By collapsing spatial divisions, the Lord’s Supper tells a spatial story about the destiny of the world. The Lord’s Supper is catholic in the truest sense. It is celebrated by those across the world who acknowledge the Lordship of the man from Galilee. However it has a “decentered center; it is celebrated in the multitude of local churches scattered throughout the world, with a great diversity of rites, music, and liturgical spaces.” The Lord’s Supper is a region whose middle point is everywhere, yet also restricted.

Driving down Hawthorne Boulevard the other day I looked up to see Portland, Oregon’s version of Whole Foods called New Seasons Market. The tagline on the building says, “Locally Owned, Locally Grown.” On their website New Seasons is filled with phrases such as “home grown,” “we live local,” and “commitment to the community.” New Seasons is popular in Portland, like the other local restaurants and shops that seem to open daily in Southeast Portland. What is it about local that people love? Why are many cities in the U.S. seeing a resurgence of the Ma & Pa stores? And is there something deeper people are reaching for?

The local la la is at least in part a reaction to the phenomenon known as globalization. Globalization is the process of international integration of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture. Globalization was triggered by advances in communication and transportation, but most recently it has been accelerated by the Internet. In short, globalization flattens space and time detaching things from particular localities. (I am not curmudgeonly enough yet to think either of these movements are inherently bad. What bothers me is a false dichotomy where one ignores the benefits of the opposing services. My opinion is that it is best for them to live in tension. But that does not mean each faction does not have its own ripple effects.)

Globalization, as Cavanaugh puts it, is a “master narrative.”^[1] While bringing things together, ironically it fragments things. The Mcdonaldization of Society causes everything and everyone to line up and taste the same burger in less than a 90 second wait. Whether one is in Paris, Kentucky or Paris, France the McDouble is offered with the same “cheese” and ketchup. But the masternarrative “produces fragmented subjects incapable of telling a genuinely catholic story.”^[2] The catholicity of the movement subsumes the local under the universal and everything loses its distinctiveness. Cavanaugh gives the example of Mexican food being popularized in places like Minnesota.

Just as the food must be universalized and made bland enough to appeal potentially to the taste of anyone anywhere, to compete there must be a simultaneous emphasis on its unique qualities; advertised images must be rooted in a particular location, for example the traditional Mexican culture of the abuelita before the clay oven sipping pulque and shaping tortillas in the palm of her hand. Anyone who has stood at a Taco Bell counter and watched a surly white teenager inject burritos with a sour cream gun knows how absurd these images are.^[3]

The ephemeral particularity is the flipside of a dominant universality. The illusion of diversity is shattered by the combined architectural Pizza Huts and Taco Bells. Everyone knows Italy and Mexico are not together enclosed in the clear glass double-doors.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]

 Notes:

^[1]The title and much of the inspiration for this article came from William Cavanaugh’s excellent article on the same subject. I have tried to distill his material into a more readable format, while also adding some reflections of my own. William Cavanaugh, “The World in a Wafer: A Geography of the Eucharist as Resistance to Globalization,”Modern Theology 15 (1999): 181–96.

^[1] Ibid., 182.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid., 187.