{"id":15967,"date":"2018-01-18T16:56:49","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T00:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=15967"},"modified":"2018-01-18T16:58:17","modified_gmt":"2018-01-19T00:58:17","slug":"beyond-boundaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/beyond-boundaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond boundaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As I embarked upon my reading of Benedict Anderson\u2019s Imagined Communities, <\/em>I felt uncomfortably trapped at a formal dinner party sitting next to the most erudite, obnoxious man. He was unfortunately trying to impress me with his name-dropping, and relished quoting obscure literary texts in their original languages. It was only as I compelled myself to sit through the appetizer, main course, dessert, and aperitifs<\/em> that the brilliance of his argument began to dawn on me. We create nations. They are a figment of our imagination. And yet, while they begin in the mind, they end up having real power and enduring presence in our world today.<\/p>\n

As most of you know, I live just a few hundred metres from the border with the most powerful nation in the world. At the end of my street looking out my office window, I see the St Croix River, which is the easternmost Canada-US boundary line, and on the other side, less than a rowboat paddle away, the town of Calais, Maine. There is no Wall to separate nations; at low tide, if you could bear the cold and ice, you could wade across the river. The closest gas station to my house is on the US side, and, what a deal, I can fill up for two-thirds what I pay back home. My borrowed library books for our studies get sent to a PO box in Maine because books can be sent for free anywhere in the US but not to my home address outside the US a kilometre further. As I walk across the bridge, immediately the accent of the locals changes to the peculiar non-rhotic twang of a Down Easterner: \u201cI pahked the cah on Hahvahd Yahd.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Breuilly\u2019s symposium on Nations and Nationalism celebrated the work of Anderson\u2019s groundbreaking study of what makes nations a reality.\u00a0 He states, \u201cImagined Communities<\/em> is itself a loose-jointed work of historical comparativism. It offers an account of what kind of social phenomenon nationalism is, how it arose and how it spread around the globe.\u201d[1]<\/a> Beginning in the New World with \u201ccreole pioneers\u201d, the social experiment of nationalism expanded and strengthened through the advent of print capitalism in vernacular languages.<\/p>\n

In Anderson\u2019s thesis, imagined doesn\u2019t mean imaginary. Nations are real. But these definitions are created in our minds, and hold over us a strong and emotional power. Something happens to the chemistry in my brain when I walk across the bridge at the end of my street. I know I\u2019m in a foreign land. Even though I may live in the same valley as my neighbours on the other side of the river, I feel like the other: an outsider, an interloper, just visiting.<\/p>\n

In his 2015 obituary for Anderson, New Republic<\/em> editor Jeet Heer summarizes the issues raised in his celebrated career exploring nationhood: \u201cHow do diverse nations like Indonesia, made up of many languages and ethnicities, hold together? Why do they sometimes fall apart? What keeps people in large nations from killing each other and why does national cohesion sometime fail?\u201d[2]<\/a>\u00a0The answer, says Anderson, is that we create \u201cnarrative of identity\u201d[3]<\/a> to hold us together. The stories we tell ourselves hold us in place and give our place in it meaning. The dramatic and inspirational Story of America arcs over the Boston Tea Party, the War of Independence, and Manifest Destiny\u2019s \u201crocket\u2019s red glare\/the bombs bursting in air\u201d. It\u2019s a loud story, and it\u2019s hard to get a word in edgewise when your neighbour is ten times the size. A quieter story is told north of the border in the slowly evolving Story of Canada with its voyageurs<\/em> and United Empire Loyalists[4]<\/a>, deference to the Crown, a complicated bicultural and bilingual French-English reality, and the celebrated fact that we are all immigrants in the top half of North America.<\/p>\n

In my view, Anderson\u2019s study of nationalism and the creation of imagined communities can and should be applied to our understanding of the church, an imagined community that supersedes current national boundaries. We tell ourselves this story, for example, from Peter\u2019s first letter:<\/p>\n

\u201cBut you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God\u2019s own people,\u00a0in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God\u2019s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.\u201d[5]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We must use our imagination to understand these truths that pull together people across deeply loved national boundaries and into covenant with each other. We are in the world but not of it, so our identities as British, American, Canadian, Filipino, Algerian, and Colombian are merely window dressing. What matters is our love for Christ and willingness to follow Him in service for our world. Our allegiance goes beyond that of a flag.<\/p>\n

One of my tasks this winter is to create a new imagined community of millennial givers with the launch of the Spark Initiative with my colleagues from the Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec.\u00a0 I recently created a Facebook group, similar to our own PDX Seminary LGP8 DMin Cohort, where an imagined community can be crafted and nurtured to benefit others in the name of Christ. The stories we tell and the values of faith and generosity we uphold will guide this group.<\/p>\n

While narratives are powerful, national stories are beginning to fray. Pico Iyer, author of The Global Soul<\/em>, often speaks of the rootlessness experienced by many world citizens today. This strange transnationalism, where one feels at home everywhere and nowhere, is yet another manifestation of the postmodern shakeup of all things, which, like nationalism, are modernist creations of the imagination. After a lifetime of wandering, he strangely ends up settling in Japan, one of the most homogeneous societies on earth. He states, “Japan is therefore an ideal place because I never will be a true citizen here, and will always be an outsider, however long I live here and however well I speak the language. And the society around me is as comfortable with that as I am\u2026 I am not rooted in a place, I think, so much as in certain values and affiliations and friendships that I carry everywhere I go; my home is both invisible and portable. But I would gladly stay in this physical location for the rest of my life, and there is nothing in life that I want that it doesn\u2019t have.”[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

Iyer\u2019s attitude toward his adopted nation to me seems like the sort of approach we should develop as Christians towards our own nations. Content, not yearning for more, yet always aware that we are outsiders, belonging to a more eternal Kingdom.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>[1]<\/a> Breuilly, John. \u201cBenedict Anderson\u2019s Imagined Communities: A Symposium.\u201d Nations and Nationalism<\/em> 22, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 634. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/nana.12236<\/a>.\u00a0 Accessed January 18, 2018.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Heer, Jeet. \u201cBenedict Anderson, Man Without a Country.\u201d The New Republic<\/em>, December 13, 2015. https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/125706\/benedict-anderson-man-without-country<\/a>.\u00a0 Accessed January 18, 2018.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism<\/em>. (New York: Verso, 1991), 205.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a>\u00a0The voyageurs<\/em> were French fur trappers who explored the rivers of North America by canoe.\u00a0 The United Empire Loyalists were those American colonists who migrated north and remained loyal to the King and British North America.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> 1 Peter 2:9-10 (NRSV).<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a>Brenner, Angie;\u00a0“Global Writer, Heart & Soul \u2013 Interview with Pico Iyer”<\/a>,\u00a0Wild River Review<\/a><\/em>, November 19, 2007. http:\/\/www.wildriverreview.com\/interviews\/pico-iyer-global-writer-heart-soul\/<\/a>.\u00a0 Accessed January 18, 2018.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I embarked upon my reading of Benedict Anderson\u2019s Imagined Communities, I felt uncomfortably trapped at a formal dinner party sitting next to the most erudite, obnoxious man. He was unfortunately trying to impress me with his name-dropping, and relished quoting obscure literary texts in their original languages. It was only as I compelled myself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[583],"class_list":["post-15967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anderson","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15967"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15974,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15967\/revisions\/15974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}