I want to begin by answering a question that was posited to myself and the other interns: Where have we seen God this summer?Some answers were similar: other people, the natural world. One person said a frog, that was pretty specific.
One place that I've seen God is planes.For those of you who know me, you know how much I like to fly. I'm not a big fan of turbulence, and when the air gets a bit too rough, I'm reminded of the fact that I'm in a big sky bus and that humans are not supposed to fly. To top it off, O'Hare is the airport I fly out of most, and O'Hare is a huge and complicated hot mess of an airport, and Chicago's nickname of the "Windy City" doesn't really help with the whole, "I don't do turbulence" thing.
Yet I still fly. I flown with school groups to Ireland and Romania, and by myself to Amsterdam and Ghana, not to mention the twenty or so plane rides that I'll be taking this summer.
So how could I possibly see God in a vessel that sometimes terrifies me?
Theologian and philospher Rudolf Otto writes in The Idea of the Holy that the numinous, a sort of divine power, can evoke mysterium tremendum in us, a feeling of extreme terror and fascination. I think Otto's terminology best describes what overwhelms me when I'm 34,000 ft above the ground. You see, I'd normally close my eyes and "try to sleep" for a majority of my flights, when in reality, I'm trying to remind myself that this turbulence is not happening.