Holding

On my flights home from Los Angeles— rising over the marina, U-turning over the Pacific—I pray. Pointless. Foolish. The future is fixed, time’s forward-motion arrow is an illusion, the sequence of events we call past, present, and future is in fact a single moment: explosion, stars, planets, meteors, water, dirt, cells, fish, plants, animals, men, women, babies, laughter, song, dance, fire, war, blood, renaissance, enlightenment, coal, electricity, steel, steam, trains, cars, telephone, television, airplane, rocket, computer, cell tower, satellite—vast wireless hum wrapped like a cowl around the planet—melting, contagion, epidemic, pandemic, the sun’s sudden spike in entropy before its final, by then we’ll say merciful, implosion: all of it beating now, now, now.

I know this, I still pray, though not in words. I conjure the image of two giant hands lifting the plane and keeping it aloft, point A to point B, heat from those hands radiating up through the baggage compartment to warm my feet. Sometimes, instead of hands, I substitute the bodies of muscular angels: male, positioned at the four corners of the plane’s underbelly. They fly along in silence, quadruplet supermen, fuselage resting on their backs.

What I’m praying about isn’t a plane crash. I’m not afraid of dying that way. It’s what comes after the crash, this scenario I go through in my head:

Engines stutter, oxygen masks erupt. A sharp drop, then another, then a high-pressure, terrifying spin, surface of the ocean on slow-motion approach before the hit, at which point there is either a) an explosion, or b) the breaking apart of fuselage. B involves long seconds in deep water, churn of screaming survivors swimming away from the massive down-tug that will swallow every soul within a certain radius—said radius dependent upon size and weight of wreckage.

Case B splits into two scenarios.

1) I swim away from the sinking plane. I’m a strong swimmer, I can hold my breath for two minutes. So here I am, freestyling hard, grabbing a piece of floating debris and kicking away with my powerful swimmer’s legs—a few fly kicks, a few flutter, to vary muscle use. Most passengers are not strong swimmers. Most will drown. Here’s where I have to figure out if I would give up my piece of debris and tread water until the choppers arrive.

2) I make it onto a life raft. Once I’m on board, the raft is full. The addition of a single soul will make the raft sink. A man swims up and grabs on, we start to tip, he’s getting on no question, someone has to beat the man down or give up his spot or everyone dies. Would I be the one to volunteer? Knowing I was given my powerful swimmer’s legs for such a time as this? If I wouldn’t give up my spot for the man, would I do it for a woman? An elderly woman? A child? What’s the age cutoff of worthwhileness at either end of the continuum?

Would failing to lay down my life for one of my brethren mean I don’t believe what I say I believe? That I am not what I say I am? Here I have to stop and breathe into the barf bag. Because no matter how many times I go over this, I know I wouldn’t give up my piece of debris or spot on the life raft for anyone on this plane.

There is no grace for your imagination, our pastor once said in a sermon. If any of the terrible things you imagine happening actually do happen, in that moment there will be grace to handle it. You cannot muster, imaginatively, the strength and courage that will be given to you if and when you truly need them.

This is how it is with my mind, heading out over the ocean, tipping one way so I see only water, shades of blue and green and cloud-shadow slate; tipping...