The Heathrow Globetrotter
My wife, Kathy, broke her foot while we were touring about in Spain. All it took was uneven ground and the wrong pair of shoes. Fortunately it was near the end of our trip, but she still had to traverse this and that village with streets on 45° inclines on a pair of crutches. If that were not enough there was the challenge of navigating crowded airports. If you want to know what the disabled face all the time just break your foot and then try to travel.
The up side, if there is one, is that modern airports provide services for the otherwise incapacitated. That includes wheelchair service, little vehicles that beep along as they ferry you to the next gate and even special waiting rooms where a wide variety of folks languish until help arrives. When your number comes up an official looking person arrives to escort you to the next destination.
Some airports are better at this than others. For instance, Madrid gets highest marks for efficiency and employing enough staff to make it a seamless operation. London Heathrow, on the other hand, is at the other end of the spectrum, and it was Heathrow where we found ourselves waiting and waiting. It was good we arrived early because we would need every minute to make our flight back to the states.
Waiting rooms of any kind are interesting places. They provide endless case studies of the human creature. It was no different in Heathrow as we collectively formed the rolling wounded of travel. One person sits with a sling gingerly wrapped around an injured arm. Across the way a woman is keeled over because she ate a bad piece of fish. A few elderly just can’t take the crowds and all the walking required to move from gate to gate or terminal to terminal. And then there are the others.
There are some people who view these special services at airports as an opportunity to get free shuttle service. They enjoy the short cuts provided for a person riding in a wheel chair. Goodbye smart carts. Passing through customs is easier. And so certain people show up, sit down, and wait for their luxury transportation to take them through the maze, handle their bags, and make their travel just a little easier. By their easy nonchalance you get the feeling they have done this before, and they have.
One woman sits down beside us and immediately stands out for a whole host of reasons. One is her fashionable dress and appearance. This is obviously a person of some station, or at least someone who can fake it well. She totes her possessions in designer bags. Her air is of one who is irritated by tardiness, which is not a trait well-suited for Heathrow. But most of all she stands out by the absence of any apparent reason to be eligible for these special services.
I started going down a mental check list: She is ambulatory and doesn’t have a cast or crutch to her name. She is not writhing in gastronomical agony or speaking in delusional tongues. So why, pray tell, is she counted among the chosen? Membership has its privileges but how does she qualify?
Her manner is easy and affable and she strikes up a conversation with us. So what happened to Kathy, she asks, pointing to her cast. We tell the story and then, being good conversation partners, we ask about her situation and what would bring her to this little depot of the distressed. Well, said she, absolutely nothing. This is how she always does it. As anyone can easily see her carry on bag is heavy and those lines are abysmal.
It is hard to know exactly how to respond to a disclosure like that. After we suppressed our gasp we had to wonder if we had missed something. Have we been so out of touch with the way the other side lives? But then came a tinge of moral indignation; we think of services for those who need them, inadequate resources, and how unnecessary use of them could simply make them less available to those who truly need them. This is the special assistance service, not the special status service.
She grew up in West Virginia and never left her flea-bitten town once before she left home. She vowed that her adult world would be bigger and so it was. Life had placed her, by virtue of good looks and lots of savvy, on the elbow of power. And now in mid-life, single and globetrotting the world, meeting an online match in Spain through Millionairematch.com, she was continuing on to yet another safari in some African country. After that she was continuing on to another location to pet silverback gorillas. She had just come from cuddling pandas in China. Altogether she carved forty notches in her passport, one for each country.
We listened attentively. She was certain that there was Mr. Right out there somewhere, and most of the men she met were not he. She had just paid five thousand dollars to some service to find him but that hadn’t worked out. And in the end, she was certain that she was just too much of a woman for most men to handle. Like the guy she had just met in Spain, for instance. Though he was able to drop everything at the last minute in order to fly from California to the Costa del Sol, which is promising, there wasn’t much there. And not just anyone gets privileges, if you know what I mean. Shoot, if that’s all it’s about, said she, there are more than enough cougar opportunities available to occupy her free time.
Then, like a maître at a cocktail party, the special assistance director announced the arrival of her coach. And this perfectly able-bodied person mounted the wheel chair, bag on lap, and her chauffeur proceeded to wheel her to her next location. As an aside she instructed her handler, “I’ll need you to call me a cab after we go through customs.” As she pulled away the platform she let her sunglasses slide down her nose to give us real eye contact and said, “But I’m spiritual; I know everything will work out.”
We sat in silence for the longest time, wanting to speak, but speak what? Did this really just happen? Yes, of course it did.
I enjoy travel; after all, this episode took place in a terminal as I was doing some of my own. And I like the freedom to make choices, explore life, and even spoil myself from time to time. I enjoy developing hobbies that are gratifying and experiencing the new and different. Who doesn’t? So why my shock with our merry traveler?
She was perhaps the poster child for the way we are at our most lost, most desperate, and most self indulgent. I am her and she is me. It’s just that she is me on steroids. So I can see more clearly. The fact that she identifies herself as “spiritual” simply adds thickness to the story. If she were deeply spiritual she would probably be engaging with the world differently, just as if I were more deeply spiritual I would be changing some of the ways I live in my own skin and in the world. Could it be that she longed to be more spiritual even as she secretly realized how bereft she really was? In fact, don’t we all long for release from the endless cycle of aimless wandering and search, the quest for that which satisfies, the something that is always just around the corner, the something next, the someplace else? When we find it, we say, we will have arrived, finally.
If she was a caricature of the soul in flight, the grasping ego, a self caving in on itself, so she unintentionally held up a kind of wavy mirror in which I could take another look at myself and ask the hard questions.
There is always the first wave of denial: “I’m not like that!” Am I not? Isn’t it simply a matter of degree?
Like her I may believe that the answer is somehow out there rather than in here. Like her I may put my needs ahead of others for very self-centered reasons. Like her my unbridled freedom can sometimes let out just enough rope to hang myself. It is me, rolling away, looking over the top of my sunglasses saying to myself and others, “I’m spiritual …”
The call to the spirit-filled life, however, takes us in other directions – in ourselves and in the world. The kingdom of God is among us and within us and if we can’t find it here we won’t find it. The deepest satisfaction in life comes as we give ourselves away, to others and to great causes of significance that transcend our own littleness. And self-limiting our exercise of freedom keeps our focus clear, brokenness revealed and priorities identified. All of this is wrapped up in a daily walking in the humble footsteps of one who more often pushed the wheelchair than rode in it.
It is so easy to get swept along by the external winds of influence and the internal drives of our lesser selves. Before you know it we become more like what we despise than we admire. Some of the worst things in the world are done by decent people who have become possessed by false selves, illusions, and grandiose notions that are realized through their own power at other people’s expense. It is the story of the world that these deep impulses end up oppressing others. The conclusion is often tragic.
And so we are left with competing visions. One is of a sense of entitlement, as a lonely, broken figure rolls off into a self-absorbed sunset. The other is of a simple man eating with others in a place so far off the grid that few can remember where it is. He invites in the outcasts, the weary, the broken and those who don’t have a passport to the future. And there, as bread and wine is broken and shared you hear different words about the blessed life, the poor in spirit and those who are willing to endure heartache and suffering for the sake of righteousness. It’s a reminder of what we could become and what could transform the world. We have to choose, of course, wheelchair by wheelchair, gate by gate, prayer by whispered prayer.
