Pedal Pilgrim Re-Launched!
Dear Pedal Pilgrim Readers,
If you are receiving this email it means that you have been successfully transferred to my new website and platform. Congratulations!
I started writing under the Pedal Pilgrim name in 2013 as I followed this nagging sense of call to nurture and discover a new form of spiritual practice and belief in America. Thousands of people have either left traditional religious communities or are on the very edge and are experimenting with and creating new configurations for spiritual connection. I am one of those. But for most of my career I have straddled the two worlds of our historic religious traditions and the emerging spiritual forms of our time.
Six years ago, I anticipated launching into this work full-time and ending the uncomfortable straddling. I built a website. I wrote a book. I began offering retreats. I had a blog following. And I bought a camper and car that was going to serve as my full-time mobile house. All of that was very exciting, but it also came with significant financial risks. Weeks after putting all the pieces in place I was offered the position to become the executive presbyter for the Presbytery of the Cascades, a region of 65,000 square miles and nearly 100 churches.
There, I believed, I would be able to do much of the same work that I had imagined under the Pedal Pilgrim umbrella, but with the security of a regular paycheck and an opportunity to live close to my grandchildren. Now, over five years later, it is time to return exclusively to the work of Pedal Pilgrim. I took the presbytery as far as I could with my gifts and passions and now it is time to free them up for leadership more suited to their needs and free me up to continue this work I began nearly ten years ago.
What exactly is this work?
It will likely take many months, maybe years, to flesh that out completely, but I do have hints of what it may be. I am in intuitive person and I almost always feel something is right before I have the words to articulate why something is right. But here is what I know at this point. It seems rooted in two questions.
So much of the church and my professional life have been focused on the very important question, “How do we build a better society? A more humane society? A society based on spiritual values? A society that mirrors what we might call God’s justice or God’s character?”
Those are important questions. I am reminded of the Hebrew text from Micah 6: 8 in the Christian Bible: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” I have written those words on my heart for most of my adult life. I have tried to embody those sacred words in my preaching, teaching and modeling as a leader.
But as important as those words are they still seem to point largely to a faith that is concentrated on the kind of society that we believe God wants for us. It holds up a standard of how to live in “right relationship” with one another. Again, this is deeply important and I have no intention of diminishing the central place these words hold in forming the faith of religious people.
But, my question has seemed to shift over the last decade. I find myself asking and committing to a life that will answer the following question, “How do we change and heal our relationship with the Earth?”
This question does not merely expose a person who loves to recreate, connect with nature, and practice good self-care. Those of you who know me best know that I spend a lot of time hiking, biking, kayaking and snowshoeing. I only recently returned from a 9-day wilderness quest in Death Valley. But this is not merely how I recreate or what I do with my “free time” (even the phrase free time exposes that we are imprisoned by the economy for much of our life).
No, this question seems to be at the very heart of the following issues:
Who is our god and what relationship does a Sacred Presence have with the material world?
How do we heal the relationship between a colonizing, land-owning culture with cultures not rooted in the privatization of land?
How do we make “Black Lives Matter” a deeper commitment than just putting signs on the lawns of homes in gentrified communities?
How do we honor a rhythm that is dictated by the natural movement of the sun rather than the ticking of a clock ?
How do we shift from an unsustainable “growth economy” to an earth-centered “seasonal economy?”
How do we learn to treat death not as an enemy to be vanquished, but as a lover to be embraced?
Welcome to the re-launch of Pedal Pilgrim. I don’t so much as have a goal as I have a commitment to a new question.
I am glad you are taking this journey with me.
Check out my new website at www.pedalpilgrim.com.
Brian Heron
Religious Innovator and Spiritual Pilgrim