Just a bunch of square cornfields and wheat farms. Back roads and highways connecting little towns with funny names. Who’d want to live down there in the middle of nowhere?
from “Flyover States” by Jason Aldean
Those lyrics are ten years ago, but I think of them every time I fly. The view out the window never varies: wheat fields and football fields; warehouses and apartment houses; truck terminals and transmission lines. Who wants to live in a place like this? Well, I do! Why? Because I like rubbing shoulders with hard-working people. Yet, there is another reason. The deeper reason has to do with the connection between the Eucharist, the work or our hands and the land on which we live. The Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin, wrote about this connection in a reflection called, “The Mass on the World.” Fr. de Chardin was a chaplain in the French Army during World War I. One day, lacking the bread and wine necessary to offer Mass, he climbed a hill and gazed over a valley teeming with villages, farms and factories. He wrote: Once upon a time, Lord, men took into your temple the first fruits of their harvest and the lambs from their flocks. But the offering you really want is nothing less than the labor of the world itself. When the plane touches down, I enter the terminal amid people dressed in business suits, Levi’s, and tanks tops. On my way to Gate 24, I join a procession of folks with dread locks, ball caps, cowboy hats and sweat bands. Next to me is a woman dressed in a hijab, up ahead, a nun dressed in a Franciscan habit. For days following a flight across the flat plains of my diocese, I find myself thinking of cotton fields at Mass as unfold the linen corporeal at the altar. Nearby, candles flicker like the flames of gas plants near Borger and Pampa. I open the missal and discover sentences lined up like tracks in the Amarillo rail yard. Hosts lie layered in the paten like terraced land outside Quitaque and wine in the chalice shimmers like a setting sun west of Hereford. In his reflection, Fr. de Chardin consecrates every living thing in the valley with the words, This is my Body. And over every deadly force he speaks the power of Resurrection: This is my Blood. For this priest, “flyover country” is “holy country,” as holy as the Holy Land itself, where parched terrain awaits baptismal rain and, in the canyons, stones and boulders shout and sing, Hosanna to the King!
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