Published in the Baptist Times 23 September 2011
I was in the sea one day last summer when the Red Arrows roared in out of nowhere and swooped low over the ocean. Once I'd got over the shock - and my husband's callous laughter from the safety of the beach - the display was amazing.
Adults stood up from their sunbathing and children froze mid-step to watch the incredible manoeuvres. Perfectly co-ordinated and apparently missing each other by a hair's breadth, the planes circled and crossed each other, pirouetted like ballet dancers and dived like cormorants, leaving coloured smoke trails recording symmetric shapes across the sky.
Their piece de resistance, drawing gasps of admiration from the onlookers, was a perfect heart shape, pierced by an arrow drawn by a single plane shooting through the only-just vacated airspace.
When they reached the finale, there was spontaneous applause from their half-dressed unofficial audience (the display was targeted at a larger resort across the bay) and then everyone settled back into their sandcastle building or sunsoaking.
But we stopped looking up too soon. Once the Arrows had gone, an extraordinary phenomenon filled the sky. Where the planes had been, a flock of starlings began to form. Whether they were disturbed by the noise or stirred-up air currents, or whether the slipstreams whipped up a cloud of insects, I don't know. But moment by moment more and more birds arrived.
Silent and monochrome, their manoeuvres didn't attract the attention the pilots had done, but their achievement was even more breathtaking. Hundreds upon hundreds of birds flew at speed, each on its individual trajectory, wheeling and diving, hurtling through the sky and through the crowd of intensely flapping other starlings.
The choreography was astonishing. Bird Health and Safety regulations were perfectly observed. Not one bird collided with another, despite the huge numbers, high speeds and diverging flight directions. As an exercise in air traffic control, it was unparalleled. And unobserved.
It doesn't always work so perfectly, either for human pilots or avian aeronauts. This summer, tragically, a Red Arrows pilot crashed and died following a south coast air display. Something somewhere had gone wrong, either with the machinery or with the interrelating mechanisms of planning, technology, judgement and skill.
Birds too can crash land, not only babies learning to fly but adults whose radar fails. Full-grown pigeons occasionally fly into our plate-glass sitting room window; one flew into me at shoulder level as I walked round the corner of the house.
Animals sometimes become disoriented also, and fail to follow the pack. A few summers ago, a lone dolphin was sighted off the shore. Thrilled, crowds gathered to watch it, following in cars and small boats as it made its way along the coast.
Naturalists proffered a warning: dolphins do not usually swim alone. Something was wrong with this one: it could have lost its navigational skill due to injury or sickness, or been evicted by its pod for aggressive behaviour. Either way, it should not be approached.
Parents ignored the warning, cheerfully chucking their children overboard from inflatable dinghies to swim with Flipper the Friendly Dolphin - till it tossed a woman in the air and pushed her out to sea, where the lifeboat crew rescued her.
Creatures are made to function as part of a team, and as part of a wider creation. When someone goes out on a limb, detaching themselves from the rest of humanity, operating alone, it breaks the symmetry.
The problem may be in the person's thinking - such as the lone gunman turning on innocent bystanders - or with the people who should have been close to the loner but failed to notice or nurture. Or it may be with a community - when the whole pattern of values is faulty and the one who is out of step with the crowd is the one who is in tune with their own integrity.
It's awe-inspiring whenever aircraft or birds, animals or humans work in harmony. And it's always significant when that harmony fails.
Either way, we need to take notice. We need to keep looking up, and not look away too soon.
