Bicycling with the Saints and Sinners

Sep 19, 2024

Later today I’ll pick up my bicycle for this 500 plus mile journey from here in Amsterdam to the south of France. This pilgrimage will take me through places filled with history and the sinful sacred saints

Let me state here at the beginning that I’m already aware of the challenge of riding and writing. So please forgive the brevity of these posts, as well as the errors in grammar etc. But rest assured that I’m taking notes for a future more thorough essays.

This trip has a prequel. In Scotland, where my wife and I spent 10 days in that wet and wild land following a wedding of a close friend, I discovered the patron saint of this ride. St. Columba is best known for founding the community at Iona, but is also the patron saint of poets. Yet, his travel throughout Scotland were numerous, lengthy and filled with the saint/sinner activities consistent with most pilgrimages. The man and his myth seemed to have walked all over Scotland. (more on that later)

You’ll notice that I will frequently merge the saint and the sinner throughout these essays as I bike and write. I’m largely drawing on two strands. One Jungian. Namely the shadow, which I’ve written about in an earlier couple of essays. In brief, it is the recognition of unconscious forces impacting our day to day living, causing us to respond in less ideal ways. The other strand is found in a Christian anthropology namely that we are all simultaneously saints and sinners.

Bicycling with the saints and sinners is intended to explore the inner and the outer journey of shadow and light. I hope to uncover something new and something old in my ongoing quest for discovering a life of meaning in the ordinary.

But for now the ordinary means some logistics in catching a train, picking up a few groceries and securing a bicycle.

A few photos from the Scotland portion, the preamble if you will.

If you’d like to follow my Instagram or Facebook accounts for regular photos of this journey feel free. Links at the bottom

Still in One Peace,

Jim