Spiritual Aspects of the Ride

Map and Pics:  Click Here for Map and Pics.

3872 Miles, 120305 feet of climb , Days 1-52,
CA, NV, UT, CO, KS, MO, IL, IN, OH, PA, NY, VT, NH and ME

Spiritual Aspects of the Trip.  
 



Winners!  The Dutch Advance in
World Cup Soccer!



We weren't even to the first traffic light after leaving the San Francisco hotel when I heard somebody ask another what that moment was like for him. The answer I gave to myself was 'Wow' but the man who answered said the experience was a "spiritual moment." It was said with such gravity that I felt my adding anything would only pollute the deep inner thoughts that others were having around me.  "Wow" seemed overly trite and I started to wonder what was wrong with me. I was at the moment, but I wasn't in the moment.

I had just started to get to know my riding peers, and I was humbled. Not a one of them was a loser in the game of life, no, just the opposite. I could easily assume the check they had to write to be here riding in front of me was not even a pimple on their ledgers. The more obvious fact needed not to be stated. I was the only one that looked so unfit that a suggestion could be made I might want to purchase some training wheels, industrial strength, to support my excess weight.  These were highly self-motivated, successful, and moral people. There was not one word of discouragement heard  on the first day, or for the whole trip, and the use of profanity was almost non-existent.
 

Me struggling up the first hill in San Francisco

The best way to avoid looking stupid was to keep my mouth shut... and listen for once in my life.  As heard in the deep south, "I was with the goodest of the goodest." If they were to discover I was from Alabama, they would have to find it on page 38 of the rider's handouts.  I was that much out of my league. The first hill proved my assumptions were right on all accounts and falling more behind with every pedal stroke.

I wasn't even to the Pacific Ocean, still five miles away, to dip my back tire in the ocean when my inner expression went from "Wow" to "What am I doing here?" I thought it poetic that once topping the first hill, which was around 17% in grade, I entered the San Andreas Fault rift valley. It wasn't a 'we' anymore; by now everybody had already left me in their dust and for the first time in my life I had to discover what a cue sheet was. I could swear that sheet was written in Swahili; definitely not English. Yes, I had just experienced my San Francisco earthquake. Yes, I could now agree with the initial rider. This was indeed a spiritual moment. I was now 'in it', not 'at it'.
 

Even the trees are crooked - 8% grade up

It was ascending the Sierra Nevada Mountains from the west that I started having problems telling  from one stretch of the road to another if I was going up or down. To orient myself I would look at the ditches or streams on the side of the roads to determine which way the water was flowing. On logging roads, my eyes couldn't tell me what my legs could - it takes less effort to pedal downhill. My eyes were deceived by horizons that either couldn't be seen or when they could that were not true horizontal. I was traveling without trusted absolutes. I discovered that I needed these certainties to maintain my balance. When my eyes, legs and ears all disagreed, an internal argument ensued, churned the belly and increased the grip on the handlebars. Some call that mild vertigo. I call it watching my control slip away, and I was scared of mixing that dizzy condition with speed. The most terrifying moment of the whole trip for me was coming down Donner Pass on the fourth day out.  I laugh now. That section of road is advertised as one of the highlights of the trip. I can only go as far as saying it was the most memorable.

Eddie, our priest, and youngest rider

I live in the world of mathematics and sciences. When dealing with orbital mechanics or propulsion, it is comforting to have absolutes, like gravity working the same on Tuesdays as it does on Fridays. I enjoy math because it can be boiled down to simple truths: define the problem, follow the rules, stay inside the box, and through logic be rewarded with a solution. It was rocking my world that a 60 mile bike ride in California was three times the strain as a 60 mile ride in Alabama. It was rocking my self-esteem that I was not as good as others, physically, vocationally, financially, and most likely morally. It is hard to compete with a priest. I hurt in body, soul, and spirit. The good news is that I only had 3,400 riding miles of humiliation left.

The shade under a bridge
was considered a godsend.
PS: Exhaustion happens

The lowest point for me spiritually was our first day in Nevada. I thought my life was over when a 'triple' truck's trailer wheels came within three inches of me, and the afternoon sun softened the roads as if we were riding through peanut butter - and cooked your feet if you stepped off the pedals.  The disappearance of anything green was depressing; just days before we were in the lush Central Valley of California, the deep woods of the Sierras, or overlooking the blueness of Lake Tahoe. No, except for where a person intervened, the world was either a dull brown or shades of gray.

I felt that way inside too. It is when I was at my lowest point that I realized the only thing I had left was my base certainties. The love of my family, friends, the love of God, the encouragement of those at my church and at work, a tested path before me that hundreds had already accomplished, and the clockwork dawn that would signal the start of the next day's ride. These were some of the spiritual variables. Only dawn and the love of God were absolutes, and dawn was questionable.
 

Canada Dave in Auburn, CA
No rush!  The hotel is but 2 miles away!

The goodness of my riding partners started to have a very positive impact on me. "Canada Dave" always saw the bright side of things and made the trek across Nevada shorter than it really was. He always knew how to relax and to say the right things. We both had the uncanny ability to jointly misread the Swahili to gain bonus miles. To my shame I was wrapped up in my own pain to see all the goodness around me.  Looking back at all those miles I am now convinced that God purposely brings a man, and in this case me, to nothing before He lifts a man back up. Pride is an anathema to Him, and He certainly knows how to cure somebody of it.

