More Miles Behind and Fewer in Front

Cycling under wide open skies in wild moorland had a double effect on me.  Firstly, it puts me in touch with a basic sense of my smallness and vulnerability. Secondly, I found it somehow strangely reassuring, it seemed to put me in perspective.  I suppose it is rather like two sides of the same coin, both are real even if they seem at first to be contradictory opposites.

I found my thoughts moving to some of my favourite stories in the Old Testament, stories which often help me to make sense of the inner life.  For a long while, I have thought that many of the stories of the Old Testament show us a pattern of how humanity progresses in its march toward God.  The characters in these various stories are all too human, manifesting frailties we all suffer from and yet they are pursued by God and, by His grace, enter into a deep relationship with the divine.  God shows them their vulnerability and their lives are consequently given perspective.

It struck me that morning that the main problem we have is that at a conscious level most of us like rules because when we have them, even if we don’t keep them very well, or choose to rebel against them, at least we know where we are.  So often this leads us to the mistaken conclusion that God is more interested in whether or not we are moral than He does about anything else.  Perhaps He is actually more interested in us realising more of our true potential.  If God was just interested in morality that would make life reasonably simple and almost instantly understandable.  The problem is that God, both in my experience and in the way He is reflected in the Scriptures, is a whole lot trickier and more complex than that.  If life were simple then it could be reduced to thinking that if I am good, good things will happen to me and I will be ok.  The thing is that the characters portrayed in the Old Testament were not particularly good in the way we might want to judge goodness and some of them were down right unpleasant.  None of this stopped God wanting to have a relationship with them.  In fact, it could be argued that, because they were often not very good, the type of relationship they ended up having with God was a darn sight deeper than it would have been if they had all been goody two shoes.  I smiled to myself as I recalled a conversation, I once had with a Mother Superior.  She asked me who I though would make the best nuns.  Thinking it might be a trick question I confessed that I didn’t know.  With a twinkle in her eye she said, “bad girls, because they know what they are missing!”  I didn’t feel it was my place to enquire if she herself fell into that category.

As I rode along, I got to thinking about the story of Joseph.  He is sometimes portrayed by preachers as some kind of saint, a type of Christ before Jesus, pointing forward to the true Messiah.  To my mind he was a spoilt brat who had a lofty, rather omnipotent opinion of himself, with dreams to match.  Not only that, he was stupid enough to boast about his dreams to his older brothers who didn’t like him in the least, and who could blame them?  In this gripping Old Testament story, we are immediately thrust into to considering the all too bloody experience of sibling rivalry in its worst manifestations.  At the first opportunity the narked brothers decide to murder him but when the opportunity arises and they realise that they can make a shekel or two whilst at the same time getting shot of this highly irritating brat.  So, they sell him into slavery in Egypt: “where now are your dreams daddy’s favourite?”  Surely shattered for ever.

My fantasy is that, confronted by this situation, Joseph’s ego would say something along the lines of, “where the hell is God in all this?”  He was after all the product of his upbringing as his father’s favoured son and as such he got treated in a special way which did him no favours.  Oh, what tangled webs are woven in family dynamics, often with tragic consequences.  God the Father had other plans for him, which would in fact end in his dreams and aspirations coming true, but not before the brat had been well and truly knocked out of him and he could be trusted to actually come good.

Mid-morning on the eighth day found me, as usual, pottering along well behind the others, when suddenly I caught sight of them in the far distance stopped at a T junction.  The T junction was in the middle of a small village named Wray and we were around seventeen miles into the eighth day’s ride.  I rolled up to the assembled group who announced rather triumphantly, “Mick, Wray marks the mid-way point of our journey!”  “Wonderful”, I replied, “Always good to know that there are fewer miles ahead from now on and more miles behind us.”  This was a truism which from my point of view, not theirs, applied to both our present journey and the journey of my life.

Wide Open Skies and a Cross That Isn’t There

I didn’t sleep terribly well, largely due to having to get up four or five times (I lost count) to go to the toilet.  This has become an increasing problem which I am putting down to creeping old age but it is a nuisance and means that, when I wake up, I feel fairly wretched.  However, lots of porridge for breakfast revived both my body and my spirit and I was ready for the off as the team took to the road around 8.40am.   This was a respectable hour and necessary, as Nick Mitchell warns in his route map, we would face a hard day’s riding.  This was confirmed by my memory of this seventy-one-mile stage from two years previous.

The first hour and a half of the day was all climbing, some of it very steep and we only made around seven and a half miles.  The scenery however was stunning and the weather sunny so we saw the moorland at its very best.  A rabbit and a stoat ran across the road whilst I was ascending but I was going so slowly that they could have safely ambled across the road instead of running flat out and I would not have put them in any mortal danger.  The climb ended at the Cross of Greet. There followed a very long and fast descent off the moor.  Ollie showed off his descending skills by taking his hands off the handle bars and assuming a cruciform stance with his arms.  A nice trick if you can do it, personally I preferred to stay hunched over my bike.  It was however an interesting bit of synchronicity that he chose to pull this stunt as we passed the aforementioned Cross of Greet.

