“I would say that somewhere in our DNA lies this longing to be set free from the entanglement of the earth,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu told me.
The leading South African churchman was one of the people I consulted as I prepared two programmes for BBC World Service Radio which explore the connection between spirituality and flight.
Every human being is born with an innate spirituality that can be aroused by many things, like nature, music and poetry. I’ve always been passionate about flying. For me, flying offers moments of inner peace that I have rarely found on earth – “that peace which the world cannot give.”
I believe, too, that mankind’s centuries-long quest to rise up into the sky was motivated by a desire to reach the “Realms of Glory” – where some say God and the angels dwell. I wanted to find out in the two radio programmes whether anyone agreed with this theory, and with the notion that flying today can still be a spiritual experience.
I began my search at Larnaca airport, talking to passengers who had just arrived from Manchester. Had their flight amounted to a spiritual experience? One said it had been “quite comfortable.” Another said she found “flying rather boring actually.”
It was not a very promising start. But I don’t understand how flying can be dismissed in such terms when for centuries humans went to astonishing lengths to find means of flying above surface of the earth, the way that birds do.
One early attempt was made in the 10th century by an English monk called Eilmer in Malmesbury, northeast of Bristol. Local historian Ron Bartholomew told me how Eilmer “equipped himself with some form of wings and launched himself from the tower of the Saxon church. He flew, it is said, for 220 yards and then crashed and broke both his legs. He was forbidden by his abbot ever to do such a thing again.”
I was struck by the thought that one of the earliest aviation pioneers was a man of the church. That was why I wanted to hear Archbishop Tutu’s views about the relationship between mankind and the heavens. “We all instinctively think that up there is where you have goodness and light,” he said. “Up in the sky is transcendence, God’s abode, the abode of angels and the good spirits.”
For a Muslim’s view, I spoke to Professor Haleh Afshar. “I think that the concept of heaven is very important,” she told me. “People look towards the heavens, although the concept of God in Islam is universal.”
Angels, too, feature in the beliefs of the three great monotheistic religions. One of the works of contemporary composer Sir John Tavener is called simply “Angels”. “People think that I have heard the angels because they hear it in my music,” he said at his home in Dorset where he is recovering from a serious illness. “When I was feeling better and could fly I used to compose on the aeroplane.”
I am fascinated by the apparent contradiction there, that Sir John Tavener composed music rooted in the ancient traditions of Orthodox Christianity in a modern airliner. A similar contradiction occurs in some of the Greek Orthodox churches in Cyprus. Outside there is a modern soullessness about them, while inside there is an impressive and beautiful iconography that has remained unchanged for centuries.
In one such church, Ayios Demetrios in Nicosia, Father Demosthenis told me about the importance of angels in Orthodox iconography. And he went on to say that “humanity has a lot to thank angels for, because angels gave humans the idea of flying.”
At last I had found the connection I had been looking for: a direct link between the yearning of humans to fly and spirituality inherent in the skies above us.
But in making the progammes I could not overlook the dark side of flying: the damage that planes cause to the environment and the role of aircraft in war and terrorism.
Environmentalist George Monbiot said bluntly that “we simply have to fly less than we do today.” Poet Laureate Andrew Motion read a new poem, heard for the first time in these programmes, called “Coming into Land”, based on the writings of a young British airman killed in World War Two. “As often as we think that leaving the earth is a sort of rise into a transcendent state which defies time and gravity,” he said, “so coming into land is the equal and opposite, which is to say it is like dying.”
Author of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull Richard Bach, a lifelong pilot, said that when he flew in a small plane he became “part of a creature that has never existed on earth before – a combination of a machine that can fly and a soul that yearns to fly.” Indian-born astronaut Sunita Williams told me that in outer space “you have the perspective of looking back on our planet, and you realise there are bigger forces out there.”
Perhaps pilots of small planes at one extreme and astronauts at the other are best placed to experience the spirituality of flight. But there are opportunities for the rest of us if we look out of an airliner window. One summer evening, after a long and stressful wait at Dublin airport, our plane finally took off for London. We climbed into an uncluttered, stress-free world, above clouds tinged by an orange glow from the disappearing sun. There in front of me was a full moon, like a giant circle of tissue paper pasted onto a fading blue background, the way it can never look from the earth. I was, for those few moments, in heaven, experiencing that peace which the world cannot give.
Gerald Butt presents “Realms of Glory” on the BBC World Service’s Heart and Soul on January 3 and 10.
