What was the co-pilot thinking?

          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?

           

Why the 90s are cool

The distance from one base to another in major league baseball, measured in feet:  90.

The time played in soccer, in minutes: 90.

Some of us this week celebrate birthdays measured in years: 90.

When I tell you this, you may ask, what is my angle?  My angle, in degrees: 90.

It is nice to be 90 because at 90 it is nice to be.

You don’t have to be quite 90 to remember the Burma Shave signs along the two-lane highways, spaced one after another with a few jaunty words on each one. If the Creed were on a Burma Shave sign it could look like this:

A speck in the eye
a tear on the speck.
God in the sky,
Satan in heck.
Love in a flicker,
ash in a flash,
Life even quicker,
a hundred-year dash.

What makes a 90th birthday memorable is the number of children (John Wall and his wife Pamela Heyda, Marie Veldman and her husband Mark, David Wall and his wife Toni), grandchildren (Jacob Wall and Dan, Kristen, Michael, Matthew and Katie Veldman) and other kinfolk, along with friends from school days and friends from now and all the friends in between. The mystery is not why writers think anybody wants to read about their birthdays. The mystery is why anybody does read them.

In the 294 days remaining until New Year’s you may want to ponder that question. Maybe a reader is attracted by the fact that my March 12 birthday is shared with W. H. R. Rivers, an English neurologist and psychiatrist, whose birth in 1864 helped establish the use of three initials instead of a first name. On that date in 1947, Mitt Romney was born. Just a year after my birth in Jamestown, N.Y., George Ariyoshi was born, destined to become the third elected governor of Hawaii. There should be lots of coincidences in our horoscopes.

The thing is, as more and more people have drifted away from faith in God, people have drifted away from astrology. The willingness of obstetricians to schedule delivery on particular times and days has diminished some of the astrological mystery, and then there’s NASA.

My first job on a newspaper included getting the syndicated horoscope column properly marked up for a Linotype operator. Would a teenager consider scrambling the astrological predictions, running the Pisces forecasts under the Virgo sign perhaps? Maybe.

But there’s no maybe about the splendor or the suffering of life. For me there is no maybe about the splendor of God as creative mind, or the suffering of God as love, or the presence of God as spirit. And, as soon as yours arrives, a happy birthday to you.

[To be continued March 2025]