House of Common Prayer
Near the edge of the timber
where a ravine cuts a deep swath in the clay,
a stand of yellow clover rises,
one bright chapel in the brome.
This is a house of common prayer,
my matins,
where I lay my woodsorrel at the altar
and weave my voiceless psalms
among the birdsong.
This is a place of rest,
safe from thistle and teasel;
a place of hand-folding, green-knuckled
and small;
a place where the length of oxtongue is lament,
and the depth of dandelion
is praise.
I have been here before
as a child who traveled alleys
and once found—keeping vigil behind the corner grocery store —
a hallelujah of hollyhocks.
Even at eight, I knew this was a place of prayer,
that there behind the garbage cans were crimson blossoms
preparing a way in the wilderness.
Keeping to the prescribed course is a matter of genius and magic. Brown must guide them by any means possible. He has a sextant clipped to the dashboard in front of him. The course and distance calculator is clasped to the side of the fuselage. The drift indicator is fitted in under the seat, along with a spirit level to measure bank, and the Baker navigation machine sits on the floor of the cockpit. There are three compasses, each of which will illuminate in the dark. Sun, moon, cloud, stars. If all else fails, he will have dead reckoning. –from TransAtlantic by Colum McCann
On June 14, 1919, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown began what would become the first non-stop transatlantic flight–and transatlantic airmail–from Lester’s Field, near St. Johns, Newfoundland to Clifden in Ireland. They were flying a modified WWI bomber, the Vickers Vimy, with 1,890 nautical miles of open sea and 16 hours of flying time before them. In the aftermath of WWI, however, there were few who even knew about the flight, and the pilots’ ultimate achievement only became newsworthy after the fact. The fact that this flight occurred only 16 years after the Wright brothers made the first controlled flight of a powered aircraft is nothing short of miraculous.
Irish novelist Colum McCann profiles these men and their harrowing flight in a section of his 2013 novel, TransAtlantic. Actually, to call the flight harrowing doesn’t begin to do justice to the seemingly insurmountable odds these men faced. As parts of the Vimy began to ice up, at one point, Brown left the cockpit and actually climbed onto the wings to dislodge ice. Between the heavy snow and clouds, failing instruments, and loss of any sight of moon or star or horizon line, the men were literally forced to fly blind for hours. During these tenuous hours, Brown, the navigator, resigns himself to relying upon dead reckoning.
Dead reckoning is a navigational process of calculating position by relying upon a previously determined position, or fix, and then advancing that position based upon speeds–known or estimated–over time and course. In today’s world of unwavering and complete reliance upon technology for navigation, dead reckoning seems primitive, unnecessarily foolish, and certainly deadly. And yet, when all else fails, keeping to a prescribed course may be–as McCann writes–a matter of genius and magic.
As the weeks of coronavirus updates and death tolls persist, many may feel as though we are, indeed, flying blind with no clear horizon line in our sights. People use the word unprecedented with genuine reverence. There seems to be no real fix from which we can confidently navigate. And so, for better or for worse, we are delivered into the hands of dead reckoning.
Just the other day, I realized that I didn’t know what day it was–not just the date, but the actual day of the week. For weeks, one day has rolled into the next, and only the rising sun and emerging moon has provided any real semblance of time passing. Like many, I fear losing myself in the heavy cloud cover of no-end-in-sight. I don’t fly blind very well. Dead reckoning is not in my current bag of tricks. I need a lodestar, a fixed point from which to navigate my days.
These days of nowhere to go and not much to do have given me uncomfortable pause. For I’ve realized that for much of my life, the lodestars from which I’ve navigated have been work-related. A good day’s work–either at school or at home–kept me on an even course flying confidently towards the future. A sense of accomplishment was the steady updraft that pushed me ever onward and upward. A stack of graded essays, a lesson planned, two loads of laundry washed and folded, the back door finally painted, the dishwasher loaded–all notches on my belt of achievement, all navigational points along the road of my life.
American author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writes of a dead reckoning that is an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies. Truthfully, I know that too much of my life has been a frenzied pursuit of fixing my place in the world without any true observation of the heavenly bodies. When I should have looked upward, I ran inward. When I should have relied upon God, I relied upon genius and magic. And when I should have turned to faith, I turned to dead reckoning, resigned to the belief that all else had failed. If I simply worked harder, longer, better, I could fix my place in the universe.
For a time, Alcock and Brown had no other option but to trust in dead reckoning. But both men understood that they desperately needed a real fix–the sun, moon, horizon line–if they were to survive. There are periods and circumstances in our lives during which many of us have trusted dead reckoning. For whatever reasons, we have believed that–frightening as it may be–this was our only real option. As we work to develop a coronavirus vaccine and seek the safest ways to reopen our country, a certain amount of dead reckoning is understandable. When it comes to the science of both combatting the virus and recovering the economy, we are flying a little bit blind.
But when it comes to our spiritual response to the pandemic, we don’t have to resort to dead reckoning. Our lodestar, our fixed horizon line has been–and always will be–right there in front of us. We may not remember what day of the week it is, but we can remember who is flying our plane.
