On a wing and a prayer

The chapel is the least-visited of airport facilities ÿ and often the drabbest. But what does faith have to do with flying anyway?

By Jason Oddy

Of all the colours in the spectrum, grey is perhaps the one you would least associate with God. Grey calls to mind corpses, concrete, corporations – but it does not make you think of the divine. It is too compromised and worldly to be uplifting, and there is something distinctly doubtful about its being pressed into the service of belief. Which is why the chapel at Newark airport in New Jersey feels like an ecclesiastical oxymoron.

Newark's chapel is a study in grey. Grey carpet. Grey skirting. Grey walls. Grey curtains. Grey chairs. Even a pulpit upholstered in synthetic grey fabric. Taking their cue not from Chartres or St Peter's, the designers of this airless box on the mezzanine level of Terminal B have achieved something unique. This room must accommodate every faith, and no doubt its colour scheme has been chosen so as not to offend. Yet, more exceptionally, what could be called the designers' monochromania seems to offer a glimpse of the Platonic ideal of neutrality.

In a sense, neutrality is the innate condition of modern airports, places that social anthropologists prefer to term "non-places". For in these vast arenas, where all nationalities intermingle, it can sometimes feel as though you are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Oriented to the skies, their terminals, unlike conventional buildings, have only a limited interest in the ground on which they stand. And since night never falls in these always-lit environments, both geography and time find themselves suspended.

Of course, attempts are made to naturalise the terminal. Gatwick after all has its "village". But even the presence of a post office, pub and newsagent, not to mention the odd machine-gun-toting bobby, does nothing to mitigate its absolutely synthetic character. The same holds true for those airport chapels that, unlike Newark, have made distinct efforts to reconnect with tradition by turning to the past for decorative inspiration. JFK's new Terminal 4 is equipped with a clutch of chapels, one apiece for Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews. This state of single-occupancy luxury has allowed them to be cluttered with the customary paraphernalia of each creed. Doubtless these trappings are meant to anchor and inspire believers. Yet, somehow, such a painstaking attempt at simulation makes Kennedy's religious spaces seem even more deracinated than their barer counterparts.

These seldom-visited places are housed in modular units that could as well be Sock Shops, Waterstones or toilets, and it would in all likelihood take a miracle to exorcise their forlorn spirit. Although most large airports have chapels, it seems that few people are aware of their existence. In part this is down to economics. Airports nowadays derive up to 40 per cent of their income from what marketers like to describe as "passenger discretionary spending", so it is not hard to see why terminal planners do their utmost to ensure that our route from check-in to take-off is plotted to keep us in the maze of shops and restaurants. Only souls in serious need of sanctuary from the perfume-sprayers and the glittering razzmatazz of duty-free will make the pilgrimage to a room so far off the beaten track that to go there is to risk missing your plane.

While people may morbidly imagine that airport chapels exist primarily to accommodate the grieving relatives of plane-crash victims, they usually fulfil more mundane purposes. While airports have no permanent inhabitants, a place such as Heathrow is host not just to the million-plus passengers who pass through it every week, but also to a staff of 68,000, who, like any comparably-sized community, have their own religious needs.

In spite of this, it still seems strange that in the midst of these temples of materialism, such outposts of belief survive. For in a way, the airport, emblem of speed and progress, stands for everything a chapel does not. The chapel is where stillness reigns, a place you visit to take leave of this earth not physically but spiritually. It is a cupboard of introspection in a vast place where the other journeys taken are journeys that take us away from ourselves – indeed, are often designed to let us escape ourselves.

It is possible, of course, that airport chapels exist simply to keep hubs of commerce such as terminals ticking over, by helping pacify their conscience. Or perhaps it is the case that these places of prayer have sprung up as a manifestation of an Icarus complex, with mankind afraid that its hubristic achievement of taking to the skies will be punished unless it appeases the gods by making a gesture of piety. For, as 11 September reminded us, flying and faith are divided by a fundamental fault-line.

If the trauma inflicted then on the West's psyche led to a momentary turning towards belief, then it should also have made us all recognise that at some level our very ability to take to the air is antithetical to the idea of religion. It may not just have been a desire to achieve the worst that led the terrorists to choose for weapons aeroplanes, symbols not only of man's scientific prowess but also of his wish to put himself up there with the angels. For the power of flight encroaches on territory that once belonged to God. From a fundamentalist's point of view, al-Qa'ida's radical negation of this technology may have been the most fitting response conceivable.

More mindful of its mortal wellbeing, humanity as a whole tends to choose less drastic means to accommodate its impulse towards the sacred. The French philosopher Michel Serres sees airports as our equivalent of the great medieval cathedrals, with the ostensible buildings at ground level being merely the foundations of an immense virtual architecture of radio signals, electronic relays and encoded information enveloping thousands upon thousands of people aloft. And like cathedrals, airports rank among the most costly buildings of their age, with a typical terminal running to some hundreds of millions of pounds. So while man's energies may still be directed heavenward, today the deities that demand his devotion are those of science and capital, not ineffable spirit.

Five hundred years after the Copernican revolution and a century since the first powered flight, the secularisation of belief is well established. No better evidence of this exists than the airport, a place that not only demonstrates our willingness to put faith in technology, but one that also shows how faith has fused with technology. Now, when man wants to worship, it is to the terminal that he goes. Not so that he can visit the vestiges of some obsolete creed, but so that he can join in the evangelism of the future. Indeed it is quite ludicrous to suppose that an airport chapel in all its drabness could ever compete with the purifying experience of flight. At 30,000ft, the profane world falls away.

The ability to propel us swiftly forward at great altitude is possibly science's most fantastic trick, because in so doing it succeeds in sanctifying both us and itself. As we look down, it seems that we are no longer connected to the earth and its sufferings. And if we look up, all that is visible is blue. *

Jason Oddy's photographs are available from the Photographers' Gallery, 5 Great Newport Street, London WC2, tel: 020 7831 1772