Airplane Spirituality

My friend Wes White wrote this and posted it on Open Source Theology. I just love the way he thinks.


I only just recently returned home to Glasgow, Scotland after a long three week trip to the USA that included four multiple-leg airline flights. On Monday coming, I fly once again to Amsterdam, The Netherlands only to turn around on Wednesday and fly back. So I'm learning a lot about what I now refer to as "airplane spirituality." Here's just a couple thoughts on it for your consideration. (There might even be a bit of application hidden within.)

1) Traveling on airplanes reminds us that healthy Christian spirituality is as earthy as it gets. On long overseas flights, human beings have the audacity to develop bad breath, for example. Some actually bring along brush and paste and hazard the experience of minuscule airplane toilets in order to retain some semblance of hygiene. But most simply resort to popping mints, spraying sprays, or freely engaging various other forms of cover-up. Suddenly liberality with chewing gum finds itself in vogue. But it is all an attempt to mask something that we really need not hide. Being human is earthy, and in that is glory. St. Augustine ( City of God, bk.9, ch.1) referred to it as the blessed recognition that we are "intermediate beings," finding ourselves most truly when we happily locate ourselves somewhere between the beasts and the angels. Humans who affirm their "intermediateness" are able to appreciate the baser as well as the more sublime aspects of life, and to find God in the mix of both. My friend, Rodney Clapp, puts it this way: "Christian spirituality comprehends not only the sparkle in our eyes but the grime under our fingernails." (Rodney Clapp, Tortured Wonders, 177.)

2) I am regularly amazed at the contorted bodily positions people can assume in order to seek a bit of sleep on a long flight, especially when the plane is full to capacity. Sleeping is otherwise a rather private affair where drools and snores and involuntary escapes of bodily gases are preferably protected from public attention. Not so in the cramped spaces that usually define the intimate communion of long-distance flight. Some who would generally never be seen with a hair out of place soon give in to unbelievable displays of tangles and tousles out of sheer desperation to resemble an horizontal posture. It is intimate communion indeed! After all, at the end of a long and crowded flight we have all slept together. But it reminds us that spirituality, Christian spirituality particularly, cannot be healthy if it is only a private matter. In fact, Christian spirituality proves its muster by its sociality, for we claim that all humanity derives its essence from the Trinitarian God who is socially defined. Miroslav Volf and others ( see, for example, God's Life in Trinity ) have been reminding us of late about the perichoretic nature of God's own sociality. I am more and more convinced that one of the best ways to both demonstrate and test the genuineness of the give and take of perichoresis is by attempting to sleep on airplanes, where community is voluntary to be sure, yet anything but arbitrary.

True spirituality is earthy. True spirituality is social. God, I think, is discovered and experienced in both. So don't be afraid to fly.