ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

On a day when, certainly in England, people will be pouring over the local election results as they drink their morning coffee, let me quote words which have a slightly more universal ambiance:

'Their sound has gone out into all lands.'

The quotation, from the book of Psalms, originally referred to what is known
as the music of the spheres.

But for me, these words evoke the work of people who I have missed for the
last three weeks. I've been in the USA, a country in which newspapers
are scarce in many places and where television news......well, what can I say?

On two evenings, I turned on a news channel and watched three presenters who,
for an hour each, parsed the latest utterances from the White House with their own
carefully selected panel of experts. It was as if there no other news was worth broadcasting.

By contrast, last night on ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ 2, Lyse Doucet, presented a stunning and balanced review of what has been happening in Syria for the enlightenment of people who don't live anywhere near that country. Reporters and foreign correspondents do that, even at the risk of their own lives – as witnessed by the nine journalists killed this week in Kabul, one of whom worked for the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ World Service.

Their words, their sound has gone into all lands.

And we need that news, that information about what is happening elsewhere.

We need it because through history, trade, political and religious connections,
through tourism, cultural exchanges and the way we treat the earth's environment,
we are bound inseparably to places and people we may never see, but whose nations
affect us as our nations affect them.

The world is not a monoglottal empire dining on the same fast foods and fizzy
drinks, forever deferring to Western expectations. It is multicultural, diverse
and challenging by design - I would claim - of the living God. When Jesus walked
the earth, inhabitants from three continents were commonly found in his native land;
people from seven different races meet him in the Gospels, and all are welcome.

We are global citizens who are best nourished when we are connected. This is something which an elderly lady revealed in a letter I once received. She wrote of how she was so glad that someone she would never see, from a country she would never visit and in a language she would never speak had written a song which found great resonance at her husband's funeral. The woman came from Scotland, the song … from Mexico.

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