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) 

Breakfast in America

I had a long business trip to Cambridge coming up, and all of my usual haunts were either sold out or prohibitively expensive, so I decided to give the Residence Inn a try.  As the name implies, this place is designed to approximate someplace one would actually reside, rather than stay for a couple of nights.  This means that many of the rooms, like mine, include kitchenette areas, and that all the frou-frou one might find in a boutique hotel – the in-room yoga mat, the bedside luxury lifestyle magazines, the hip bar and eatery – have been eschewed in favor of more practical features, like ample power and USB outlets, and a laundry room, and a “mini-mart” just off the reception, where the road warrior may find 24/7 fortification.  “Consultant Functional” would be an apt way to characterize this place: it’s where the young, sleep-deprived MBAs go after sitting in meetings all day to work on slides for the next day’s all-day meetings. 

Yesterday morning, I headed down to the breakfast room around 6:40 (early breakfast room opening hours being another CF benefit).  Several people were already sitting and eating: indeed a few consultant types, an (out of place) family of four, a pair of guys speaking German.  The ubiquitous CNN feed was glowing on the large flat-screen facing the entrance, and for once the “BREAKING NEWS” in the fire engine red banner wasn’t crying wolf.  Someone had fired many bullets into the audience of a country music concert in Las Vegas.  By then, the death toll stood at 20, although the local sheriff’s redundant comment that “we have in excess of more than 20 victims” suggested that the tally would get much grimmer soon.  A shaky mobile phone video, shot by one of the poor souls at the concert, played in a nightmarish loop. 

Perhaps, a few years ago this sort of scene would have made people stop and gather around the screen and watch and shake their heads.  But this one, layered onto all the others before it and the ones almost certainly to follow, had become simply part of the ambiance of America in 2017. We all sat and ate our breakfasts.  On CNN, one woman’s repeated screams rose above all others, then fell into a dissonant weave with Lana Del Rey, whose voice came through the hotel PA.

Introduction

I read Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines recently, and I couldn’t help but consider it alongside my current business traveler’s “lifestyle.”  Last year, I flew around 100,000 miles, and I probably spent more nights in hotel beds than in my own.  

Chatwin concludes that only through traveling (ideally on foot) does a human become truly human.  He quotes Pascal: “Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.”  And paraphrasing Pascal, he calls out the reason why: “All our miseries stem from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room.”  In Songlines, he follows the paths of indigenous Australians, who literally define themselves and their world through the paths their ancestors have walked and sung into existence.

Right away, I see the humor and pathos in even attempting to connect the spiritual worldview of Aborigines with my spending half of my waking hours dragging my Tumi Alpha 2 through European airports.  Obviously, there’s nothing remotely spiritual about business travel, right?

I suspect that business travel is typically so monotonous and soulless because that’s how we usually approach it.  The business traveler’s arsenal – noise-cancelling headphones, eyeshades, smartphones – are assembled specifically to insulate and / or distract us from the world we inhabit.  Then the plane touches down, everybody immediately un-airplane-modes their phones and squirms like a classroom of 1^st graders until the sad bing of the seatbelt sign triggers the Pavlovian scramble to get the hell off the plane.  At best, this experience is something to be endured and escaped asap; at worst, it degenerates into scenes of violence.*

I am giving myself the probably quixotic task of finding something spiritually significant in business travel, or at least while business-traveling.  To search for God and truth in a milieu that seems to be completely spiritually vacant.

Earlier this year after landing in Geneva, my bag was in the overhead thing many rows back, so I was forced to sit there while everybody else got off the plane.  I looked out the window at one of the little trucks the airport guys use.  And I found myself experiencing that moment simply for what it was.  I was there; the little truck was there.  This was somewhat intentional: it was early in the year, and I still fresh on a New Year’s resolution to try to appreciate things as much as possible.  I say that in the literal sense, as in to take things in as thoughtfully and mindfully as possible, not necessarily to be thankful for things.  Although now as I untangle the different meanings of that word, it occurs to me that there is likely a lesson there.  

This is perhaps just a long-winded way of saying “Be Here Now,” a philosophy I certainly can’t argue with.  Perhaps more elegantly, it's a search for what Graham Usher calls the “sacrament of the present moment.”  Maybe approaching this from the perspective of the hyper-business-traveler, in an environment in which the appreciation muscle is not so frequently flexed, would be interesting.  In any case, it seems like a superior way to spend my time and energy than playing Candy Crush. 

  

* This seems to happen most frequently on US domestic flights, about which there’s certainly more to be said.