The Parable of the Plane Crash

There is a cer­tain fas­ci­na­tion with plane crashes. They always get the head­lines - or at least a place on the front page. Some­times years go by with­out a sin­gle major crash involv­ing a domes­tic car­rier. The fifty-thousand killed each year in auto­mo­bile acci­dents are hardly noticed at all. Unfor­tu­nately, that has become sim­ply a com­mon sta­tis­tic. It is the drama of the plane wreck that will float around in the news for weeks or months.

On occa­sion, I go through a series of dream cycles that use air­plane crashes as the cen­tral sym­bol. That cycle has started again. I once asked a ther­a­pist friend of mine to inter­pret the theme of these dreams. She said that it had to do with the way I observed life. I tend to watch as people’s lives crash and burn. We can­not live life for oth­ers. They soar or crash on their own. Fly­ing tends to be the dream metaphor for the spirit within us that reaches toward the sky. Not every­one suc­ceeds. Hopes and plans occa­sion­ally crash to the ground.

Dreams often come to us as para­bles. We can look at them from many dif­fer­ent angles and glean a bit of wis­dom. I have some­times won­dered what Jesus dreamed when he was on earth. How many of his para­bles began as one of his dreams? I hope some­day to find out. In the mean time, I reflect on the par­a­bolic nature of my own dreams.

In the plane crash series, I watch as a plane crashes near me, but I am never in it, and it never falls on me (though often very near me). For what­ever rea­son, I see myself as watch­ing social and per­sonal dis­as­ters hap­pen to oth­ers, while being at peace with myself. There is a sense of hor­ror but it is not a night­mare. No one rel­ishes the fail­ures of oth­ers (at least I hope not).

When I fly, it is with com­plete con­fi­dence. I do not think these dreams are pre­mo­ni­tions, but I do believe they are para­bles and maybe even prophe­cies. I do see things crash­ing and burn­ing in our soci­ety — or about to. God is not to blame. We are the ones that build the social and per­sonal philoso­phies that fail — just as we build the machines that fall from the sky. The amaz­ing thing is how life goes on through the rub­ble. Therein we dis­cover the key: life is greater than its tragedies.