Near Death Experiences

Bob Smithy’s Inn stands on a crossroads and after an exacting climb there is a very short, sharp decent across the road to an equally short climb of a few yards to the pub carpark.  In 2013 Naomi had what she called her, “near-death” experience.  This involved her foot getting stuck in a faulty peddle cleat which meant she couldn’t stop at the give way sign at the crossroad without falling off her bike and subsequently shot straight across the road.  Fortunately, there was nothing coming and so the threat of death receded into folklore.

On this this trip, once I had eaten as much as I possibly could, I got chatting to another group of local cyclists who asked me where our group was heading.  When I told them, I was treated to a considerable number of anecdotes about their cycling prowess and I got the distinct impression that I was, if you will excuse the crudity, being invited to engage in a prick fencing competition the aim of which was to prove that they, as northerners, were far harder (excuse the extension of the phallic pun) than their southern counterparts.

All fuelled up, we set off again to the top of the climb where we had by now completed round about thirty miles.  For some reason best known to himself, it was a complete mystery to me, Henry hung back and took a vast number of photos of a group of cows grazing in a field opposite the pub!  It has to be said though that the countryside beyond the lunch stop was very beautiful indeed.  The strange thing about today’s ride was that it had passed through some very unattractive towns and urban sprawl which then suddenly gave way to some glorious rural vistas.

We finally reached the top of the climb and then hit an eight-mile descent into the last major conurbation, Blackburn.  Parts of this descent were very steep indeed and the road surface was not good.  At one-point Ollie went hammering past me his cycling jacket flapping in the wind.  Just before he got out of sight something flew out of his jacket pocket.  He screeched to a halt to retrieve it as I shot past him (well that was a first on a descent!).  I noticed that the object that had hit the deck at some considerable velocity was his mobile phone.  The obscenities got louder as I approached him and then faded slowly away as I disappeared down the descent.

At the end of the descent we meandered through the streets of Blackburn and over the spectacular Wainwright Bridge, named after Alfred Wainwright, the author of a seven volume “Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells” and the town’s most famous son.  We cycled for half a mile down Barbara Castle Way, named after the town’s most famous daughter.  Once out of Blackburn we encountered some more undulating riding which took us on a main road to the village of Langho and then on to Whalley where we got off the main drag and back onto more picturesque country lanes, where the possibility of musing once again presented itself.

I cast my mind back to the last days of being a Priest-in-Charge and the early days of subsequently being a Vicar.  I think that the first stirrings of the embers beneath the grey coals of my psyche came when a copy of the “Woodstock” film fell into my hands.  I watched it first on TV and then bought a copy and became somewhat obsessed with its content.  The film is of course set at the height of the “make love not war” hippy era, an era which was no doubt naive in the extreme but none the less attractive in its desire to combat the destructive nature of the war in Vietnam which raged in parallel with it.  The film somehow put me in touch with a sense of having somehow missed out due to my rather puritan attitude during the mid-sixties and early seventies particularly in the area of sexuality and its expression.  Mind you I did make some weak attempt to be a weekend hippy and went about sporting an afghan coat for a couple of years.  Anyone who has owned an afghan coat will know that they are incredibly warm but, when exposed to a heavy downpour of rain, make one smell rather like a decomposing yak. I also grew my hair and beard long, so much so that my father once remarked, “I don’t know where you start and that coat finishes.”  However, what came home to roost as I entered my middle years wasn’t just the fact that I had not indulged in a good bout of free love before I settled down, oh no it was much more complex than that.  In 2013, Naomi had her near-death experience at Bob Smithy’s crossroads; in the period of my life I mused upon that afternoon, I too came to a dangerous crossroad in my life.  I experienced, to some extent at least, the death of the person I thought I was and, on a psychological/spiritual level, it felt just as dangerous and out of control as getting your foot stuck in an unyielding cleat!

 

 

Food for Thought

Once I got “Staying Alive” out of my head I got to thinking a bit more about my discovery of reading and gaining knowledge.  Thinking about it on the road that day I recalled that I had, some years earlier, come to the conclusion that this thirst for academic knowledge had a good and a not so good side to it.  Seeking any kind of sound knowledge, even if it is knowledge for knowledge sake, can’t be in itself a bad thing but it can be used as a defence against experiencing the rawness of life and I think in my case, in part at least, it was used in this defensive manner.  Life with my parents was safe but on the whole a rather dull experience.  I could not escape this by getting into sport as, cycling apart, I wasn’t really interested.  Becoming a committed Christian had the effect of cutting me off from various other teenage outlets and so once the initial high of the conversion experience subsided, I found myself in need of some powerful stimulation and this came in the form of gaining knowledge: in other words, I started mostly to live in my head.  The negative effect of this might be illustrated by saying it was rather like sitting in a cosy room observing the world through double glazing and making judgements and comments upon life beyond the window whilst having little or no real experience of what that life might entail.  On course I didn’t realise it at the time, but choosing to live like that involved a considerable amount of repression.  The fires of adolescence quickly subsided under the steadying hand of Evangelical Christianity and its strict morality, the surface of the fire in some sense became ashen grey, the embers beneath hidden but not extinguished.  Looking back on it now it seems to me that I became old before my time. Also, what I did not realise at the time was although the externals of life had calmed under the ash of normality the embers remained hot and only needed something or someone to come along and stir them into life again and then the fire would rage with new life.