I must confess I didn’t think about anything much on the way up to the Cross of Greet other than wishing my legs didn’t hurt quite as much as they did and wishing this first part of the day’s ride would soon end.  As it happens you could easily miss the Cross of Greet, as I in fact did, however, fascinated by the name I looked it up at the end of the day’s ride.  The main reason why I missed it was that I was looking out for a cross, logical enough one might think, but the fact of the matter is that there is no cross just a large stone near the road with a square hole carved into it where presumably the cross once stood.  I discovered that it dates back to medieval times and the cross that was once in the square hole has either given in to the ravages of nature, it is after all in a very exposed spot one thousand and four hundred feet above sea level, or perhaps it got the chop like so many monuments, considered too Catholic at the time of the Reformation and then after the English Civil War, the Commonwealth.  Who knows, perhaps some local farmer is blessed by its stones being incorporated into a wall of his farmhouse, after all folk were quite keen on recycling what was considered redundant lumps of stone in the fifteen century.   They were, unlike us, not particularly interested in preserving the crumbling ruins of the past.

It is interesting how the terrain I cycled through on any given day tended to trigger various considerations concerning my inner journey.  This countryside was very beautiful, in a stark kind of a way, but what I liked about it was the sense of wide-open space and vast skies.  It is so easy for the human spirit to become narrowed, confined by our little ego, when there is so much more to discover about being human.  The ego forms a picture of what it should be, so a good, simple definition of the ego might be something like this, “everything I aspire to be”.   It therefore follows that its opposite is, “everything I don’t want to be, but fear I might be”.  To discover the broad nature of the inner life one must be prepared to be in an internally exposed place and that can be a very uncomfortable place to find oneself.  I was provoked into considering this broad inner world once the arduous ascent was conquered and as I subsequently cycled through a vastness of this magnificent, breath-taking moor that August morning.  Many years after my midlife crisis had passed, I came to realise that the meaning of this difficult period was an attempt by, what I would call, my total self, to find liberation and break out of the jail imposed upon it by my ego and by the constraints imposed by my position in both family and calling.  Like the fate that overwhelmed the “Cross of Greet”, perpetrated by an unknown hand, so sometimes God does a hatchet job of our “ego ideal” in order to bring about a personal spiritual revolution and growth into something more integrated.

Theakston’s Old Peculiar

I found it impossible to stay too long with memories of a painful part of my life and, as this time round I was undisturbed either by members of my own party or passing local cyclists, I became lost in thoughts of a more joyous kind.  I had previously been thinking about how much of my early life in the faith was given over to over-intellectualisation and the dangers thereof, but as I cycled through such lovely scenery it caused me to muse on other aspects of how my faith came about and how it developed.  As I rode along, I was not musing in the manner of someone profoundly interested in geography or geology, I was asking more fundamental questions and ones which primitive peoples, once they got beyond simply living a subsistence existence, must have asked – “why is the world here and why is it so beautiful?”

I assume that these types of questions can only be posed by a creature that is profoundly aware of its surroundings and has the time and imagination to ponder them; in other words, someone who, in a real sense, is conscious and not merely driven by instinct.  Whilst still mainly driven by unconscious powers, it is my contention that most human beings are capable of such contemplation and that is why even non-religious people are deeply affected by an existential encounter with raw nature.  Many of course who give credence to the idea that there might well be a God often claim to feel nearer to the Divine in the countryside or in their own garden than they do in Church.  I have considerable sympathy with such a contention.  What arises in me when I am confronted with sublime natural beauty, as I was that day in Bowland Forest, is the desire to say thank you and for that purpose to be fulfilled I find myself in need of someone to thank, i.e. God.  In order to express my gratitude, I find that the best I can manage is to employ some form of mythic picture of a Creator, either ancient or modern, whilst humbly realising that whatever image I use must at best be tentative if I am to avoid theological or aesthetic idolatry.

So, I found myself cycling along thanking a Creator God who has not only expressed Himself in the glories of the natural world but one who has graciously given me “eyes to see them” and a spirit that can rejoice and revel in them.

The latter part of the day involved some significant climbing, and I was thankful that the forest of Bowland was bathed in glorious sunlight as it was could have been a very different experience.  I could have been struggling through it in the pouring rain and a headwind not really knowing quite where I was or if I was even on the right track.  Which led me to the realisation that, if nature does reflect something quite profound about the nature a creator God, then encountering the reality that lies behind creation can be a less than pleasant experience and sometimes can feel downright dangerous for it can take you out of the moral norms which make you feel safe and self-righteous.  This, by a somewhat circuitous route I own, led me back to thinking about the turmoil of my middle years.  This period was not enjoyable, but it was in the long run highly creative and left me significantly transformed at many levels.  At the time I cannot claim to have felt much gratitude and sometimes lost sight of what God might be doing in the emotional ferment of it all, but since then, when everything died down and some kind of normality established itself, I have become profoundly thankful that I experienced this period which laid the foundation for the second half of my life and my subsequent journey of faith.

