Canter Bridge

You always cringe a little when you see a dozen suited-up athletes waiting for the same flight on which you ambitiously intended to get five hours of work and rest accomplished. When people tell you, in apologetic syllables, that your schedule is really full this weekend, you smile and respond, ‘I can always sleep on the plane’.

Now you wonder whether you can.

They’ll be raucous, boozy, irritating, you fear. They’ll turn this metal flying tube full of 165 folks with a place to go into a party that’s all about them. Over against the persistent anonymity of airports, a pack of people dressed up the same signals an unscheduled detour from the norm.

It spells trouble.

Maybe this time my penchant for fearing the worst is way off base. The navy-blue track suits with ‘Marina’ emblazoned across the front are peopled by handsome young men and women whose polite joviality promises something better. The Aztec angularity of their faces and the particular accent of their Spanish tells me, as much as the Mexican destination of this flight, that they’re headed home. The geography of cheek-bone and jaw-slant beautifully frame brown faces and black eyes of athletes who little suspect the piqued curiosity of my secret inspection.

They sit in several good-natured knots in the waiting lounge at Dulles Airport. A glance at the date confirms my hunch that they’re Mexican runners going home after yesterday’s Marine Corps Marathon in D.C. A half hour ago, over lunch, I blinked back tears as I read how runners from many nations had paid their respects in creative ways as they ran past the huge gap in the Pentagon building where a crisp Autumn morning had turned to carnage and terror just weeks before. Now, one flight down, two to go, headed home to Costa Rica via the late, cheap route that forces a plane change in Mexico City, I sit back with my coffee and magazine. I’ve plenty of time for studying these young runners who yesterday conquered 26.2 unforgiving miles—they don’t shorten it if you you’re having a bad day—and today limp ever so slightly through Dulles’ bustling concourses. An incipient touch of community already wheedles some sympathy out of my suspicious heart: I ran the London four years ago and couldn’t walk for three days.

When the Scriptures look to better days, the picture is always communal. Whether Jeremiah’s gorgeous vision of the old leaning on their canes in the street while children play about them, or the priestly-minded snap-to-it-ness of Ezekiel’s Restoration Project in chapters 40-48, or the polyglot cacophony of John’s bellowing hordes, the good future that awaits the hopeful is always plural, always communitarian, always about us.

The biblical tradition is rudely silent on the matter of private bliss. Even the solitary Job got that way not by choice, but by the marginalizing shame of his disease. In contrast, his story begins and ends amid the jubilant hurly-burly of family. Even—at the last—recovered faith and a singular encounter with the Creator produces prayers for Job’s adversarial ‘friends’, tied up in knots by the asphyxiating tidiness of their small wisdom.

Death, I suppose, is the most unshared of moments, solitary by duress, absolute in its privacy. Yet in Jesus’ famous conversation with the thief on the cross as both approached the end, his promise is communitarian in its compressed way: ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise.’ To eliminate those two ‘superfluous’ words would be to alter this world and the next.

This is a lousy flight. We leave an hour and a half after we’re all aboard, two hours late. People will miss connections. Even the pilot becomes palpably embarrassed by the sheer number and variety of the delays. There’s no potable water on the plane, the movie’s on the blink, and people—so it seems to me—are nervously wondering whether they should be upset about five hours without coffee.

Through it all, one voice of sanity maintains an odd kind of community among the lot of us ‘distressed travelers’, as the industry lingo would style us. This voice—I never meet its owner until we’ll coming off the plane in Mexico—belongs to the purser, the chief of the flight attendants on this troubled airplane. She treats us like adults. She informs us of every new act in this comedy of errors with the right mix of sympathy, realism, and good humor. Her voice is fluid and kind. She’s not reading from a script. Rather, she’s interacting with human beings who don’t know each other, thrown together for this parade of irritations, people whom she respects, though neither does she know any of us.

As we descend into Mexico City, she comes on once again, this time for a touch of frankness that is uncommon in this business. ‘We hope this experience has not been too difficult for you’, she dares to say, no doubt violating several points of procedure in one fell swoop. ‘When the water went out while we were still on the ground in Washington, we gave serious consideration to canceling the flight. But we decided that it was probably more important to most of you to get to your destinations than it was to have coffee and the other conveniences we’ve done without.’

Maybe it is too much to call this community. Yet we are drawn by shared experience and its interpretation by a person who is in sympathy with us to conclude that we have indeed traveled together.

Then this invisible purser makes public the knowledge she has gleaned during her five embarrassing hours. She has learned, because she has asked, of the enviable performance of this Mexican running team. ‘We have on board with us this evening’—again, two important words shape the world—‘a number of prize-winning athletes’. She speaks their names, her English maiming their Spanish but the tenderness of her—our—moment forgiving all that. A bottle of champagne is presented to the man who finished ‘number two’ in the marathon. A new community erupts in applause.

Community—usually—is tied to a place. It names names, it shares history, it evolves in the jostling that is every day. It is concrete, not abstract, never perfect, always partial, normally fragile, occasionally tribal. It knows whom it likes and dislikes, yet in the end recognizes to whom it is bound.

Yet community is also a habit of the heart, an inclination towards plurality, a cultivated taste for perceiving the ‘we-ness’ of life, even when this comes to us cloaked in the ordinary and every-day. To the ease of anonymity and the leisure of privacy, it is a persistent condition, an insistent questioner, a final adversary.

It calls us, as Jeremiah knew, towards streets where bent elders mix with raucous school children who may in their frolic knock them down. It makes hearts shaped by biblical voices long for the mix of young laughter, adolescent dreaming, middle-aged caution, and the gravel voice of weathered memory.

It beckons the believer—no matter how solitary the hard miles of his journey—to no private cloister, but rather to a city, its streets full of people. Ezekiel, among the most prickly of prophets, knew that place. Its name, he tells us in the final words of his scroll, is this: ‘The Lord is There’.

Inside the terminal—now after midnight, people hurrying to get home—I fall into step with one of the suited runners. As we head towards passport control, I make conversation: ‘How did it go for you?’ A poignant misunderstanding ensues: ‘Very well!’, he says. ‘We got a 2nd, a 7th, a 9th, and a 12th.’ Then he is gone, home for well-deserved sleep, while I wander off to find my next flight. I never had time to tell him, ‘You misunderstood my question’. It had been a singular one: ‘How did it go for you?’ He had understood it communally, and told me instead of the success of his team.

I will never know whether he won 2nd, 7th, 9th, or 12th. He may have finished 432nd. Perhaps he dropped out at mile seven with a blistered heel. Maybe he was the equipment carrier. Maybe he’s never run a marathon in his life.