Finding the holy from your bicycle seat

We’ve got to be grateful for the incredible American bicycle industry. In less than 50 years, great new bike companies have sprung up, succeeded, and continue to be technological and design leaders. This alone is testimony not only to the rising number of cyclists, but to the viability of cycling as what we have always hoped it would be: a major form of transportation. 

Cycling ought not to be approached as exercise. We’ll never develop the mental platform to see cycling simply as part of life if we continue to sideline it as recreation. That’s one legacy of the car culture. We get convinced that, when we grow big, we drive cars. Bikes are for kids. What a loss.

I commute by bike for all my basic needs. Shops, banks, restaurants, doctors, dentists, NMSU.

If I need to buy a refrigerator, that’s a different story, but my normal mode of transport is the bicycle. I suppose it’s exercise, but that’s not the point. Life at 14 miles an hour gives you time to think, meditate, drink in your surroundings, find your rhythm.

Funny how the growth of automobile culture led to a faster pace of life. We live at warp speed, though we do not recognize it anymore. For younger people the sense of rush must be more intense. To ease up such an assault upon the psyche, some folks find solace in drugs, others in alcohol, sex, the usual suspects. 

Take a bike ride. A ride to the supermarket or many miles farther. Once you get used to it (again, perhaps?) cycling becomes part of you. Cycling and walking occur at a human pace. That is not the frenetic anxiety-laden rat race many of us choose or are forced to run.

Even though I’m riding alongside motor vehicles, even though there can be distractions – things cyclists notice, a screwdriver in the gutter, a new “for rent” sign – I am in my monastery. There is no requirement for brick and mortar to make this monastery. You can do it in your heart, and you can find the silence that is below and above the noises that crowd into our lives. You can find solace and cultivate inner peace on the seat of your bicycle.

On that seat you are rooted in your community if you choose to be. You learn every street, pothole, and major crack in the road, but along with the smells, you learn the culture where you’re planted. That learning plants you deeper.

Cyclists are a community within a community. We talk over coffee, tea, water, beer.

Most of the time our talk is not just about bikes, in fact may be not about bikes at all. It may be philosophical or political. Or simply, how’s your daughter in Montana? Your sick uncle in Wisconsin? Cyclists care by their presence and they are prepared to care even more if needed.

You may have noticed (after all these years of columns) that my spirituality is tied up with dirt and kinship, with material and relational stuff.

I find the holy in those arenas. 

Not in some sky, pie or not. Cycling is a way of meditation upon just that truth.

You may think I’m a romantic with my talk of cycling. I’m not. Honest. I do not gush about cycling. I see it as part of a solution to a handful of personal, societal, and environmental problems we’ve not sufficiently addressed. 

So go on. Take a bike ride. Take the first step toward a different level of engagement with your world.

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle is a retired Orthodox Christian priest. Contact him at gabrielcroch@aol.com. He’s a long, long time cyclist.