My thoughts returning to this difficult period were matched by a steep and rather dangerous descent into Slaidburn our destination for day seven.  Like the dangerous path my midlife crisis took, so too the road to Slaidburn was potholed and rocky, not at all pleasant riding, but eventually I made it with both self and bike in one piece if not a little shaken by the experience.  The Youth Hostel at Slaidburn is very quaint but with extremely creaky floors.  A quick shower, followed by the all-important pint of high protein drink and then off to the very nice pub situated close to the Hostel, where I reacquainted myself with Theakston’s Old Peculiar, a beer I had not tasted for many a long year; we must be getting near to the Lake District.  On our return from the pub Julia, Lauren and Jo cooked a great pasta meal, we played a couple of rounds of “Pointless” and then turned in for the night.

“And there was evening and there was morning, a seventh day.”

 

As I Rode Out One Sunny Day I Met a Numpty Along The Way.

As I rode out of Blackburn, the last conurbation of the day, I got to thinking about one of, what I have described as, the glowing coals that suddenly burst into life during my middle years.  This was getting in touch with, and then learning how to harness creatively, anger.  This issue surfaced during an incident which seen in isolation seemed so trivial as to be almost laughable, except for the ramifications for my life at the time and for my future life. This smallest of sparks exposed the huge amount of repressed anger that I had for years kept under wraps in order to maintain a quiet life.  This certainly was a legacy of my upbringing and was a defining part of the Elfred family myth, i.e. we don’t get angry, it is far too dangerous an emotion to let loose; to explode big time will mean the end of the universe.  Now this may seem ridiculous to extroverts who lose it all the time and forget what caused the blow up five minutes later but it makes complete sense to introverts who fear anger, both their own and other peoples, and therefore avoid it like some kind of psychic plague.

Without going into detail, or naming names, this issue was about control of my everyday existence.  I had tended to live in my head, concerning myself with what I considered to be weighty matters, theological/philosophical concepts, psychological theories etc.   Suddenly, with the occurrence of a seemingly small event, I realised just how much I had given away in terms of the daily running of my life and I found myself wanting control back.  No, it was stronger than that, I needed to take back the power I had given, even thrown away.  It felt like a matter of life and death, it was that urgent.  It seemed at the time that if I didn’t do this I would be finished, I would disappear into a black hole of anxiety and depression from which I would never emerge. So, I would freely admit that I overreacted with regard to this particular incident but to express the anger that I felt, disproportionate though it was, felt bloody good.  It was a complete revelation to me about a side of myself I had failed, up to that point, to acknowledge.  It was an amazing relief, like someone had lanced a septic boil and drawn out the poison.  Recalling the painful beginnings of what became a midlife crisis was in sharp contrast to the scenery through which I cycled that sunny afternoon.   For I found myself in the most spectacular part of the day’s ride as the team entered the Forest of Bowland.

What had struck me, when I first encountered the Forest of Bowland last time in 2013, was the lack of trees.  Silly me, I thought forests were so named because they consisted mainly of trees.  Well, the bit of the Forest of Bowland I now rode through for a second time didn’t seem to have very many at all.  That aside, it is an amazingly beautiful and scenic part of the British Isles consisting of vast expanses of heather moorland, blanket bog and a home to several species of rare bird.

The other thing I remembered from last time I rode through the Forest of Bowland was the fact that as I was rolling along minding my own business and lost in thought another cyclist drew alongside me.  He had on all the gear, covered head to foot in lycra, which was lavishly decorated with cycling advertisements; he looked rather like a mobile billboard for some online cycle shop.  Perched on his head was one of those little peaked cycling caps which the old-time cyclists used to wear and sometimes the pros of today still wear but now under the obligatory crash helmet.  This type of cap is euphemistically known, among our team as, a “twat hat”.  His was worn at what can only be described as a jaunty angle and it was back to front.  As he pulled alongside me and slowed down, he inquired as to my destination.  He had a similar feel about him as did the northern alpha males I had encountered during lunch and so I decided to hit him with my long-distance cycling credentials, “Eventually, John O’ Groats”, I replied, “but today, Slaidburn”.  He cast a look of distain upon me and said, “Your saddle’s too low”, before gathering speed and disappearing up the road in a cloud of dust.  As it happens, much as I hated to admit it at the time, he was right; damn it!  If you don’t get your saddle height right you cannot maximise the power in your legs.  In much the same way if you keep repress psychic energy which, if correctly handled can give you considerable power and motivation, you are not going to travel well through life.  I must confess. I didn’t like his attitude or his look that day but his advice was sound and corrected adjustments were made to my riding position by the time I rode that way again in 2015.  I never came across him again, either on that first trip, or this one so – you may have looked like a numpty mate but you did know what you were talking about, so thanks.