I cannot speak for others, but I started to see God's hand all over me and on the paths before and behind me. Too many hints. They were everywhere. My math and science brain in me wanted to work out the probabilities of such a string of events - mind boggling. There has to be a point where the probabilities are so miniscule that it crosses the line from natural to supernatural. Luck can only take a person so far.  The more one studies applied math, the more one has to surrender to the possibility of an interactive divine that shapes the course of history. I concluded the most amazing aspect of God is that He doesn't leave fingerprints. If He did, there would proof of His existence and that would render faith both obsolete and meaninglessness. No, I concluded He seeks mankind's love and admiration, but if He exposed Himself that would mean appreciation, love, worship, all of the entrails of those voluntary attributes would become compulsory in the light of overwhelming evidence. No, He chooses to allow us to have a free will; a will where we have the right to love him, hate him, demote him to a seasonal cosmic Santa Claus, or as many do, ignore him completely.
 
Growing up poor, Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday. Christmas was not. Yes, I scored big with presents given our situation, but I didn't like the theology the John Coots song added to it:

     He's making a list                                           

     And checking it twice;

     Gonna find out Who's naughty and nice

     Santa Claus is coming to town

     He sees you when you're sleeping

     He knows when you're awake

     He knows if you've been bad or good

     So be good for goodness sake! 

 

My young behavior was such that I detested the thought of some cosmic entity keeping book on me 24x7. The same phrase that nagged me in my childhood continued to nag me now. The problem with catchy tunes is that they keep catching you, and this was one of the ditties that plagued me during the ride. The line that bothered me the most was the last one: So be good for goodness sake! What is that supposed to mean? Is the song saying we should be good because it is good to be good? That is unpinned reasoning - no absolutes - no string on that kite.

Dawn at Wendover, NV

So what would anchor 'for goodness sake' to the ground? Family reputation? A basis for success in commerce? A basis to form a relationship such as marriage?  Continuation of societal norms? And what would be the fruit of each of those reasons? Harmony for one thing. Peace maybe. Coercing a child to behave the two weeks before Christmas? Those things, but also pride. Pride in being able to say I was good, and by inference better than my siblings or peers. Pride also promotes a weak argument to keep a soul out of hell on Judgment Day, as if we could point back to our good deeds and tell God we deserve entrance into his heaven. That is where the 24x7 aspect of good old Saint Nick bothers me. For every one good thing I did by accident there were hundreds of other things I did on purpose hidden away in my Hall of Shame. Only a fool on judgment day would present that approach as a personal defense. Historical accuracy is one of the attributes I fear the most about God.

The only true anchor I could think of 'for goodness sake' would be the argument that any good that we do is nothing more than a reflection of the image of the divine within us. We are told that mankind was made in the image of God, and goodness is nothing more than that light's reflection getting past the crud and mud of our flaws that fog the windows of our soul. I find that to be true. If you look in the best angle, people glow with goodness. If you look in wrong places, such as pricking one of their pet peeves, well goodness doesn't glow out of those slime pits.
 

Some of the best of the best

So what good is being good anyway, and who has the right to say what is good? Is society the arbiter of what is good? Nations take on the personalities of their leaders, and human history compels us to look elsewhere for a moral standard. Should it be our parents or grandparents? Their credentials include a genuine love for their families, but the problem with searching an ancestry is the discovery that our forefathers were just like us. Educators? Doctors? Clergy? What about the group I was riding with? That was certainly the cream of the crop and the group even included a priest. Or should it be the individual that sets the standard of self-atonement?

God is not impressed. He looks at these deliberations and likens them to a group of prostitutes arguing among themselves who is the most virginal. According to the prophets, His standard is perfection and the question quickly becomes how much forgiving, pity, and mercy will be needed to cover the depravity that leaches into human behavior. He is not interested in playing Santa Claus; He is in the restoration business: Beauty for ashes. He is not interested in bad people becoming good, but dead people becoming alive. Goodness is merely the divine life shining through, a byproduct of His transforming life giving power. Goodness is not the goal, it is the evidence.

 

Final Group Picture, Rye High School, NH

So did I waste my time looking for goodness in America? Absolutely not. When the 'gooder' credits the 'gooding' to someone other than the 'goodee' then the real source of the 'good' receives the credit. When somebody was prompted within themselves to be kind to me and later they deflected the thanks away from themselves, God got the credit for the prompting, and everybody gains joy. 

This is what Alabama boys think about when they ride their bikes across America. May all men and women realize that God is in the restoration business, cease all hostilities towards Him, and ask God to wash them new and alive in that life giving power.  "Joy to the World!" - commands the Isaac Watts Christmas carol.

 

If there was one spiritual lesson I had to learn on this trip it was to not to look with the eye, but look

In the Atlantic Ocean - Wallis Sands State Park, NH

at life through the eye. It is the difference between being at and in. God gives too many hints of His care and He wants us to respond in faith to even bigger truths He has in store. He does not expect us to say thank you for every blessing, but I do think He enjoys it when we express gratitude. It is one thing to be at his throne room of nature, and quite another to be in His throne room. Personally, I have taken that step, and trusted Him to daily to get me through each day, and especially during this adventure. I dared not boast of my faith in His power to get me across the country - heavens no! I was always on the brink of physical failure and mental succumbing to the urge to quit. Some would say that is a weak faith. Okay... it was, but it was still faith.  Friends were supportive, my fellow bikers were encouragers, and God was faithful. When the smoke cleared on the last day the most unlikely of riders was standing strong not just at the ocean, but in the Atlantic.

Bottom Line: God had His hand all over me all the way. Wow. Better said, I lived 'in' the Wow of God.