Up in the Air

Pat and I recently went to see Up in the Air, the new George Clooney picture playing in theaters. It’s a good movie, well worth seeing. It works on several levels, one of which is the comment it makes about the struggle between electronics vs. face-to-face interactions as the basis of relationships. Another is the rootlessness and disengagement of modern society.

The George Clooney character, Ryan Bingham, is “career transition specialist,” who flies around the country delivering termination notices to the employees of other corporations. For a substantial fee, Bingham arrives and sets up a temporary office in the company conference room and proceeds to do what the company’s executives don’t have the courage to do themselves: lay off their workers. Bingham has the patter down pat, complete with euphemistic language, sympathetic mien, and platitudinous encouragement to the newly unemployed worker to seize this catastrophic moment as an opportunity for a whole new life. As if they had a choice about this “opportunity.”

Bingham himself has no wife or children, no house, and no roots. He “lives” in a sparsely furnished 1 bedroom apartment with no food in the refrigerator. His clothing is neatly folded on bakers’ racks, ready to be stowed into the roll-on bag that he packs with mechanical precision. He logs more than 300 nights each year “on the road” in hotels, and spends part of nearly every day in the first class cabin of an airliner, “up in the air” – in more ways than one.

Bingham’s life ambition is the accumulation of 10,000,000 miles in his frequent flyer account, a feat only seven others have ever accomplished. In pursuit of his goal, he has sacrificed everything we might regard as the evidence of a life: relationships with his extended family, a wardrobe that includes leisure attire, even a place to live. He finally attains his goal as the movie draws to a conclusion. Halfway through another flight from somewhere to somewhere else, the flight attendant makes the announcement of Bingham’s ten millionth mile, and he is rewarded with a visit from the airline’s chief pilot. Their conversation is simple but strained, and finally the pilot asks Bingham, “So, where’re you from?” Bingham pauses, looks around the airliner’s cabin; behind him we see through the airliner’s windows as the plane cruises high above the clouds, the earth passing below him so fast and far away that any place is indistinguishable from any other place. “Here,” Bingham says at last, “I’m from right here.”

I’ve been mulling over that line ever since I heard it. I’m fairly sure the screenwriter intended it as something of a critique of Bingham’s – and our – rootlessness, our dissociation with anything as permanent as “the ground.” But I can’t help hearing other overtones in it.

Jesus once told someone who pledged to follow him wherever he went: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). On another occasion, when told that his family was trying to speak to him while he was preaching to a crowd, Jesus said, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Then, says the text, he looked at the crowd and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33-35).

One can argue, I suppose, that Jesus never intended his words as a description of a lifestyle for his followers. I would agree, mostly. But that still leaves me to explain why Jesus would tell his disciples to “go, sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come and follow me” (Matt 19:21). Or again, why he would say that “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake or the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age – houses, brothers and sisters, mother and children, and fields with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mk 10:29-30). Not exactly the surest 401K I ever heard of.

John Leith, who taught theology at Union Seminary in Virginia (where I studied, many years ago), once listed several characteristics of a Christian life lived under the influence of the Reformed tradition. The last of Leith’s characteristics was “an increasing detachment from the things of the world.” What Leith meant was that, throughout a long life lived in faithfulness to the gospel, one’s identity and sense of place in the world depends less and less upon the “things of the world” – houses and fields, bank accounts and BMWs, and yes, even relationships – and more on the Christ who beckons us from beyond them.

Jesus and John Leith seem to me to be making the same point. They seem both to be saying that discipleship in Christ is a matter of detachment from the “stuff” that clutters the closets and crowds the shelves of our consumerist existence. They seem both to be calling us away from roots sunk so deep in dirt of daily reality that we cannot soar aloft on the wings of hope and possibility. They seem to be inviting us to live “up in the air,” so to speak.

Let me be clear: in so speaking, I am not saying that Christians are not to live in the “real” world, and instead to live out some “other-worldly” piety. I am not suggesting that Christians ought to eschew relationships in favor of some desert hermitage. I am most definitely not suggesting that salvation is being “raptured” away into some alternate universe, leaving behind the grit and grime of the one in which we’re born and die for some heavenly home in the sky.

But I am suggesting that being “up in the air” is an apt metaphor for the provisionality of the life of faith, for the sense that we are always between somewhere and somewhere else, and that the “somewheres” may well be less important than the “between.” I am suggesting that, when Jesus spoke about the life of faith, he exhibited a strong preference for metaphors of transition and motion – way, path, taking up crosses and following – over metaphors of settlement and stasis.

I don’t recall anyplace in the gospels where Jesus is asked, “So, where’re you from?” But I fantasize that, had he been, he would have looked around, perhaps from the height of a cross atop a Judean hill, and said, “Here. I’m from right here.”