So, the steady external development of my life slowly unfolded, I got into a long-term relationship and eventually married.  I held down a job which was well paid with good prospects which did nothing to fire my imagination.   Eventually I left to pursue my thirst for theological knowledge in a structured manner.  I went to two theological colleges, gained two degrees.  I fathered two lovely children, served two curacies, became a priest-in-charge and eventually a vicar, taught on the Diocesan Lay Readers Course and so on.  Little or no indication of what was to come.

Whilst I recalled my earlier life, much of this stage of the ride involved tackling many miles of rather unpleasant urban cycling.  We left behind large stretches of lush green attractive countryside and were forced to go through several rather run-down towns, the first of which was Warrington.  The route took us past the second prison of the trip, this time HMP Risley a category C prison. A mile or so after the prison we passed through the village of Culcheth.  We were now fourteen miles into a sixty-three-mile ride which was nowhere near as long as the previous day but was considerably more arduous in regard of climbing.  The first twenty miles were gently undulating, but after that the real day’s climbing started.  Eventually, after the various ascents were conquered, we came to Bolton.  On the 2013 trip this town seemed to me to be extremely grim, however on this trip the sun was shining and it did not appear quite as bad as I remembered or was expecting; I guess any place will look its best in brilliant sunshine.  One of the things that Julia noticed when going on shopping trips was as we got further north there was a propensity of Food Banks, something which, at that time, were not so common in the south (but now are).  This made us acutely aware of the North South divide which so often gets mentioned in the news.  To see evidence of it for yourself brings it home in a way that even the most objective media reporting cannot match.

Once through Bolton we began to climb steeply until we stopped half way up a steep ascent at Bob’s Smithy Inn, a charming pub with a large car park, where we met the support team who had prepared the fuel for the next part of the journey.  Eating has always been a pleasure for me, both food wise and for its social element, but on these long bike rides the pleasure element becomes secondary to the desire to stuff as many carbs down my throat as possible in order to gain enough energy so as not to burn out before the next food stop.  There is no finesse about eating on LEJOG, with the possible exception of the daily evening meal but, even then, one has at least half an eye to getting the carbs in for the start of the next day’s ride.  This all-consuming carnal reality seemed to sit in stark contrast to the intellectual reality of my earlier life I had been thinking about.

Staying Alive

The Holiday Inn, after a long day’s ride, was pure, unashamed luxury.  In 2013 we didn’t stay at the Holiday Inn but took a long detour to a guest house on the outskirts of Liverpool.  This proved to be a friendly and very comfortable place, a double bed and a TV in the room.  The owner, when he realised, we were riding for charity gave us a wonderful full English for which he would not accept payment.  Nice though this was, it meant that we had a long drive back to the Holiday Inn to start the seventh day’s ride, so this time we decided, despite the extra cost, that it made sense to stay at the Holiday Inn.  Swimming and having a sauna considerably eased my painful ankle and for this I was very grateful indeed. Claire, at the time of the ride, Henry’s girlfriend, surprised Henry by turning up whilst we were all in the pool.  Lauren, Ollie’s partner, also joined us that evening and became an important part of the support team.

Despite the comfortable bed at the Holiday Inn I did not sleep particularly well.  I had a very vivid dream which involved seeking permission to cycle through the grounds of a stately home.  On waking I felt quite worn out. Having considered the dream I felt that it was perhaps an attempt on the part of my ego to confront the other parts of my psyche which tend to militate against me succeeding in any challenging venture. After the dream and my rather hurried interpretation thereof, Julia and I headed down to breakfast and joined the others and we were on the road again by 8.35am.

The first part of the ride was not at all nice and involved negotiating some horrible roundabouts on the major road out of town.  I found one roundabout in particular extremely frightening indeed and I feared for my life as I nervously sought to navigate it.  The main problem and the greatest danger were due to the fact that one lane led onto a motorway and cars were driving at considerable speed round the roundabout and onto the slip road to the motorway.  After some hesitation, I launched myself into the traffic hoping and praying I would make it to the other side.   A succession of speeding cars hooted at me as I tried my best to figure out which lane I needed to be in.  By the time I finally got to the other side and the relative safety of the dual carriageway I was, to put it mildly, quite stressed, physically shaking but grateful that I had finally made it one piece.  So, after this, as my heart rate was just about getting back to normal, the group managed to get onto a rather good cycle path which ran alongside the dual carriageway and thus we got out of the traffic.  The experience on the roundabout left me realising just how vulnerable one is on a bike and how it would be very easy to quickly become a fatality statistic.  Perhaps there was a sense in which my dream predicted this and was warning me of external as well as internal dangers to my whole LEJOG 2 adventure.  My initial thought, once out of danger, was, “Oh shit, now I have a Bee Gees song going around and around in my head!”  (“Staying Alive”)

