Finding God in Traffic

I LEARNED HOW to bike relatively late in life. I was 23, and it cut my commute in half. Since I’d been walking an hour each way for a night shift that started at 11 p.m., that meant a lot. My guru was an elder from my local church who lived across the alley. He taught me how to change a tire, gears, and my life. He showed me hospitality by teaching me about my bike, but it extended much further than that.

UCC minister Laura Everett does much the same thing in Holy Spokes . She uses the metaphor of a bike as a lens to discuss the broader issues of how to relate to people, the Earth, and God: Mostly how, to use Brother Lawrence’s term, to practice the presence of God.

Everett takes the bike piece by piece, moving through it from wheel to handlebar and reflecting on the lessons that it teaches of patience, of grace to live with and learn from others, of taking up space (on the road and in life), and of knowing that you are fundamentally invisible for the cars rushing past. Living in a city will teach you all these lessons anyway, but they come more quickly on a bike.

We need a more-robust spirituality of the city: We’re an urban culture and Christianity is historically an urban religion. Yet we often think spirituality and Christianity are easier in a simpler, rural context. Imagine the early church’s Egyptian hermits retreating to the desert or Thomas Merton moving from New York City to a monastery in Kentucky. We idealize places where we can be secluded or have neighbors who are like us, where we don’t need to deal with a diverse city and the complex joys it brings.

So Everett’s wisdom about practicing the presence of God where you actually find yourself—in traffic, rather than by a still pond or in a secluded cabin—is valuable. If you wait for tranquility to find God, you’ll quickly run dry. We need to seek and receive God in the daily, the ordinary, and the commute if we want to draw close to God.

At the end of the book, Everett includes special bike-related liturgies, which sits uncomfortably with me. I’m a Reformed curmudgeon when it comes to worship, which makes me concerned that her “blessing of the bikes” and “ghost bike” services have little scriptural support. Do we need a structured ritual for blessing a means of transport or, for that matter, a memorial service that focuses laser-like on what the deceased was riding when they died? Everett finds that these liturgies speak to a pastoral need in Boston, which is fantastic. But for me they still cast a shadow on the rest of her excellent text.

I’m a terrible cyclist. Everyone passes me on my way to work, I’ve been stuck in second gear for a year and a half, and my brakes are held together with duct tape. Still, biking has taught me lots of things about life and a few things about God; it is one way the church has worked powerfully to help me.

The city has taught me even more—which is why I was thrilled that Everett used the lens of a bike to discuss a more-profound theology and spirituality of the city. Holy Spokes is a valuable contribution to building that spirituality and bringing all of us closer to God, even when we’re in traffic.