Flight Delay
One recognizes that it is a “first world problem,” hardly worth the worry we put into it. We will acknowledge that other people, in other parts of the world, have real problems. Some are living where every day sirens go off to warn of missiles coming in. Some live where water has to be purified before it can be drunk. Some live without access to common antibiotics.
Such things greatly overshadow the problem of a delayed flight. But for a 21st-century person who has the wealth to fly (which probably includes you, dear reader), there is little in our experience more viscerally disturbing than a flight delay.
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The flight was scheduled to depart New York at 4:40 p.m. Thunderstorms were in the forecast, so it was not a surprise around noon to learn that the flight was delayed to 5:32. A bit later, it was 5:10; then 5:20, then 5:14. I got to the airport about 3:15, slithered through security, grabbed a cow burger at the Shake Shack and settled in with my laptop at gate 56.
At exactly 4:30 a gasp went up all around me. People were all looking at their phones. They were saying to each other, “11:26?” It was like hearing the hour of your execution. “We won’t get on the plane until almost midnight? We won’t get to Dallas until 1:15 a.m.?” Two minutes later another collective gasp. “It says 7:51 now.”
A strong storm was aimed at our airport. An incoming flight—our plane—had been turned back to Baltimore. But the storm should pass within an hour. “It says 8:03 now,” I reported to my neighbors. An hour later: “It says 8:09 now.”
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“Men’s curiosity searches past and future / And clings to that dimension.” So Eliot, in “The Dry Salvages.” Our personal travel details are infinitely interesting to us but infinitely boring to those to whom we relate them. To achieve a calmness of spirit, to step outside the temporal succession, requires a trust not found in the movement of past into future. Last Sunday, I knew I had a friend in the city, and that I could, if necessary, spend the night in his apartment. More deeply, I knew that whatever happened it would be okay. Where one spends the next five hours, where one spends the night: with such things we can trust God to accompany us as the various decisions have to be made. That, of course, is what people do under bombardment or in fragile situations of disease. They trust God because, maybe, there is no other option. But we like to think we have other options: that we have pull, we can claim status, we can push ourselves upon the system and change it in our favor.
We are stuck in the dimension of past and future.
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A flight delay is a rather pathetic metaphor, perhaps, but if so it is one we deserve. The people near me, last Sunday, were mostly rather humorous about it, which is the best way to be. (The more aggressive ones, I suppose, were pressing their case elsewhere.) The truth is, every one of us is trying to get home—really home. We think we can engineer it and make it effective, comfortable, and inexpensive. But getting home is hard business. The journey is full of discomforts. And its cost is beyond telling—in the end, its cost is our life.
Which is to say, a flight delay is one of the little things in first world life that remind us of things we prefer to forget.
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Out & About: Sunday, July 21, I am preaching at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas; the eucharists there are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.
The next Good Books & Good Talk seminar will be Sunday, September 29, on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Please note that this is a change of date from previous announcements.
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On the Web: A couple of years ago the book seminar discussed Alan Paton’s achingly beautiful novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. Here is a contemporary, poignant and aching “letter” from South Africa, “The Once Beloved Country”: https://newcriterion.com/article/the-once-beloved-country/