How the Spiritual Life is Like Air Travel

Something compels you to travel by plane.  There are people to meet in another city; or there is work to be done in other places; or there are deep and rich and painful histories embedded in earth and stones you must touch to experience; or there is a pleasant oasis to refresh your dry spirit.  You must go.

At the airport, you are aware that home already has been left behind.  This is not a stable place.  It is a transitioning place.  Any stopping here, even for a meal, is temporary.

The cabin door is locked and the plane pulls from the gate.  There is no turning back now, not without literally creating a federal incident.  Taxiing to the runway, waiting in the take-off queue, you stare out from the constricted aperture of your window portal at the great sliver-skinned dragons thundering into the sky ahead of you, hauling faceless cargoes of souls to the far corners of the Earth.

A slight but persistent force compresses you into your seat as jets hung from wispy airfoils — engines of power most people in history could scarcely have imagined — rocket you above solid ground.  The beast dips a wing and banks upward, a resistant mass of pressurized air pushing you up, up, towards a solid bank of clouds, against gravity’s heartless grasp.

Into the cloud deck, all is gray-black-oily-wet.  The beast shivers, wing-tips flexing, skin stretching, rivets straining.  Nothing appears through your portal.  Nothing but a Brownian motion of storm.  You are noplace and you could be anyplace.

Suddenly the dragon’s nose pierces through cloud tops and everything is light.  A dazzling Sun breaks over endless miles of rolling marble-white, perfections of the classical forms, pillars of Hercules, thrones of gods.  From here it is clear:  where you have been, where you are, where you are going.  The petty embroilments of the city you have left have dropped away, the horizon stretches ahead, and everything you see fits into a crisp and beautiful pattern.

Hours later, there are subtle shifts in cabin pressure.  Passengers and crew grow more alert, tense.  Soon the flight will descend once more through a cloud deck of chaotic uncertainty.  It will thump rudely onto the tarmac of a different airport, another transitional space, open to a new city.

In this new city lie your urgent appointments and tasks.  There wait the wisdom and refreshment you seek.  If you stay for any time at all, you will encounter also new entanglements, pains and mysteries, much like and yet much different from those you knew at the place you had called home.  Memories of clear Sun on cloud-tops arrayed over limitless horizons will seem false, inaccessible, unreal.  And you will once again pass through cities and ports and clouds and heights, heights and clouds and ports and cities, stretching out and summing up, rolling on and on and on, until you arrive at the Final City at last.