Greetings, gentle readers! I can explain the quietness around here with the excuse that I’ve just spent a week in our nation’s capital, where I was invited on short notice to give a talk at a small conference organized by the Abigail Adams Institute. Each summer, they run a seminar in Boston where students discuss selected readings from thinkers like Ivan Illich, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, and many more, loosely organized around the history and philosophy of technology. I participated in this seminar a couple years ago, and this year, they decided to put together an “alumni reunion” of sorts in D. C., where the seminar leaders would present along with some guest speakers and students working on papers. We heard samples of new work in progress from Mary Harrington, Geoff Shullenberger and Greg Conti of Compact magazine, Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation, and more. Including me, who despite being neither an Important Influencer nor a grad student nor a post-doc somehow got a speaking slot. This was lots of fun, but also a bit nerve-wracking. Thankfully, everything went swimmingly, and kind friends in the city gave me the flexibility to make the most of my visit. This travel diary is my way of making up for my temporary silence to paying subscribers. Enjoy!
Thursday/Friday: Jetlag, Encounters of the Uber Kind, and Live Music
My trip began inauspiciously with an 8-hour layover in Chicago O’Hare. Yes, you read that correctly. I saw rain on the forecast and idly wondered if it would mess with my schedule. Oh, did it ever. After missing my original connection, I was automatically rebooked for a 9 PM flight, not ideal but not the worst either. This would have put me in D. C. around midnight. Then the updates started coming in: It was delayed by an hour. Then another hour. Then another hour. I’d brought apple and cheese slices in an attempt to avoid buying overpriced airport food, but they were mostly gone now, and the bits of cheese still left were getting melty. In desperation, I forked over $20 for Manchu Wok.
I ate next to a young man poring over a textbook. He told me he was studying to become a journeyman. He was curious about what I did, I said I was a writer on various topics, and we ended up talking a little about religion and churchgoing. He’d gone to church as a child but drifted away, though he felt it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go back. I agreed and looked up reasonably sane evangelical churches in his area. He already had a good impression of one church, which also featured some comely female worship leaders on their splash page. Of course we agreed one should choose a church for a variety of factors besides the babes, not that the babes hurt. Hopefully the lad was nudged in a good direction.
Finding a place to sit in O’Hare that is a) comfortable and b) close to a power outlet is a bit of a quest. I staked out some territory at one of the gates where my plane was supposed to come in at some point, and as the hours ticked by, I decided I wasn’t in a hurry to move. Other hapless travelers were in the same boat. A young couple told me they’d been waiting half the day there for a flight to Italy. Their baby girl was being astonishingly good. She decided I was cool and kept crawling over in my direction. I blearily worked on my conference talk, which in my infinite wisdom I’d left partially unprepared until the last minute. The airport WiFi kept flickering in and out, but fortunately I’d piled lots of material into a doc I could work on offline. The thought of getting a hotel and re-re-booking crossed my mind, but Grok informed me that as long as the airline could blame things on God rather than themselves, I couldn’t make them pay for it. In the end, we left at 3 in the morning.
When I touched down in the city, my first Uber driver was an Ethiopian Orthodox man. There’s a vibrant Ethiopian community in D.C., and they seem to make up a disproportionate number of Uber drivers. We initially had some trouble locating each other in the dark, probably because I was facing the wrong way. I apologized. He was gracious. “Important thing is that I found you.”
The Ethiopian Orthodox tend to hang crosses from their rearview mirrors. This driver, Derege, was no exception. I told him that I liked it, as I always do. But no one else has done what he did next. “If you like it,” he said, “I can give it to you. I have another one.” I was a little stunned but happy to accept it. Derege then spent the rest of the ride talking in beautiful, simple language about God, faith, and the gospel. In my jetlagged state I forgot he was probably Orthodox and initially asked if he was Catholic. When he corrected me, he hastened to add, “But we believe the same thing. Catholic, Orthodox are the same.” He’d actually gotten the cross from a Catholic store, “because we are same, we believe same thing.” I told him I was a Protestant. “Is same. We believe in God.” He assured me again that he had a replacement cross and was quite happy for me to have it as a tangible reminder of God’s presence.
We talked some about prayer practices. “Pray every morning,” he said, “All day through the day, every night.” I admitted that I didn’t pray with the regularity I should. Derege encouraged me that prayer could be simple. Something short in the morning when you leave for work, like “God, help me today,” and a short prayer of thanks in the night when you return. “That’s it,” he said. One didn’t need to read “all these books and everything” to be close to God. “Always with you. Always with you. You always with Him.”
He talked as well about being attentive to creation, about being reminded of God in whatever beautiful or striking thing he saw. “You see anything, you say Oh my God. Oh my God.” He reflected on how people will still exclaim this if they’re in trouble, even if they don’t believe. He shook his head sadly when he talked about unbelievers. “I don’t know. Some people, it’s crazy, why they don’t…I don’t know.” They’ll believe “in the pole,” he said, pointing to a telephone pole, or the tree, or the cow. We discussed pagan religions, the difficulty of persuading polytheists that Jesus is the only way. “He is only way,” Derege agreed emphatically. He meditated on the beauty of the gospel. “He is not like human being. He give forgive for everybody. Whatever you did, he said okay. He die for us.”
Later I looked up that his name means something like “he acquired strength,” but he was unsure of the meaning himself when I asked him. He liked my name and was trying to pinpoint it: “A church…in Israel…” I said it was Hebrew for house of God, and perhaps he was thinking of Bethlehem. “Beth” means “house of.” “Yes, yes, right! House of this, house of that…”
Again there was a bit of confusion at the end of my journey, as I was staying at a friend’s row house but she described it as an “apartment.” With much chagrin, I woke her up from a dead sleep to help confirm the location. Then I bid Derege goodbye, feeling sad as always when I have such an encounter that I’ll likely never meet this beautiful kind soul again. But I have something to remember him by.
