The sheer diversity of humanity you encounter in air travel fascinates me. I love to people-watch in airports. You see every kind of person imaginable, especially if you fly through a major hub. (My recent favorite was a pair of Franciscan monks, sauntering through the St. Louis terminal decked out in their robes.) Barriers of culture, language, and nationality aren’t exactly erased, but they do get a lot thinner. Because when we cram ourselves into the enclosed space of an airplane with this widely divergent cross-section of humanity and we all strap into our cramped little seats, the reality is that we are all going to the same place together. We’re all in each other’s space, and the habits and customs and preferences of all these people you wouldn’t normally choose to hang out with start to collide. But even though almost nobody is entirely comfortable with the situation, we’ve got to find a way to make it work. So most people find it in themselves to give a little for the benefit of all for the short time we’re together.

At its best and at its worst, flying is so church.

Air Support

I encountered the fellow traveler who has been on my mind for the last three months outside our gate in Minneapolis. He would have caught your attention too, if only for a moment. Everything about this thirty-something man, from his haircut to his physique to his thousand-yard stare, said “combat veteran.” Which is what made his companion, a Chihuahua, seem all the more incongruent. The man was seated on the floor, back against a wall, his backpack next to him, holding this tiny dog and petting her gently as if to reassure her that everything was going to be fine. And this may have been the best-behaved Chihuahua I’ve ever seen; rather than being an ankle-biting yap-factory like I might have expected, she seemed content to be held and be quiet. The two of them together were as alone in their bubble as I usually am in mine when I fly, and my impression was that is exactly how they wanted it.

I also remember thinking the prospect of a dog on my plane was an interesting one. Service dogs are allowed, of course, but a fairly new phenomenon is the “comfort animal.” Rather than providing a specific service such as helping a sight-impaired person navigate, comfort animals are becoming more popular to help calm people with social anxiety or nervous disorders. The standards for training and certification are quite different (much higher for service dogs and, for that matter, their people), and society is still trying to figure where exactly comfort animals are and are not appropriate (they are causing havoc for some of my colleagues at other colleges). There had also been (only a couple weeks before my flight) a very public flight delay due to a comfort dog having an unfortunate gastronomical problem on board a plane.

Nothing about this Chihuahua said “service dog” (they are always marked, and almost always retrievers), so I figured she was a comfort animal. And everything about the dog’s owner said “PTSD.” Both were sympathetic figures in my eyes; I knew nothing about their story and who knows if my read on them was accurate at all, but the two of them together were a picture of determined tranquility in the midst of constant motion and ever-present threat of discomfort that is air travel.

As our flight was called and the impatient members of Group 3 crowded around the gate so they could get in people’s way for the next 15 minutes, I loaded my partially-recharged electronics and the books I was half-reading in my carry-on and the man loaded his dog into his backpack. It was at this point I noticed that his pack was dog-shaped. It had mesh panels to allow airflow and pop-outs like a camper trailer for the dog’s head. The dog went in the backpack without a fuss, and for a couple of minutes her owner let her acclimate before zipping up the pop-outs and shouldering the pack. I wondered what Delta’s policy was on comfort animals, and decided I didn’t care (assuming, of course, the dog had no digestive issues). These two didn’t seem to be any trouble.

Trouble

As it turned out, they were seated across the aisle and one row up from me. And so I had a perfect view of the awkwardness that broke out before our flight pushed back from the gate. The backpack with the dog inside was at the man’s feet, not pushed fully under the seat as required by whatever laws or regulations are in place, in the unlikely event that our airplane were to break mid-flight, to protect us from getting pummeled by flying luggage in the last few seconds before our fiery deaths. The flight attendant noticed this on her walkthrough and, not knowing this wasn’t just any backpack, asked the man to stow his carry-on properly.

The man, without initially explaining his reluctance, resisted. The flight attendant immediately adopted a Defcon 4 demeanor: polite, but firm. “Sir, the backpack needs to be entirely under the seat in front of you.”

It was pretty clear the man did not want to shove his poor dog under that seat, but it was also clear he did not want to draw too much attention to the fact that there was a Chihuahua in his backpack. He was also beginning to get worked up. He asked, somewhat impatiently, why the pack on the floor wasn’t good enough.

That question brought the flight attendant seamlessly to Defcon 3: more firm, less polite, with an edge of arrogance that I imagine comes from having to deal with this stuff day after day until you are thoroughly sick of it. “Sir, there can’t be any obstructions on the floor which the people in your row might trip over in an emergency. We can place your carry-on in the overhead bin or you can stow it all the way under the seat in front of you, but it can’t stay there.”

Running out of options, the man finally explained the rub. “There’s a dog in there.” Clearly he was not keen on shoving his dog under the seat, much less the overhead bin. I think he hoped that this might buy him some consideration. It didn’t. The revelation there was a dog in the backpack did not faze the flight attendant in the least, nor did it change her insistence (edging now towards Defcon 2) that the dog go under the seat. The only change was that a new alternative emerged: he could switch seats with the man in the window seat so the dog wouldn’t be in anyone’s way, an option which went nowhere fast.

By this point the tension between these two had permeated our entire section of the plane. I could actually sympathize with both of them. I’ve been the guy with the dog in the backpack…well, not literally, but I’ve needed someone to understand my situation and cut me a break, and not get it. I’ve also had to be the voice of authority: Sir, these are the rules, and they aren’t my idea, but they are inflexible and so I must be as well. Because until you get with the program, none of these other 75 people get to go to Peoria.

Finding Room for Grace

When we talk about grace, I think we easily prioritize the guy with the dog over the flight attendant. After all, he’s the underdog—I can’t believe I actually just typed that—in this situation, and she the impersonal corporate entity. And we would only be half right in doing it. We really misunderstand grace when we interpret it only as bending rules or excusing lapses. It is easy for us to say this person should eat the cost or tolerate the inconvenience of facilitating that person’s needs when we’re not out anything ourselves. Grace costs somebody something, and for that reason I’m not comfortable expecting it or even asking it of others. By its very nature, grace is chosen and not compelled.

There was room for grace all around in this situation. I’d like to think if I was in the flight attendant’s shoes, I would have demonstrated grace by finding a way to badger less while still meeting my responsibility to the other passengers to get them in the air on time; this is basically what I try to do every day. Some days I do it better than others, and some days I screw it up spectacularly. I’d like to think that if I was in the man’s shoes I’d recognize what the situation required me to do and subordinate my own preferences to the needs of the people around me, but I also know I do that very imperfectly.

And there, of course, was a third player in this situation. I could exercise grace by giving up my own treasured window seat so the man could sit with his dog at his feet without blocking anybody’s path to the exits. I was actually chewing on that idea, brainlocked on what impact such a move would have on the guy next to me (the kind of overthinking things that I do all the time), when it became irrelevant. The man with the dog gently slid the backpack under the seat in front of him, and the rest of the flight was largely uneventful.

I’ve thought about those two a lot since that flight: The traveler who needed someone to understand his situation, and the flight attendant looking out for the needs of her passengers in ways they probably didn’t recognize or appreciate. We are faced with situations like theirs all the time, where our conflicting responsibilities and preferences complicate our human interactions and lead to strife. The church is no exception. But we do have a unique gift from God to navigate these conflicts. By His grace, God enables us to demonstrate grace.

The challenge is to recognize and act upon those opportunities when they unexpectedly come.

Image credit: artur84 via freedigitalphotos.net