Calling Passenger Holy Spirit!

by Sarah-Leah Pimentel · October 15, 2016

The Jesuit storyteller Fr Anthony de Mello once told the tale of an old Chinese farmer who experiences a series of events that has his neighbours either commiserating with his adversity or celebrating his good fortune.

Each time the farmer responds to his neighbours’ reaction by shrugging his shoulders and saying: “Good luck, bad luck — who knows?”

His neighbours deem it bad luck when his father dies, but good luck that he inherits a fine horse, but it is bad luck when the horse runs off. The farmer isn’t as jubilant as his well-meaning neighbours when the horse returns with a herd of wild horses, and doesn’t necessarily share their sadness when his son is injured trying to break in the wild horses.

When his son cannot be conscripted into the army as a result of his injuries, the farmer merely smiles and says: “Good luck, bad luck — who knows?” The moral of the story is that life is not made up of a series of individual, seemingly unrelated events. Rather, these events are part of a rich tapestry that carries the trace of God’s loving hand.

Yet, we often miss God acting in our lives as we are caught up in the turmoil of everyday. It is only when we stand back and follow this golden thread that we can see how God’s spirit has touched our lives.

I was reminded of Fr de Mello’s story as I waited to fly home after six weeks away — bringing to a close a most eventful sequence of airport dramas.

This time, all the passengers had boarded and we were almost ready to begin the 11-hour flight home when the captain announced that the engineers had discovered a small crack on one of the external panels, and we would be delayed by about four hours to wait for a replacement plane.

Four hours became 22 hours as the flight was cancelled altogether and we were placed in a hotel for the night.

My initial reaction was to berate my run of bad luck, because this was yet one more incident in a trip peppered with missed connecting flights, a broken suitcase, lost luggage, and a complete unwillingness by the two airlines to admit their responsibility in allocating our seats to standby passengers or to trace our lost luggage.

The news that my return home would be delayed by a day felt like the last straw. How can one person have so much bad luck in six weeks?

After some sleep and a hearty breakfast, I was able to face the prospect of a day spent waiting in the airport with a little more humour. After all, what would it really matter in the grand scheme of things to miss a day’s work if my flight landed safely? Especially when the alternative might have been becoming confetti somewhere over the African continent. Surely, the Holy Spirit was at work to ensure that the engineers detected the small crack, no matter how inconvenient the consequences of that crucial discovery.

When I think about it, all of my airport mishaps had a happy ending. Despite the missed flight and an additional flight through the night, I still made it in time for my meetings (albeit on no sleep and with the help of several buckets of coffee).

In bad fortune I experienced acts of kindness. A friend drove me to an airport an hour away to search physically for my luggage, which had been dumped in the baggage claim area. Another friend gave me his old suitcase so that I wouldn’t need to send my own suitcase on another adventure wrapped in duct tape. So much else could have gone wrong, but somehow it all worked out.

Too often we react to the small inconveniences in everyday living as if the world is personally out to get us. We complain, we speak about our bad luck, our tempers rise and with it the negativity spreads around us — as it did at about 1am when the airline informed us that we would not be flying out until 6pm the following evening.

But when we focus on our bad luck, we lose the opportunity for grace to work itself.

As part of our daily prayer, we’re called to step back from the events of the day and reflect on them in the light of divine grace.

Where was the Holy Spirit at work in my day? Despite all the things that went wrong today, what went right? Do I recognise where I was invisibly protected from harm as I made my way through unseen dangers?

Am I able to see God’s hand in conversations that could have escalated into confrontations but instead ended on an amicable note? Do I see the seeds of God’s love in the beauty of the sunrise, the colours of the sunset, or the power of the ocean on a stormy day?

Good luck? Bad luck? Or just simply, God working in my life according to his perfect plan of love for me?