If you’re tuned in to one of the
on-camera commentators, you may have been told why a young co-pilot crashed a Germanwings plane with 150
persons aboard. Maybe you’ve been told what he thought about while passengers
screamed, sealed in the huge aircraft behind him.
Of course nobody really knows what
Andreas Lubitz was thinking. Commentators tell us what they think he was
thinking. They depend on memory, instincts and good intentions to provide swift
oral locomotion.
It is said that Lubitz consulted
professionals for treatment of mental ailments, including suicidal tendencies,
but no doctor unstrung his tangled mind or spotted the danger to others.
Commentators who never met Lubitz, and never heard of him before the crash,
fascinate us with stories and speculation about it, their own and the
speculation of others.
We want the commentators to fill in
the blanks for us. We know that disturbed minds are never more determined than
when they tuck their secrets away, hidden from psychiatrists, spouses, parents,
siblings and friends. Lubitz may have spent his last hour with his secrets,
without a thought for the plane and passengers.
Mark Twain lets us peer into the mind
of Tom Sawyer, and we know what he’s up to. But Tom doesn’t know. It hasn’t
happened to him yet. Paul in his letter to the Romans says, “I do not
understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing
I hate.” He considers this further in Romans 7:15-20, NRSV, concluding that “if
I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells
within me.”
The psychiatrists, the teachers of
pilots and other professionals are not examining patients and clients in order
to spot sin. That’s more elusive than cancer and more controversial than life
support issues. They are looking for mental disorders that may be what Paul, in
earlier times, called sin.
Lubitz will never be confused with the
co-pilot described by Robert Lee Scott Jr. in his 1945 wartime book and movie, “God
is My Co-pilot.” Nor can anyone be confused about the frantic prayers addressed
to that eternal co-pilot by passengers and crew hurtling toward a sudden end.
Lubitz is being examined in absentia.
Who will probe the minds of the passengers?
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