Philippe Petit walked across a wire strung between the Twin Towers in 1974. That is 1,312 feet in the air. He walked across it 8 times for a total of 45 minutes.
In the movie about it, The Walk, at the climax, Philippe is walking across the wire for the second time and he says, “And then I feel something that maybe I have never truly felt before. I feel thankful. So I get down on one knee and I salute. First, I salute the wire, then the towers, and then I salute the great city of New York.”
At the highest point in the movie, he offers thanks. The movie is about thanksgiving.
However, Philippe fails at this one point. He fails to offer thanks to what is still higher than him. He fails to acknowledge God.
The movie scene reminds me of the infamous song by John Lennon, Imagine:
“Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky.”
That is what the movie gives us: a man up in the sky trying to offer thanks but all he has to thank is an empty sky.
Offering thanks into an empty sky is pointless.
Thankfulness only works when it is offered to the one who gave the gift. It has been said that people want to be thankful but when they go to give things they have no one to say thank you to. They fail at thanksgiving because they fail to offer thanks to God.
Some might claim that if God is over us then we will never be as high as him. So they think that God being over us will lower us. But the reality is with no God, with no standard, then measurements of height have no meaning. Without God, we are actually always low.
If God is not over us, then we have no way to measure how high we actually are. Without God, everyone is always on the same level. So even when Philippe was 1,312 feet in the air, if there is no God, then Philippe was just the same height as everyone else. His high wire act was nothing special.
Chesterton once said, “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought.”
Only those who acknowledge and thank God can recognize heights and depths. In thanking God, we are lifted up to our proper position in creation. We are under God but he has placed us, in Christ, over creation. God has made us for himself to praise and thank him. When we do what he has designed us to do, we stand at our highest position. Only in God can we find our true height.
As the hymn Be Thou My Vision says: “Thou my best thought, by day or by night.”
When we thank God, standing with our feet on the solid earth, we stand taller than Philippe did up on that wire in 1974.
