The Story We Find Ourselves In

Elie Wiesel suggests that "God created man because he loves stories". If we are wanting to understand the mystery of life we may want to explore it in story. We have a great hurdle to leap if we are to have our eyes opened, for we are children of the Enlightenment and the Post Modern era.

This Era, John Eldridge says, has been causing us to loose our Story. "The Enlightenment dismissed the idea that there is an Author but tried to hang on to the idea that we could still have a larger story, life could still make sense, and everything was headed in a good direction. Western culture rejected the mystery and transcendence of the Middle Ages and placed its confidence in pragmatism and progress, the pillars of the Modern Era, the Age of Reason. But once we had rid ourselves of the Author, it didn't take long to lose the larger story. In the Postmodern Era, all we have left is our small stories. It's not pentecost, it's time for spring training. our role models are movie stars, and the biggest taste of transcendence is the opening of the ski season. Our best expressions are on the level of "Have a nice day." The only reminder we have of a story beyond our own is the evening news, an arbitrary collection of scenes and images without any bigger picture into which they fit. The central belief of our times is that there is no story, nothing hangs together, all we have are bits and pieces, the random days of our lives. Tragedy still brings us to tears and heroism still lifts our hearts, but there is no context for any of it. Life is just a sequence of images and emotions without rhyme or reason." from The Sacred Romance.

So what happens if we are created in a grand story and yet don't have eyes to see it? We create our own little stories to bring meaning to our lives. Deep within us we are meant to live within a grand story and to deny that leads to searching smaller stories or creating our own. What are these smaller stories? For me...it could be mountain biking. For you? Maybe it's sports, politics, tv shows, music. Or maybe you create your own story...More on that later.

The World of the Gospel

"It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to what side because appearances are endless deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who life happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name...That is the fairy tale of teh Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still." - Frederick Buechner in Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale

The Search for Eden

Mountain Biking and Spirituality
“The Search for Eden”
An Essay Series by Ben Biggerstaff

Deep in the depths of our memory we know we were created in most beautiful place ever by the most beautiful being ever. In our spiritual DNA we have been passed down an appetite for the place where mankind began, a place called “Eden”. This place was a place unpolluted by the hands of selfish humanity, now unimaginable, where everything everywhere at all times radiated with a jaw-dropping, eye-blinding, heart-filling wonder! All around us spoke of the craftiness of the hand of the Creator of all things. And all nature, man, plant, and animal were in one accord with the Creator is it was bliss! Some things have changed since then. Mankind became selfish and ruined almost everything. But still within us is a longing to be back there.

We mountain bikers find this deep memory welling up when we find ourselves deep in the backwoods with trees taller than we’ve ever seen! We start to remember when we reach the peak of the mountain and, from the heights, look all around at the beauty with such a macro view that it seems as if nature had not been touched by mankind. We remember when we stop at the stream to hear nothing but rolling waters over smooth stones. We long for beauty and this longing draws out of town and into nature.

We know as we leave the garage driving to the parking garage and through the walking tunnel into the office, not catching a bit of fresh air, that something is missing. We long for the weekend not simply to get a good ride in but something deeper, we desperately want to be back in Eden. We want to be back where all things are in sync with one another. We want to be back where beauty is everywhere. We want to be back where things are unspoiled, where we can be in the quiet and possibly hear from the Creator of it all. For, it is the Creator that dreamed up all this beauty in the first place. And it is the Creator that is revealed through the beauty to which we are drawn.

This longing lies deep within us all. If it is not mountain biking, it is fishing or hunting or can be seen in how we drool over a simple sunset. We are being reminded of something that has been lost, beautiful relationship with all things. But in an ancient text it says, “behold I am making all things new”. This God-Man, Jesus, is saying he’s bringing all things together again. It has begun already and will be finished one day. The beauty calls to us on the trail, the Creator calls to us on the trial through the beauty. He reminds us we were made for beauty. He beckons us to join Him in making all things new and beautiful again!

Picking A Good Line

I began a series of Essays, I guess you could call them, about the parallels I see between Mountain Biking and Spirituality. Here is Essay #1 called "Picking A Good Line"

I’ve been a mountain biker for the last six years advancing from a casual weekend rider to a competitive Cat 1 racer. I’ve also been spiritually awake for the last nine years. And in the overlapping time I’ve found many parallels and insights that some times bring more clarity, and sometimes bring further distraction and confusion, to what is really important in life. This is a bit about that.

“Picking a Good Line”
One of the first things I did after my first mountain bike race was get a copy of Mountain Bike Like a Champion by Ned “The Lung” Overend. The two things I have always remembered from that book are how to take a turn with all your weight on the outside foot and how to use your eyes to navigate the trail.

If a rider is to really rail a turn there has to be commitment. There has to be courage in his loins (I love that word). I love what G.K. Chesterson says about courage,
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it” (quoting Jesus) is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers (or mountain bikers, if you will). The paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it…(he) needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.” –italics mine.

And so we riders find ourselves faced with this at, literally, every turn. Will we have courage to rail the turn or will slam on the brakes, put our foot down and loose all momentum? Or will we throw our weight to the outside, lift our finger off the brake and for the sake railing the turn, risk tumbling into the thorn bushes and possibly get a greater taste of our potential?

The second thing “The Lung” teaches is a rider must look where he wants to go. Don’t want to his that stump ahead? Then look at the line around it! A smooth rider must keep his eyes looking ahead, spot the obstacle and the clear line around or over it and point his bike that direction while continuing to look past it for the next line. The peripheral vision is used here. We always keep our eyes on where we want to go. Identify the obstacle and line and do it over and over and over again through the course of a ride. When the focus is brought to the root immediately in front of the tire, the momentum is lost and we find ourselves on our face in the dirt.

So many of us have been hurt by others or seen someone hurt others and made promises in our hearts that, “I will never be like that person.” This is an example of focusing on the stump on the trail. Focusing on the negative does not usually get us to the positive. And so the challenge is to focus on what we want to become or achieve and to have the courage to commit while risking failure. For me, I remember a passage in an ancient text, “Fix your eyes on Jesus”, who called himself “The Son of Man” or the spitting image of what humanity was meant to be. And as I navigate the single track I am reminded that by focusing on him I am becoming more of the kind of person he would be if he were me.

Affair

I've been having an affair with facebook.com for some months now. It's tearing my relationship with the-biggerblog.blogspot.com to pieces. I'm sorry for everyone who has been harmed because of my selfishness:)