Once on the cycle path however my mind was freed to start thinking again about things other than homicidal motorists and a song I don’t much care for and I found myself musing again about the early days after I made my initial commitment to Christ.  Things got into a pattern of Sunday worship, prayer meetings, Bible study groups, church youth club and reading as many popular Christian publications as I could get hold off.  Up to this point I had never been much of a reader.  One of the lastingly consistent effects of my conversion experience was the awakening of a thirst for knowledge and a consequent love of reading, something which has been with me ever since.  I consumed books like it was going out of fashion.  After about a year my chosen reading material changed.  I tired of reading about drug addict gang leaders who had experienced a dramatic turnaround in their lives and started to get seriously into reading theology.  I became something of a knowledgeable amateur theologian majoring in Reformation and English Puritan Theology.  This was the start of a pattern of how I seem to learn new material.  It occurred again when I started to get interested in psychology, a lot of reading based around one school of thought, an amateur attempt at gaining knowledge before seeking professional advice and supervised training by real experts.  It’s interesting how we all have different ways of learning which seriously challenges the “one method fits all” type of education system.

“Oh, no, that bloody song is still going round in my head!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Want To Get You Up Out Of Your Seat

There had been plenty of time for thinking and musing as, once we had climbed gently to Bishop’s Castle, we descended equally gently through Hope Valley, Pontesbury and on to Shrewsbury where we crossed the River Severn via the Welsh Bridge.  We cycled through Shrewsbury and on to Bomere Heath where Julia met us at the cricket club for first lunch.  We were making very good time and were by now 33 miles in.

The afternoon’s riding was not completely flat, I would describe it as undulating.  Time to muse again.  On this part of the day’s long journey, my mind moved to thoughts of the origins of my faith.  My mother was an influence.  She had made it clear to my father, who was not really interested in church, that part of the deal when she agreed to marry him was that she would be free to practice her faith.  I don’t really remember this, but my mother told me that one day I announced that I wanted to go to Sunday School and so I was duly enrolled in the Sunday School at St John’s Congregational Church, Thornton Heath, a stone’s throw from our house.  She did not pressure me to go the Sunday School, evidently it was something quite spontaneous coming from me and so I grew up in this congregation.

At the age of seventeen I was in a Bible class at St John’s which was run by a Ghanaian man and his Australian girlfriend (later to be his wife).  These two individuals impressed me in so far as they seemed to live their Christianity with complete sincerity and conviction.  One Sunday Morning they played the group a tape of part of one of Dr Billy Graham’s sermons.  Externally I showed little interest and like others in the group rather shrugged it off, making somewhat disparaging remarks about American Evangelists.  Despite my external response, internally this tape made quite an impression on me, as Dr Graham seemed to speak with considerable authority.  Some weeks later he held a month-long evangelistic Crusade at Earls Court, in London, the year was 1966.  The Bible Class leaders invited the group to attend the meetings at Earls Court and were themselves involved in the choir and as counsellors at the rallies.  I was in the middle of trade exams for my apprenticeship as a telecom engineer and so, for the first three weeks, I had a good excuse for not going.  However, once the exams were over my excuses ran out and so I agreed to go with a car full of my friends from church to listen to Billy Graham.  The journey to Early Court by car was eventful as the friend who owned the car in which we travelled always liked to do things on the cheap and so bought remoulded tyres for his motor, punctures were a regular consequence of his vain attempts to save money.  This particular evening was no exception and so we got held up by the inevitable puncture.  When we eventually arrived, we found a queue stretching right round the building and I thought to myself, “Oh, good, that’s ok then, we won’t get in”.  Just as I was reassuring myself of this fact a man walked up to the four of us and said, “I’ve got four tickets here boys, I can’t use them and they are going spare, would you like them?”  “Thanks”, replied one of my mates and in we went, jumping the queue in the process.  I was profoundly challenged by Dr Graham’s message and decided that I wanted to respond and make a commitment to Christ.   Fear of what my friends might think of me kept my rear end glued to the seat when Dr Graham made the usual call for people to respond by coming forward to the front of the auditorium.  However, when I got home, I fell on my knees in my bedroom and asked Christ to come into my heart.  An overwhelming sense of peace and acceptance came over me, a feeling which remained quite strong for several weeks.  With this feeling also came a challenge.  It was as if God were saying to me, “I have responded to your prayer; now go and make a public declaration of your faith.”  I returned to the rally at Earls Court a couple of nights later and went forward at the altar call.  I have over the years thought about that night, 28^th June 1966, and how it set the direction of the rest of my life.  Others have attacked it and tried to get me to see it as an illusion but I cannot deny, however I might interpret it or try to understand it intellectually, or psychologically, that it was very real and remains so to this day.

The latter part of the day, although not exactly difficult riding, started to take its toll.  By the time we reached Mickle Trafford seventy miles in I was longing for the ride to end.  I ended up thinking about nothing much beside my painful ankle and how the miles seem to become longer and longer.  In the last few miles we hit heavy rush hour traffic which made things worse but eventually I made it to the Holiday Inn at Runcorn, where Nick Mitchell’s route ended for the day.