15 May 2020 | Going global

We are nearing the end of a very unusual Christian Aid Week. This year there could be no door to door collecting. Hopefully, online donations will have soared instead. Many of the people helped by Christian Aid across the world will have been severely impacted by the pandemic. Nowhere is immune from this global crisis.

Before this all kicked off, we had got used to globalisation and the sense of living in a 'global village'. The supply chains for our industries increasingly extend worldwide and items arrive 'just in time', rather than being stockpiled here. Thanks to the Internet, we too can instantly order things at the tap of the screen or the click of the mouse from literally anywhere on the globe.

Earth from space (NASA public domain image)

London, of course, is a vibrantly global city with people from all over the world living, working and travelling here. Maybe it was our global connections that made London especially susceptible to the spread of the coronavirus. Tragically, it didn't take long for something that originated in Wuhan to arrive at our shores.

Globalisation is not an altogether new invention, however. I learned recently that one of the most staple of English fruits, the apple, was originally developed in Asia Minor over four thousand years ago. Our apples are mostly descended from those introduced into Britain during the Norman Conquest in 1066. Interestingly, the ‘Granny Smith’ was first discovered in Australia in the mid-nineteenth-century. If it hadn't been for our global connections, we'd still be eating sour crab apples, known as ‘wildings’, in England today! 

An apple a day! © Philip Richter

Christianity has been a global phenomenon right from the start. Even before it spread through the Roman Empire and beyond, it was never intended to be tribal. As John’s Gospel puts it: ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’ (John 3:16). And St Paul makes clear in his speech in Athens that ‘from one ancestor God made all nations’ (Acts 17:26). Perhaps it was this sense, so central to Christian faith, that we belong to a single human race, that paved the way for what we now recognise as globalisation?

Although, as we now painfully appreciate, globalisation has in one sense made us more vulnerable, it has also brought new possibilities. We have enjoyed (and will one day enjoy again!) the chance to travel the world and expand our horizons. The sense of being a 'global village' also gives the nations of the world the potential, at this current time, to come together, to jointly combat the pandemic. Whatever the temptation, nation-states do not necessarily have to 'pull up the drawbridge' and look after their own. In the face of this massive global threat, nations will, I hope and pray, increasingly seek to develop treatments and vaccines in collaboration with each other. Hopefully, they will also combine to help out the people that Christian Aid holds most closely to its heart.

We may live on an island, but that doesn’t mean that we have to be insular. The metaphysical poet and Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, John Donne (1572-1631), coined the now-famous phrase ‘No man is an island’ in one of his writings (Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII). The piece ends with the words ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’. This was a reference to the ringing of church bells at funerals to mark someone’s passing. John Donne was himself seriously ill at the time of writing, in the winter of 1623, and it may be that he was pondering his own mortality. Equally, he may have been highlighting how interconnected we are as human beings – what affects one of us, affects us all. And that is surely as true today as it was then!

No man is an island entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were,
As well as any manor of thy friend's,
Or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Philip