A friend recently sent me a link to a YouTube video knowing that I might dig it. He was right. I have watched it several times transfixed by the combination of the opening monologue, “holy crap” footage and hauntingly beautiful UNKLE remix of the Moby song God Moving Over The Face Of The Water.
I am realizing that I have a predilection for what arises when multiple separate pieces are brought together to form a new whole. It creates a symphony of beauty that helps draw out a deeper truth. But I wonder if some feel this is a form of manipulation or an over stepping of creative bounds.
The opening dialogue of the video is an edit of a monoluge from the narrator in the 1993 film “Alive.” It chronicles the true story of the Uruguayan rugby team who’s plain crashed in the Andes Mountains. The words are hard to understand so I have a transcription below. These words set a tone for the entire video that I will let you decide whether they act as manipulation or inspiration. If these were the words of Joe Kittinger they would certainly act as a powerful description of a layer to his experience. But they instead come from the mouth of John Malkavich who is playing the narrator of the film "Alive."
At first this put me off. But I find I keep watching it anyway. I keep watching because the symphony of beauty created here keeps resonating with me. I cannot escape the truth that God is found in a unique way through solitude and whether I find that solitude through my own doing [like Joe] or it is thrust upon me [like the rugby team] I should never miss its value. There is something found in solitude that cannot be discovered anywhere else.
In his book Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer compares the human soul to a deer in the woods. If you want to catch a glimpse of it you need to sit quietly and be still long enough for it to peak its head out. You will never find it crashing through the forest. If that is true, there is a deep value in seeking solitude at any price. For what we will find is something that is essential to our being fully human.
Whether Kittinger ever had these kinds of thoughts we may never know, but he did have some encounter with God up there in that basket. This is the record of the last few seconds before he jumped:
"I stood up, turned around to the door, took one final look out and said a silent prayer: 'Lord, take care of me now.' Then I just jumped over the side. That is the most fervent prayer I have ever said."
I don’t doubt it was.
"After 20 years, you analyze a lot. You remember people, heroism. Many people come up to me and say that had they been there, they surely would have died. But it makes no sense, because until you're in a... situation like that... you... you have no idea... how you'd behave.
To be affronted by solitude without decadence or a... single material thing to
prostitute it elevates you to a spiritual plane, where I felt the presence of God. Now, there's the God they taught about me about at
school. And there is the God that's hidden by what surrounds us in this civilization.
That's the God I met."
