Spirituality and flight. In 1941 John Gillespie Magee Jr was a 19 year old US poet and military aviator with the Royal Canadian Air Force, a freshly qualified fighter pilot flying Spitfires in Britain. He claimed in a letter to his parents to have begun composing '
High Flight' while on a sortie at 30,000ft, completing it before his wheels touched down that day. Magee was killed a few months later when his plane came out of cloud and collided with another aircraft. His poem is one of the best known of World War II, and became a sensation in the US following his death, eventually being adopted as the official poem of the RAF and the RCAF.
It has long been recognised by scholars that the motif of flight features prominently in many religious traditions, from the spirit of the Lord hovering over the waters, to mystical ascensions, flying horses, winged angelic beings, and gods of the sky, winds, and thunder. The names of various deities were associated with the firmament, such as God Most High (
El Elyon) among Hebrews, the Eternal Blue Sky (for
Tengri) among Mongols, and Sky Father (
Dyaus Pitar) among Hindus. From prehistoric times the heavens have been regarded as a sacred place, the very locus of the divine. In the nineteenth century some scholars considered imagined-flight as
the foundation of religious experience. Later, the renowned Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade dedicated considerable time and effort to exploring the connection. It is strange to think for how long humankind has looked skywards and imagined countless religious worlds and powers, without ever having travelled there.
Less well known is how central a theme is spirituality within aviation literature, such as in Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Listen! The Wind (1938), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), Wolfgang Langewiesche's Stick and Rudder (1944), Charles Lindbergh's The Spirit of St Louis (1953), Ernest K. Gann's Fate is the Hunter (1961), Richard Bach's Nothing by Chance (1969) and his popular allegory Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970). Religious metaphors and language are common among these and other so-called 'disciples of flight' who sought to capture the spiritual dimension of aviation. However, it is John Magee's joyful poem 'High flight', which speaks of 'touch[ing] the face of God,' that is probably the most emblematic of the aviator's experience of contemplative wonder and spiritual transcendence in flight.
Daniel Langton is a pilot and is currently working on a short study of flight and the religious impulse. Watch on
YouTube.
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