I miss the wonder of flight.

 

Gone is the sense of awe and the elegance of air travel.

 

Security requires us to "hurry up and wait." Airlines have withdrawn amenities of comfort and kindness, and treat loyal passengers with disdain. Narcissistic passengers seek every advantage over their fellow travelers. A cousin--a musician who travels internationally--recently confided, "I've come to resent air travel."

 

But every now and then my heart skips a beat when the wonder of flight reveals it's secrets at thirty thousand feet.

 

Recently, I've flown through the night, precariously close to a massive, otherworldly, anvil cloud, troubled by a violent--though, eerily beautiful--thunderstorm illuminating its belly. I've flown over Four Corners of the American Southwest and marveled, even from thirty thousand feet, the massive, natural stone formations of Director John Ford's Monument Valley. I've flown over Chicago's historic Wrigley Field, blanketed with snow. Wrigley, not me.

 

From thirty thousand feet, well above the fray, the view brings perspective and clarity to the world below.

 

 

Recently, I shared conversation with a young woman whose mind was dizzy with questions, daunting questions: questions about her church family and her family's church family; questions about her role as wife and mother as well as her role as sibling and daughter; questions about where to hold fast and where to loosen her grip. The questions and their possible answers seemed to cross and to collide and to confuse.

 

And so, I did what only seemed obvious. I invited her to go flying.

 

 

She closed her eyes and imagined her charter lifting up into the sky. She watched from her window as the rural highways below morphed into the seams of a colorful quilt.

As the plane reached ten thousand feet, I asked her to look out her window to the world below. "What questions," I inquired, "did you leave behind on the tarmac? What questions--though they may have seemed important only moments ago--just seem to have lost their urgency?" As we ascended to twenty thousand feet, I continued my inquiry, "What questions," I asked, "can you see from your window, becoming smaller and smaller, like the buildings below? What questions seem to have become irrelevant against the backdrop of the vast horizon?" As our plane reached its cruising altitude of thirty thousand feet, I asked, "What question or questions remain?"

 

To her surprise, from thirty thousand feet, well above the fray, the view brought perspective and clarity to the world below.

 

Maybe flight hasn't entirely lost its wonder.