From L.A. To Vegas

(I’ve been slowly moving archived posts from an old blog to this one. This is a two-part story of a plane flight I took not so long ago.)

I’ve always thought those stories of pastors evangelizing people on planes were fascinating. You know how it goes: The good-natured pastor ends up seated next a divorcee, or maybe a young couple “living in sin.” The pastor introduces himself, delivers the gospel, brings them to repentance, unburdens their guilt, and cures their souls of dysfunction, all before touchdown on the destination tarmac.

Personally, I hate talking to people on the plane.

As an introvert I’d rather have my toenails scooped out with a spoon than break the ice for an hour or two with a stranger on a plane. It’s not that I dislike people. Sometimes I don’t. It’s not that I don’t care. I pretty much always do. I just don’t care about shallow things, and that’s what happens on a plane. Shallow. Tortuously long volleys of stilted banter about weather, sports, hobbies, travel and other insipid close-quarter glad-handing.

Ugh.

Sometimes when I sense an irrepressible “talker” I charge like a sanguine Rhino, all horns and happy swagger, snorting intense personal questions at breakneck velocity, pressing frighteningly toward the ecstatic landscape of life’s horrific uncertainties. Tell me everything. Generally folks don’t receive that very well. That’s the idea. Break the American social contract of aesthetic minutia and people clam right up. It’s a sacred contract. Sometimes it even works with friends and family. Trekking much further afield threatens most people’s lovingly cultivated gardens of unfettered freedom – freedom to think and believe and do whatever the hell we want. Nobody wants to lose that.

So I read.

I don’t know about you, but the way I do it reading is an altogether different sort of dialogue: It’s an orderly, controlled, intentional dialectic with someone whose ideas are intellectual, deeply meaningful, and unusually well-considered (we’re talking the ideal book). It’s like conversation…for Calvinists. Plus I can interrupt the author and scribble all over his face if I disagree. Real live people tend not to appreciate that. Michael Servitus certainly didn’t.

So recently I climb onto a plane – a short hop to from L.A. to Vegas – and immediately pry open my latest conversation partner (The Starfish and the Spider, great book btw). Soon a woman slides into the seat next to me followed by a man, both in their late twenties and apparently not together judging by the informal courtesies exchanged during individualized pre-flight rituals.

I take the opportunity to transmit psychic morse-code: don’t talk to me…deeply engrossed in book…extremely focused…barely aware of you…nothing personal…completely uninterested. They get the message. Not a word. I cease broadcasting and ease back into the cockpit.

The steward bangs the plane door shut and the woman jumps straight from her tail as though a mini-ejector in her seat is wired directly to the latch. Suddenly she’s hyper-ventilating like a scared rabbit.

“Oh my God!” she says just above a whisper.

Oh my God, I think, ignoring her.

“Are you afraid of flying?” asks the man. He seems genuinely concerned. Good. She has a comforter. Maybe they’re both single. Maybe they’re MFEO. The last thing I need is a case of derailed kismet haunting my karma. Better to keep quiet.

“Oh, no-oh-oh-oh,” she stutter-laughs, “I mean…uhhh maybe a little, but I’ll be okay.”

Just as I’m telling myself her histrionics will subside after take-off the tired old plane shudders from the belly up, lumbering down the taxi-way, and the woman somehow shoves her entire head completely between her knees. Muffled primordial spasms erupt from her throat. I am amazed. I’m still trying to figure out the maneuver when she comes up for air. Apparently God is still on her mind

“Oh-my-GOD-oh-my-GOD-oh-my-GOD…”

She’s really emphasizing that name. Suddenly I’m wondering why we refer to that sort of thing as using the Lord’s name “in vain.” It doesn’t seem useless to her. I’m fascinated. I’m thinking through a more generous theology of “spontaneous utterances” when she starts barking. Well, more like a coughing-bark, actually like she’s clearing the fear from her throat. The man on the other side of her glances at me nervously: Your turn.

Uh-uh, I flash back. Determined not to be shaken I dig a foxhole in the paragraphs of my book. I hunker under piles of shoveled prose. Weather the storm, I tell myself. It can’t get worse.

“Oh my God, I think I need a barf bag,” she chokes, rifling through the seat back as we finish taxiing toward the runway.

To be continued.

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Daily Show Lampoons Religious Superiority

Once again, the Daily Show has managed to brilliantly depict the post-Christian perspective of religious attempts to dominate culture. Whether you think Brit Hume’s comments were inappropriate or “right on,” it’s critical for Christians to understand that this is increasingly the water in which we swim:

I think there’s an important critique of the way religious adherents – especially Christians – have turned the practice of faith into a kind of consumer product. The irony is that by proselytizing in this way, we run the risk of belittling the seriousness of our own faith by presenting it as just another (albeit better) choice in the marketplace. What do you think? Is this incisive commentary or persecution?

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