I recall how I used to puzzle at the history of western Europe and its eastern neighbor, and try to imagine what they were talking about. They were talking about the eastern and western ends of what had once been the Roman Empire. Rome, in the west, came to represent one political and military and religious center, and at first, Greece and Constantinople (now Istanbul) represented the other, somewhat Mid-eastern side. Gradually, Russia, and Russian Orthodoxy, became the other pole of western civilization.
What Russia had been was symbolized by the music and art of the figure skating competition, when it seemed that every skater had chosen the glorious music of Russian musicians.
We, here in the United States, have a hard time understanding that New York, or Chicago or San Francisco is not the center of the universe, any more than Sochi is. When Europe was barely more than a semi-civilized society, with mud on its feet and bows and arrows in hand, on the other side of the globe, there were great and ancient civilizations with glorious art and music and architecture. Today, we are beginning to come to terms with that, again. China, India, Thailand, Japan, Korea, and other, smaller places, far from us, have become much closer neighbors. And we know, now, finally, that all of us began in Africa; that all of us are descended from people who walked out of Africa, and across Europe and the Mid-East, through Asia, and all the way down to Patagonia, and when they could not find a way to walk, they pushed out on rafts and outrigger canoes, to populate the whole earth.
And they are still walking, and sailing, and soaring! The faces of the whole earth are showing up everywhere; in our restaurants, our neighborhoods, our work places, and at the Olympics. So much of what we, and everyone else too, have assumed about our own place being the center of every good thing, is patently absurd.
When we look at the face of that fifteen-year-old Russian girl, wearing a jacket that recalled Catherine the Great, skating to Russian classical music, and looking vaguely and beautifully Asian, probably because she comes from a nation that spans both Europe and Asia, a nation that has western Europe on one side and China and Japan on the other, we are not looking at something other. We are looking at what it is to have walked out of Africa to almost every far place on earth, and what it looks like to gather again to show how we have learned to ski and skate and sing and play ice games.
It only sounds foolish when we pretend that God is on our side, and that Eden is in our back yard; that the earth is not round, and that we have not walked almost everywhere.
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