Conquest of the Skies

Anyone seeking some divine awesomeness while on a long-haul flight could do much worse than spending a few hours in front of a David Attenborough documentary.

“Conquest of the Skies,” playing last night on LX52 (ZRH-BOS), was, I imagine, selected by whoever curates Swiss Air’s in-flight video collection for obvious contextual reasons.  And, I also imagine, with no small sense of corporate pride: as the painted lady butterfly (vanessa cardui) and peregrine (falco peregrinus) have conquered the skies, so have we at Swiss International Air Lines, a member of the Lufthansa Group.  I myself was not feeling quite so smug, casting several nervous glances out the window to confirm that the plane's wings were indeed proper airfoils, like those of the griffon vultures of Segovia (gyps fulvus).

One wonders if, 300 million years from now, similar films will be made by our cockroach ancestors’ version of David Attenborough, examining the fossilized remains of an Airbus 330-300, and speculating about the parasites it must have carried to and from their various colonies. 

Well I guess it would be nice

In case you missed it among the trick-or-treating and World Cup qualifying and steady drumbeat of mass murder in my home country, October 31^st was the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s famous door redecoration in Wittenberg.  Fortunately, his slim “Ninety-Five Theses and Selected Sermons” doesn't take up much space in my backpack, so it’s been riding along with me for trips to Amsterdam and Boston the past couple of weeks. 

Thanks to Mr. Moir, my leftist 11^th grade European History teacher, I’ve always been able to recall Luther’s main point about “justification by faith alone.”  To the extent that I had ever really thought about this, I had always interpreted it to be an easier, somehow more sensible position on Christianity.  It was, as Luther intended, a just rebuke of the abuses of an institution that was putting money and power ahead of the Gospel. To my 15-year-old self, it also seemed like a more user-friendly alternative to the Catholic Church, where I was baptized but never really felt at home.  Forget Catholicism with all the guilt and ritual and fussily keeping one’s spiritual balance sheet in order.  To be a good Protestant, all you had to do was believe!  Easy!

It turns out that “just believing” is, actually, incredibly hard.  I’m not talking about stuff like creationism, or feeding the five thousand,¹ or resurrection in the flesh.  I mean just believing in a loving and merciful God.  This kind of faith demands that you, without a whole lot of solid evidence, reject all sorts of rational arguments to the contrary: that this God of yours is no more than an opiate of the masses, or a neuro-biological phenomenon, or a myth perpetuated by certain power structures to keep people fearful and in line.  It demands that, in certain “progressive” socio-cultural circles, you risk appearing as a glassy-eyed, backward Pollyanna.  It demands that you reconcile your image of God with the aforementioned steady drumbeat of mass murder, and accept that your God is somehow okay with a bunch of poor souls getting murdered while they’re out riding their bikes along the Hudson River, or while they’re shopping at WalMart, or in a church on a Sunday morning while they are actively worshiping that loving and merciful God.

I don’t have a clever or reassuring conclusion at hand here.  Faith is hard.  Luther’s advice about coming to faith involves complicated, paradoxical concepts like being broken to pieces and rejecting our own merits and confessing one’s incapacity to do good.  Stuff that doesn’t play too well in the circles I usually travel in. 

¹ Although I think there’s a strong case to be made for reading the story of feeding the five thousand metaphorically, as the Gospels contain no descriptions of fish and bread magically multiplying, only that “they all ate and were satisfied.”(Mt 14:20)