Today’s Scripture Reading
(November 22, 2018): Numbers 36
On January 1, 1949, James
Thomas Mangan marched into the Cook County, Illinois Recorder of Deeds and
Titles office to register a deed. It might have been the strangest declaration of ownership in human
history. James Thomas Mangan was attempting to register ownership of the
entirety of outer space. With the registering of the deed, Mangan laid claims
to a new nation called “Celestia.” The purpose of “Celestia’ was to save the
vastness of outer space from human mismanagement. Mangan’s “Celestia” was
politely ignored by most of the significant powers of the world, but when
Mangan unveiled the flag of “Celestia” in June 1958, a blue hashtag or pound
symbol on a white disc flying on a field of blue, the flag, for a short time,
was displayed at the United Nations along with the flags of other nations.
Mangan died in 1970, and with him, the dreams of “Celestia,” although the
question that he posed continues to be asked
today. Is it possible for one man, woman, or even nation to own outer space?
During Mangan’s lifetime, the question was purely theoretical. Over the years
since his death, it has become a more practical issue. Not only have we placed satellites
and created a serious pollution problem along the only border that “Celestia”
possesses, the one that divides space from the planet earth, but we have made
intrusions into the Mangan’s nation. And, not that far into the future, we will
begin to mine space of the riches and treasure that it holds; a treasure that will be a necessity to make up
for the way that we have misused the riches of our planet. James Thomas Mangan
wanted to protect space, and in all honesty,
he might have been a better candidate for the role of protector than the corporations and superpowers
which are likely to make that decision in the not too distant
future.
The ownership
of space is an important question. But it is also one
that is probably unanswerable when we can’t even figure out ownership of the
earth. Just outside of my office at home sits a globe from another era. Many
nations are not included on its face. The globe still proudly declares the existence
of the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” an artifact of our world that has
been gone since 1991. Since the day that
the Globe was created, borders have been repeatedly drawn and redrawn. No border,
and therefore no ownership, of any space on the planet
seems permanent.
In Israel, there was an
intention to attempt to maintain the consistent interior borders of the nation.
The land that the tribes claimed as their possession on the first day of the
nation would remain in control of that tribe for the rest of the history of the
nation. Specifically, it was not possible to move land that was contained within the border of one tribe
and transfer it to another. While the law provided a way to transfer land from
generation to generation, the claim of the tribe was more important than the
claim of the individual. So when that came down to women who inherited land,
they had to marry within their tribe, or else lose the inheritance that they
had gained. None of this should be a surprise to
us. Even in our temporary society, it is impossible for me to move the
land that I own from state to state because of where I was born or the
emotional ties I might have with another region of the country. As long as I am
willing to be a landowner in the area in which my land exists, my ownership of
the land is recognized. But as soon as I declare that the land that I own in
Montana, is the property of Georgia, I lose the right of ownership and
inheritance. By owning land, I have agreed to join a different tribe from the
one I held identity to in the past.
And that process prevents anarchy that would exist if it were any other
way. And anarchy might be the best way to describe Israel’s current state. Over
three thousand years after the original tribal boundaries were set, those boundaries are gone, replaced
with an uneasy alliance between Israel, or more precisely the tribes of Judah,
Benjamin and Levi, and the Palestinian Authority which exercises control over
vast swaths of former tribal lands. And even now, the borders continue to move.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 91
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