Sermon: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate

 

When the first Malaysia Airlines plane, flight 370, disappeared last March, it created a feeding frenzy for bloggers, tweeters, and conspiracy theorists. No one could understand why the pilot hadn’t radioed for help — why there was no communication at all before the plane disappeared off the map. Then there was the parade of responses from long-suffering airline industry professionals, patiently explaining that when there’s an emergency on the plane, the protocol is always, “aviate, navigate, communicate.” In that order. The pilot wouldn’t have been expected to be communicating until and unless the first two priorities were at least somewhat under control. Which apparently they weren’t.

 

If you’re a pilot in that situation – the plane spiraling out of control, or burning or engines failing – you can imagine that you would be praying for one thing: time.

Praying for everything to snap into slow motion, like it does in the movies. Just one momentary Sabbath of suspended animation. Time to get your bearings, time to analyze what’s going wrong, time to radio air traffic control and cry for help. Time is what the pilot needs most desperately and time is precisely what the pilot does not have.

 

Normally, however, if there’s no emergency, if everything’s fine and you’re just cruising along happily at 30,000 feet, you, the pilot, can aviate, navigate, and communicate. You know where you’re going and why and you’re free to chat away over the intercom, commenting on the Eiffel Tower off to the right or the Mall of America off to the left. You’re also in frequent touch with air traffic control, back and forth about weather and runways and whatever else you guys talk about.

 

Aviate, navigate, communicate. It’s a great protocol for life on the ground too. Aviate meaning just keep the plane in the air – get yourself out of bed in the morning, take care of yourself and your family, make sure there’s a roof over your head, a little food in the fridge, hold down a job (or get one if you don’t have one), go to the doctor if you’re sick – just the basics of survival and functioning. For so many people in the world, this alone is a huge challenge and a huge accomplishment. People can face so many obstacles. We should never begrudge someone the sense that if their life has been hard, and they’ve just barely been able to aviate, but they’ve done it, and they haven’t hurt anyone along the way, that can be a life well lived.

 

Navigate is for when you’re lucky enough to not just live your life but make decisions about how you want to live it. Where you want to fly your plane and where you want to land. This includes the whole arena of personal fulfillment – the child asking, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” The adult switching careers, not because they can’t make ends meet with one but because they think they’d enjoy another one better. Finding a partner for love rather than just for the economy of scale.

 

But navigate is also about how you’re going to live your life religiously and ethically. What systems do you want to participate in and not participate in? What organizations do you want to join and not join? What identities do you want to claim as important to who you are? What social circles do you want to be part of? How do your political values influence the career you choose and the volunteer work you do? If you have sufficient financial and social resources to aviate and then a little extra, these are all questions you can ask.

 

And finally, there’s communicate. Communicating is about reaching out, speaking out, and extending beyond yourself into the world around you. Communicating through words and actions is what puts you and your ideas on the map. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if you don’t communicate something, for all intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist. Communicating means telling someone you love them even if you think they already know it. Communicating means explaining to the shopkeeper that you’re actually boycotting that item, not just choosing something cheaper.

 

Communicating means joining the protest, calling your senator, talking to the press, writing letters to the editor, and debating your colleagues at work specifically on the grounds of you values. Even if you’re aviating and navigating really well, if you don’t tell people why you’re doing what you’re doing, they’re not going to know. If you don’t go public with your values, your choices, and your faith, they will remain invisible and impotent to do anything significant in the world. And there are plenty of other voices that will fill the airwaves with their own.

 

If you think that’s a little extreme to put it that way – to say that if you don’t communicate something it basically doesn’t exist – consider the fact that over the same period this week that 17 people were killed in Paris with every news outlet blaring 24/7 about the unfolding drama, Boko Haram killed 2000 people in Nigeria, mostly the elderly and children who couldn’t get away fast enough, and it was at best a second page story. Now this massacre exists, of course, in the sense that it happened to those people, but it doesn’t exist in the eyes of the world, which means that the 30,000 new refugees won’t get the humanitarian aid that they need. The Nigerian government won’t get the military and financial support that it needs to have any chance of containing Boko Haram and preventing this from happening again. Religious communities around the world should be in a full court press right now, demanding emergency intervention but, for the most part, we’re not. Ignatius Kaigama, a Catholic Archbishop in Nigeria spoke to the press a couple days ago basically saying, “Where the &%#! is everybody?” Communication.

