London, England
We are so used to our days being divided by an expanse of darkness in which we sleep and dream and take needed timeouts before the challenges of life reassert themselves with the rising sun. Our entire lives are completely oriented to these alternating periods of light and dark. How interesting, perhaps in a curiously disquieting way, it is to have this pattern disrupted.
We left Anderson in the torrid heat of afternoon on a Southern summer day in late June. In Atlanta we found refuge in the inner coolness of the tunnels in the subterranean world below the terminals of the Atlanta airport. We emerged and in the dark inner recesses of the international terminal found pleasant happy distractions in a TGIF restaurant where we enjoyed quesadillas and fine jazz music.
About 9:15 PM we were launched by two large Rolls Royce turbines into the late lingering crimson of the summer solstice. Only this time the crimson lingered on towards 11 PM. Or was it really 1 AM on Greenland time? Somewhere around what I thought to be 3 AM someone committed the unpardonable sin of lifting one of the window shades. Absolutely amazing to me was the brilliant white sunlight that blasted through into the cheap seats of our cabin. I had expected total darkness or at most a colorful vermillion sunrise a couple of hours hence. Instead we found that night had somehow been truncated to a mere ninety minutes and it was already Thursday wherever we were, which was someplace over Iceland where it was abnormally bright and abnormally cold at 69 degrees below zero. The 104 degree heat of June was forgotten. We had traversed the world on the edge of night that crosses Greenland and Iceland this time of year.
We are told in the Revelation of John that in the New Earth there will be no night, no gnashing of teeth, no pain, no death. We are told of a paradise free of angst. One of the great hopes of the Christian message derives from this description of a new world free of darkness. Perhaps we are getting a small foretaste of this. It seems like the night piece has gone away for us, at least for a season.
We landed in London on Wednesday or Thursday or some admixture thereof. Curiously, I felt much better having skipped the night than embracing it and fighting my pillow all night long as I usually do. I wonder if there is some object lesson to be found here. The Gospel of John admonishes us to seek and stay in the light lest the darkness overtake us and cause us to stumble because we can no longer see where we are going. Near supersonic jet flight makes it possible to actually chase the sun and flee the darkness. Can jet travel be a useful metaphor to engage in for a season in order to break free of the ruts of darkness ordinary daily living can throw us into? I think so.
We did the usual things one does after spending the night getting pushed across the sky by jet turbines. We got into the Belgravia area of London, found our way to a small hotel south of Victoria station, and submitted to a jet lag fugue for an hour or so. Amazingly, we arose at about 3 PM or 10 AM, depending on ones perspective, feeling well, and went out to sniff around a grand city we had not been in for five years or more. To my great elation I quickly found myself crawling out of the mental ruts I have long been in. The long-lasting brightness that comes with the summer solstice in the far north was clearing out the affective cobwebs and a childlike wonderment overcame me. Happily, I pranced around the borough of Westminster and photographed Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the House of Commons, the Thames, the Victoria Gardens, the inner workings of Victoria Station, and whatever else I could put my digital cross hairs onto. I took some of the best architectural photos I have ever made. For several hours I wondered what was happening; that I was seeing London for the first time despite fifteen previous visits to it. I experienced it with a depth and freshness that defied explanation. I know I have taken pictures of all these places sometime in the past twenty-five years before but I must have been shooting them blind.
Overseas travel is so often motivated by a desire to see new realities, or at least ones new to us. London is fundamentally no different than it was the last fifteen times I was in it, but there is a spiritual basis for believing that it can be new for me if I bring a different expectation to it. Having been through a three-year dark night of the soul since last in London I can be so grateful that I could even manage this long journey and keep my sanity intact. I not only have my sanity, I am feeling quite a citizen of the world. The gratitude I have for being able to make the journey and actually be childlike in my wonder of all that is here would suggest to me that we often get what we expect. It also suggests that our God, whose property it is to always have mercy, is doing exactly that; showing me mercy.
The prophet Jeremiah, speaking for God, declared to the Israelites when they were in serious deep doo-doo, about to be annihilated by one of their enemies, that “I know the thoughts I have about you, thoughts for good and not for evil, and plans that will give you hope and a future.” Right now I can feel that God has brought me across the vast span of a dark night of the soul and used the metaphor of jet travel to remind me that one day I will no longer dwell in darkness. I can believe He really does have a plan and future for my life. Today was my future yesterday and it has turned out glorious.
In the meantime we had a fine vast Indian Tandoori dinner late in the evening and we choose to use up the remaining bit of night to sleep off jet lag. Tomorrow is the future I anticipate with relish.
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