As an airplane taxis toward takeoff, I invariably treat the mandatory instruction from the flight attendant as annoying background noise: “Make sure you put your own oxygen mask on before assisting others”. Most of us don’t pay any attention, because we figure such a scenario is never going to happen.
But it is happening, not in the confined space of a jetliner, but almost everywhere else. Our airwaves are being polluted by vengeance, anger, threats, lies and betrayals. The swirl of this intensifying cultural smog may not be affecting our lungs, but is damaging our souls, to the degree that many people, myself included, often find it difficult to breathe. And several times now in the past few weeks, I have heard people hold up the image of the preflight instruction and offer it as a life-giving suggestion: “make sure you put your own oxygen mask on before assisting others.”
Breathe. Breathe in life and hope. I have become rather intentional about this. I need to be, because of all the ideological, political and grit that chokes my airwaves, fires up my ego (not in a good way) and makes me forget that I even have a soul. In my mind’s eye, which has been forged through decades of a faith journey that has been filled with fits, starts, disappointments, and epiphanies, I can see the mask that is always there for the taking. To put it on – and breathe normally– so I can assist others. Without engaging in this important discipline first, my psyche gets batted around like a beachball, and I end up being of little help to anyone else, much less myself. And I become easy pickings for the growing horde of conflict entrepreneurs.
This psychic/spiritual mask enables me to connect with my body and my soul, which are the necessary pillars of what it means to be alive. I have also discovered that I don’t have to hunt for the mask, or situate myself in a specific place to activate it, although that can certainly help. The mask follows me wherever I go, and is forever ready to dispense a gift, a grace that doesn’t have to be carefully monitored, because it never runs out.
This gift, this grace, is what we call love. Yes, this is the love that binds hearts together, a love that we endlessly and eagerly romanticize, but the love flowing from the mask is so much more than that. This love, this grace, is fierce. It threatens to bind us together, even to those – no, especially those, we don’t want to be bonded to. Whose hearts seem hostile to ours. This love is an antidote to the punishing pollution of vitriol and venom, regularly offered by forces and voices that define love so narrowly that it is unrecognizable, except perhaps for the narrow segment of people who have been selected as the winners in a malevolent and rigged lottery.
References to gift, grace and love in such a trying time may sound sophomoric (a wise fool); for some it is yet another misguided fantasy. I can’t prove any of this, but the more I intentionally put on this invisible mask the more I trust the life-giving gift it constantly provides. Prize winning author and theologian Frederick Buechner (1926-2022) makes the claim, “almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved. I can prove the law of gravity by dropping a shoe out the window…I cannot prove that life is better than death or love better than hate. I cannot prove the greatness of the great or the beauty of the beautiful.”
I have never seen oxygen masks drop down in an airplane. I hope I never do. I have never seen a psychic mask descend from heaven or some other high place and offer me grace, gift, and love. I don’t need to prove its presence. I am learning not only to trust that gift, but how much I need it.
We all need it. Put on the mask. It will help you breathe normally.