 

Remember that “aviate, navigate, communicate,” in that order, is an emergency protocol. You only strip down to the essentials if you’re in a life-threatening emergency and the ground is coming at you fast. True life-threatening emergencies for us religious liberals are few and far between. Not non-existent, but rare. Certainly compared to, say, Nigerians. Statistics show that liberal religious people like Unitarian Universalists tend to be pretty well off. We are overwhelmingly middle and upper class college graduates, marriageable and employable, with access to health care. There are, of course, many exceptions, even in this room. But as a broad generalization, we aviate. We have the resources and we aviate just fine. In fact, we have the resources to do way more than aviate. And yet, often, we don’t.

 

Our lives can feel so overwhelming, so turbulent, with so much to juggle, so much to keep track of, so little sleep, so much to do. It’s all we can do to just keep going. And so we will often bail on the navigating and the communicating. We feel like we don’t have the free time to get involved in organizations that reflect our values. We feel like we don’t have the money to make the consumer choices that we believe in. We feel like we don’t have the mindshare to give to understanding and speaking out on the Keystone XL pipeline or our government’s position in the middle east or campaign finance reform in this country. We just can’t do it.

 

We’ve got to get the kids to school and someone has just spilled an entire glass of milk on the last clean shirt that he had and there’s some glitch with the computer where we can only receive but not send emails and so we’re relying on our phone but the battery’s been dying. And then the next day it’s not that, but it’s something else. We’re living deadline to deadline, mini-crisis to mini-crisis, task to task, just trying to keep up.

 

In my own experience and in talking with congregants here and elsewhere, we so often feel like we are in a state of emergency. We triage down to just aviating. And just like a pilot in a real emergency, with split-second decisions to be made, with so much information coming from the dials on the console, with alarm bells going off, the one thing we need more than anything is precisely the one thing we don’t have: time. If we could just stop time, even just for a few seconds, we could regroup, get a handle on the situation, and develop a strategy that might incorporate aviation, navigation, and communication. We could have a heart-to-heart with air traffic control.

 

Well, the good news is that, with the help of our community here, and the wisdom of religious tradition, we can stop time. We can do it through a Sabbath practice. I’ve talked about this here before and I’m sure I’ll talk about it again because I believe that the Sabbath is such a wonderful gift to anyone wanting to lead a spiritual life or even just to get out of fight or flight mode. It doesn’t have to be a full 24 hours and you can make your own guidelines to make it doable for you. But Sabbath is the delicious, blessed paradox of making time in the middle of being “too busy” to take time.

 

It’s the recognition that our lives are not, in fact, a plummeting airplane, that we are the masters of time only when we seize it, bend it, shape it to our purposes. In Sabbath practice we find that in supposedly subtracting time from our week, we actually add time.

 

The math doesn’t add up, but the equation is more spiritual than mathematical. The equation is not about how many available hours there are in a week measured against the tasks on the to-do list. The equation is that time outside of the normal flow of life makes more life possible, more richness, more connection, more purpose, more intention, more meaning.

 

So I invite all of you to join us today for our Sabbath Sunday. We’ll be taking time as a community to just hang out together, not to accomplish anything. We’ll remind each other that aviating is under control for now – everything is okay. We have all that we need.

All our chores and tasks and problems will still be there when we return. We’ll take time to navigate – think about where we are and where we really want to go, what our values and priorities really are. And we’ll take time to communicate with air traffic control – our God, our own internal highest wisdom.

 

We’ll take this time in hopes that the Sabbath lessons we learn here by experience, we’ll carry with us into the workweek. From 30,000 feet our problems are quite small. Compared to children in Nigeria, our lives are quite safe. In the grand scheme of things, we are extraordinarily blessed. And so, unless we’re in a real emergency, we owe it to ourselves and the world to focus on navigating with integrity and communicating with purpose. The aviating will take care of itself and we’ll be wheels down before we know it.