When the journey is the destination

Flights to nowhere and third spaces.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A large airport window silhouettes a bench at which one person sits.

Suganth on Unsplash.

'It's not about the destination. It's the journey.' Spare a thought for the British Airways passengers who left Heathrow to Houston, only to land back where they started at nine hours later. It's probably a little bit about the destination too.

Even though BA195 was already flying over Newfoundland when the technical issue was raised, it made more sense to fix one of its Rolls Royce engines back at the ranch. In November an Air New Zealand flight also had a 'flight to nowhere' that lasted eleven hours. I'm not sure that's quite what T.S. Eliot meant when he wrote:

'We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.’

Being stuck somewhere you don't want to be, let alone finding yourself back where you began, is a tad more prosaic. The never-ending journey can feel like a destination in itself. Which is exactly where you don't want to be.

Airports and airplanes are neutral territory, not dissimilar to 'third places' as coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg. Home is the first place, workplace is the second, and then there's the third space in our lives. Some of the characteristics are shared: a neutral ground without obligations, a leveller where status doesn't matter, and also where conversation is the main activity. Clearly Oldenburg wasn't thinking of the tube and Londoners where the chat is minimal! Airports and airplanes are also not completely levelling, when a delay or diversion means some can wait well up in the pointy end of the plane or in exclusive lounges.

Everybody knows each other's name, they celebrate together, mourn together - a compelling mixture of conviction, compassion and community.

The other day I turned on the TV, a re-run of Cheers appeared, about the eponymous bar in Boston where characters from different backgrounds and perspectives mingle. My toddler asked 'What's that?' I thought better than beginning to explain the concept of a third place. Or drinking. But we're all trying to get somewhere in life. Whether that's to get ahead, or even if it's just away from it all: to a bar or a holiday. So, the frustration of being stationary and sedentary in life when you're supposed to be having upward momentum can be even more challenging than the inconvenience of being up in the air and flying backwards.

But the Christian message is that the destination and the journey are actually inseparable.

Firstly, the church, if small enough, like Cheers, is a place 'where everybody knows your name'. I was recently at a church on a council estate and next to a prison. Everybody knows each other's name, they celebrate together, mourn together - a compelling mixture of conviction, compassion and community. In larger churches, much like most 'third places' you won't know everybody's name, but there is the commonality of having the same destination in mind. The sceptic might say it's simply a ticket to heaven, but the picture the Bible paints of the eternal reality is distinctly mirrored in the week-by-week journey: a liminal place where every people from every tribe and nation gather. It's a place where we can be propelled into the future.

Then there's the cross itself. The gospel writer Luke says that 'Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem'. He had his destination in mind. And on the cross there was finality for Jesus. But there was also an onward journey to come. Could it be that what the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus opens up for us is not just an eternal destiny in the future, but a journey today where keeping company with God is the destination too?

Perhaps that's what entering a church can mean for us today: to cross the threshold into the future, and to know the place for the first time.

Review

Belief

Culture

Music

Romance

22 May 2025

3 min read

Is Alex Warren singing a love song, or a worship song?

Ordinary's lyrics speak to a fundamental human desire, even when we don’t realise.

Ed Chan-Stroud

Ed is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University.

A singer holding a guitar raises his head with closed eyes.

Warren on stage.

Mike M. Cohen, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Alex Warren’s Ordinary is number one in the UK charts. At first glance the song appears to be a love song, and I would guess this is how it’s been heard during its 400million streams.

Spend more time with the song, though, and it becomes hard to ignore the theological imagery. “stayin’ drunk on your vine,” sings Warren – a conscious (he’s a Catholic) borrowing of St John’s image of the human person as united to God like a branch to a vine. “You’re the sculptor, I’m the clay,” is a direct reference to St Paul. Warren adds to these biblical allusions images primarily associated with Christian worship, including references to ‘holy water’ and ‘kissing the sanctuary.

So, Ordinary is certainly a love song, it’s just not clear who Warren is singing to. A human lover? Or a song to the Triune God, the One revealed in Jesus Christ?

I’m not really interested in the meaning Warren intended to convey. But I am interested in what the popularity of the song might say about the human heart.

As St Paul stood before the Athenians he told them he came with news of the ‘Unknown God’; one whom the Athenians did not know but who they deeply desired to know. Might the popularity of songs like Ordinary reveal the deep desire that human beings have for a God they do not yet know? To my mind, the 400,000,000 streams of Ordinary speak of a desire to meet with the God who is Love, the God who invites us into a union, a love, more intimate than the branch and the vine.

In one of my favourite songs, Florence + the Machine insightfully explores what it might mean to love someone without knowing it. In South London Forever, she tells us about a time when she was ‘young and drunk and stumbling in the street’. The tone is light, and the regular refrains of ‘it doesn't get better than this’ capture the (sometimes literal) ecstasy which often accompanies youth.

Yet the song also captures a real sense of loss. Florence describes how ‘I forgot my name, And the way back to my mother's house’. As the song builds, the refrain becomes deeply melancholy, with Florence moving from belting out that life had never been better to describing how:

‘Everything I ever did, was just another way to scream your name, over and over and over and over again’.

It is with these words that the song finishes.

But whose name is Florence screaming?

The song does not say. But, might it be God’s name? Indeed, Florence hints at this with a singular reference to God at the heart of the song. On this reading, South London Forever becomes a story about recognising one’s own failed attempts to find happiness as an attempt to find God. It becomes a story about seeking God without even knowing it.

Intriguingly, the great North African Bishop, St Augustine of Hippo tells a similar story in his Confessions. Augustine’s spiritual autobiography is, at least in part, a story of his deep struggle with a desire for sexual intimacy. It is a story of seeking out fulfilment in strange places such that Augustine slowly becomes a stranger to himself, and as Florence puts it, loses the way back to his mother’s house. Looking back over these attempts to find happiness, Augustine comes to recognise that it was God all along that he was looking for ‘how deeply even then, the depths of my heart were sighing for you’.

The story of songs like Ordinary and South London Forever is that the human heart always desires God, even when the heart is looking for God in strange places.

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