green skin—a sticker that said, “New Zealand, ENZA, Granny Smith, #4017.” For once, at least, I stopped to think about what I was doing. New Zealand is nearly ten thousand miles from my family’s home in Ohio, and yet we paid ninety-nine cents a pound for these apples. Without even thinking about it, I was eating in a global food economy. My New Zealand apple helps tell the story of an already existing globalization—a quasi-liturgy, if you will—that has shaped all of us from childhood to the present through our buying, selling, producing, consuming, eating, voting, and viewing. Globalization is part of our everyday practices, and we are already responding to globalization in our daily lives, even if we are doing nothing consciously. Depositing our paycheck in the bank makes us part of global finance. Buying a T-shirt made in China connects us to the globalization of work. Eating food from the local grocery chain connects us to a global food supply chain. Shopping at a superstore turns us into a global consumer. Fueling up our cars ties us to a global political system. Buying foreign goods joins us to global trade patterns. Voting or joining a nongovernmental organization links us to global political communities. Viewing a Hollywood or a Bollywood film links us to cultural meanings accessed across the globe. We cannot escape being enmeshed in practices of globalization. 220 Scott Waalkes Although globalization does not dictate the way we live, it is something we engage daily.1 But what is globalization? More than a buzzword, it is a term describing our shrinking world. Drawing on the literature, we can define globalization as a process of increasing economic, ecological , political, and cultural contacts between peoples on the planet.2 While such “transplanetary” contacts between peoples in different world regions are nothing new—humans have been migrating since the dawn of recorded history—the density, velocity, and numbers of supraterritorial social relations are increasing in unprecedented ways.3 Supraterritorial contacts are “social connections that substantially transcend territorial geography” and create situations of “transworld simultaneity (that is, they extend anywhere across the planet at the same time) and transworld instantaneity (that is, they move anywhere on the planet in no time).”4 Airplanes, television, and the Internet, among other technologies, have helped compress space and time in ways that Europeans and North Americans recognize in their daily lives. We call our computer tech support line and end up talking with a person in India. We log into our accounts and shift money in seconds. We download African music in minutes, and we can fly to Africa in hours. European converts to Islam join a “transnational and supranational” community, and radical members of that globalized community crash airplanes into skyscrapers.5 ThomasFriedmanmayoverstatethecasewhenhewrites,“Theworld is being flattened. I didn’t start it and you can’t stop it, except at a great cost to human development and your own future.”6 But there is no question that Western Christians live in a world that pushes them into the rhythms of the simultaneous and instantaneous more than into the rhythms of liturgical time. Friedman presents us with the reality of the world and restricts the imagination to the given. I argue here that Christian liturgy can liberate our imaginations and incorporate us into the drama of living in God’s story, thereby countering the rival quasi-liturgies of globalization. Many Everyday Globalizations as Rival Liturgies Nonsocial scientists sometimes lump together under the umbrella of globalization a wide variety of phenomena that should be distinguished clearly in our shrinking world. Sloppy usage of the term can leadtoany numberof gross generalizations thatallow us toavoidour personal connections to the many manifestations of globalization Celebrating the Church Year as a Constructive Response to Globalization 221 in our daily lives. Clearly distinguishing these manifestations will help us understand these globalizations better—the better to engage them constructively by seeing them as rival liturgies. The first type of globalization is economic, and within this are the globalizations of finance, labor, consumption, and trade.7 Each of these intermeshes with our everyday lives in different but related ways. We...