Abstract
What happens when you go on a bike ride? To many of us it is simply great exercise, an efficient way to get around especially in urban settings, an opportunity to enjoy fresh air and often companionship with other cyclists. Few of us, I suspect, would see cycling as an exercise in moral theology. Yet in this book Stephen Long helps us to see how such an ordinary activity has within it profound practical and moral insights about God, ourselves and God's ways with the world. It reminds Christians that their faith is primarily practical and pastoral rather than speculative and abstract, an adventure in what makes a life worth living. As theological ethicist, Stanley Hauerwas comments, ‘ethics is at the heart of Theology because the grammar of Christian discourse is fundamentally practical’ (Hauerwas, ‘The Ethicist as Theologian’, Christian Century 95/15, 23 April 1975, p. 408). We are embodied creatures inhabiting creation and learning wisdom through reflection on our life in this divinely infused context. In this way Long roots himself in the biblical Wisdom tradition which turns to creation as original grace in which God is immanently at work and which the Incarnation shows us is already christological (Amy Plantinga Pauw, Church in Ordinary Time: A Wisdom Ecclesiology, Eerdmans, 2017, p. 55). It is therefore not abstract quandaries but existential challenges which invite us to engage in such moral theology as we find ourselves in the midst of a contingent and unpredictable world yet one interwoven with the action of God seen through the story of Jesus Christ. In particular, we engage in moral theology as we reflect on practical dilemmas which disturb and disrupt our lives rather than those that console or bring joy. These expose our character and vision of the good life. Moral theology therefore depends upon asking the right questions about what unifies and makes worthwhile the self as a social story lived in time.
This book therefore is a narrative meditation and mining of Long's life as a cyclist evoked by a particular and catastrophic heart event which nearly killed him on 11 October 2020. The shock, surprise and confusion forced him to engage in personal reflection on the prospect of his mortal end and about the end or purpose of this disruptive event in the light of a lifetime of joyful cycling. He tells the story of his life looked at from what has turned out to be an interim End, which is actually a broken Middle that has enabled him to see his Beginnings more clearly. In this way he shows us that ethics is taught through stories rather than grand theories, with ordinary life as our teacher. Ethics is an art rather than a technique since it engages with our particular and personal living within the story of God.
Like any story, his has a Beginning, a Middle and an End. However, he structures his story by beginning with Endings before looking at Beginnings, the Broken Middle, the Middle where we want to be, and concluding with Endings as last things. This is because to understand our End as destination, our Beginning needs to be known. Yet our Beginning is only known and made sense of as we are told stories about this Beginning in the Middle of our lives and these together point us to our End as death but also as purpose. We never know our mortal End but through reflection on the broken fractures of our Middle lives we can sense a purposive wholeness as we discover the virtues which can make a life worth living.
In the opening chapter on Endings, therefore, Long looks at the importance of the habits, practices and connections cycling has given to his bodily identity and the formation of his character, and how his life-threatening health episode confronted him with his own mortality, lack of control and vulnerability at the very time when he felt he was far from death, in control and strong. This leads him to look at his Beginnings, how to discern whether his life has been worthwhile and how cycling as a practice has shown him that he lives in the midst of the world rather than detached from it and how it is friendships that have sustained him in this world. Yet, as mentioned above, these insights are only known from the Middle, especially in the broken Middle, the cycle crashes of life, which invite us to seek healing and receive our brokenness or wounds as life giving rather than death dealing. This process involves re-engaging with our inherited story in order to find healing, an example of which is his moving and profound reflection on the discovery that his son is gay following the latter's suicide attempt. Such reflection exposes the myth of autonomy and free agency, instead showing us that our fractures can be fruitful since they remind us in our vulnerability and lack of control that life is a gift to be received rather than a something to be possessed in our own strength and independence.
Life, therefore, is always lived in the Middle even when contemplating our End or death in a hospital bed and we can be deceived about when this End might happen. As he discovered when his heart attack happened whilst out cycling, the End may not be far away. Interim Ends, such as births, graduations, weddings and funerals, hint at this and are reminders that God alone knows our End. We, however, want our Middle to be a setting for joy. This was why he and a friend chose to cycle ride across the USA from Indiana to California rather than travel by car since the journey itself, the experience of the Middle, was what enriched it in the variety of landscapes, the surprises along the way and the friendships that it made possible. It is also why he enjoys peloton riding since this is an expression of justice as it ‘orders life together towards common goods and loves’ (p. 104) and by sharing the road challenges the individualistic capitalism symbolized by the car. Peloton riding is about a shared rather than a competitive ride, about learning friendship with others as a preparation for friendship with God, the lasting of virtue. Cycling also creates a world as it brings forth new configurations of space and time. For example, cycling needed a different surface to walking, it democratized travel, especially for women, it exposed people to elevation and the weather in a new way, it opened up new horizons through accessible travel and it required a different approach to travel in time.
Yet it is the more unexpected and threatening experiences of the Middle that are most formative as they cause us to look at the source and character of our reactions, our virtues and vices. The Middle is where our ‘who’ rather than simply the ‘what’ of our life's journey is exposed. It is where we discover that ethics is less about doing the right thing and more about becoming the right sort of people who thereby can do the right thing. The Middle is the time during which our character is formed and exhibited, character that is particularly tested when life is interrupted as he found with his health incident. Such disruptions reveal whether we are controllers or are learning to live well by adopting the practical wisdom of making the best of a situation. They show us whether we are being formed with the right dispositions and virtues, such as courage and temperance, which can receive the fragility of life without being destroyed by such interruptions. They also show us the moral significance of those who care for us in our fragility and so underline our interdependence.
Ironically, however, if life has no End then it is meaningless and purposeless. So having a hoped-for End renders our Middle intelligible and ensures that even when tragedy strikes, it is not the final word. For Christians, the apparent hopelessness of death is when we receive the gift of love. Yet this imagined End depends upon faith and every step along the way towards this hoped-for End is itself an act of faith. What we are seeking is the freedom for love and a life worth living which is focused upon a good and proper End, God's life rather than modern views of freedom as freedom from constraint or domination. This requirement challenges us to work for such a social and political order which serves this freedom rather than one that serves the interests of an elite to the neglect of the former.
Long has shown us the fruitfulness of theological, pastoral and moral reflection upon a common practice, such as cycling. Cycling teaches us about ourselves, contributes to the formation of our character, tests our virtues, exposes our vices and reminds us that we inhabit God's good creation as fragile creatures, seeking a social and political order which sustains a common good. In short, cycling can generate the sort of character that is vital if communities are to have a future in our sort of society. Cyclists may appear as ‘aliens on the road’ to a culture colonized by the car, just as Christians in late-modern societies can appear alien to a secularist culture. Yet, as Hauerwas and Willimon indicate, being a joyful alien is what discipleship is all about (Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Where Resident Aliens Live: Exercises for Christian Practice, Abingdon Press, 1996, p. 94). Cycling, therefore, helps us to imagine what a life worth living looks like for ordinary Christians as pedal pilgrims aware of our contingency, fragility and dependency on God and others as we live in a society that finds us difficult to understand. The book's narrative style makes it accessible to readers of all sorts and so will engage those in the pew, yet Long's incisive reflections along the way also reveal the depth of his wisdom as a moral theologian in the academy.