“When have you last had a good session with YOURSELF? Or have you EVER had it out with you?”
Taken from “The Inward Journey” by mystic theologian Howard Thurman, this couplet regularly draws me to deep introspection.
Such was the case while boarding a recent flight.
I don’t like tight seating arrangements. I’m a big guy so I choose aisle seating near the rear of the plane. Occasionally, this gets me a full row alone. But on this flight, I ended up in a window seat in the exit row with a guy twice my size.
As I watched him struggle to keep his arm off of me over the next hour and a half, I began an inward journey about seat selections.
I love the rear of the fuselage, yet I hate the very back row. There’s no room to recline and no window. There is also no circulation from the nearby bathroom.
I’m a decent swimmer and pretty strong so I’m prepared to help out in the event of an emergency. But I don’t like the exit row, because I spend the entire flight thinking of how I may have to haul somebody across 20 yards of airplane wreckage or water.
By the end of the flight, I’d solved the great mystery of the worst seat on a plane. It’s the row behind first class.
It’s not because it is facing a wall and has less leg room. The row behind first class is the worst seat on the plane because you’re tortured throughout the flight with sights of all of the unattainable luxuries of those who are just inches in front of you.
I’m convinced that there is a mania among those of us who aren’t sitting in America’s first class, the millions of us who work 40, 50 and 60 hours a week, that is exacerbated by our proximity to first class. Modern media outlets have placed us next door to millionaire lifestyles that we could once upon a time ignore. Now, many of us are overwhelmed by the desire to have all that we see.
Unto itself, desire for the finer things in life is not bad. But what of our health, our families and our communities while in this relentless pursuit? What is it within us that makes us want these things so badly? What is it that our hearts are truly longing for when we choose certain shoes, handbags, cars and seat selections? Could our inability to escape these longings be a form of bondage? Psychological enslavement?
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul suggests that this type of bondage is the result of submitting to “works of the flesh.” Paul was not speaking of weakness of the human body but the negative bodily spirit that enslaves us to carnal and material matters. He ends his letter encouraging the Galatians to stand firm knowing that Christ has freed them from their enslavement. And that there is a spirit within them that is far greater, the fruit of the spirit.
The war between flesh and spirit not only rages in our individual bodies, but in the larger bodies of the church and the nation. Thurman suggests that in times of crisis, such as the death of loved one or an act of terrorism in the larger body, we are immersed in the necessary self-encounter of what is truly important to us. And at that moment, even if only for a moment, we are released from our enslavement to petty matters. Love, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self-control abound.
What if we lived as if we truly believed that we were free from bondage? What if we exchanged our longing to be seen to a longing to see others? What if we exchanged our desire to be in first class to a desire to live with class, first?
Carlton Johnson is associate for vital congregations for the (PCUSA). He also serves as chief operations officer for Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary and as associate minister at the First Afrikan Presbyterian Church in Lithonia, Georgia.
