Bicycle Spirituality and a New American Pope!
by Bishop Joensen | May 14, 2025
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It is the season of high school and college graduations, met with the dramatic news of the election of the native born American Cardinal Robert Prevost as the next Vicar of Christ and successor of St. Peter, Pope Leo XIV. Here I offer some counsel for graduates, and some words of gratitude as we look to our new Roman pontiff to guide us as a truly one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, including the Diocese of Des Moines.
My late uncle, Msgr. Ralph Simington, used to joke in his latter years that given his added girth, there was about 100 pounds of him that was not ordained to the priesthood. He attributed the roots of this gain to his college days working on the dessert line at the cafeteria.
As I approach my sixth anniversary as bishop, I confess that there are about 15 pounds of me that have not been ordained to the episcopacy. I chalk up this increase to the claims of office that have reined in my passion for cycling which formerly found me in the summer months on my road bike for hours at a time. Now, I’m fortunate to put in 45 minutes on my indoor trainer with the Zwift app before getting back in the saddle of being shepherd and pastor of souls.
Though the amount of time spent cycling has been reduced, I’m still captivated by what the late, Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl, calls, ‘bicycle spirituality’. Delbrêl, who lived in Paris through the global pandemic of 1918 and two World Wars, trained as a nurse and then social worker. She self-identified as an atheist for five years before being drawn to Catholicism. She became a poet and mystic in her own right. Her bicycle spirituality is expressed in the form of a dialogue with Jesus, but I suggest that it is eminently, pointedly human:
‘Go’ . . . you tell us at every turn in the Gospel. To be in your direction, we have to go, even when our laziness begs us to stay. You have chosen us to be in a strange balance, a balance that can establish and sustain itself only in motion, only with momentum. Rather like a bicycle that cannot stay upright without moving, a bicycle that stays leaning against a wall as long as we have not mounted it to make it speed along the road. The condition given to us is an insecurity, vertiginous and universal. As soon as we begin to look at it, our life tilts, gives way. We can only remain standing to walk, to race, in a momentum of charity (The Dazzling Light of God, pp. 61-62).
Delbrêl’s Christ-inspired bicycle spirituality cautions us against inertia or paralysis. It serves as an antidote to easy comfort as laziness that settles into the security of like-minded relationships and established credentials, even the credential of a college degree, that give us a certain measure of security. Even apart from others, we ourselves become the source of internal friction where momentum eventually peters out for lack of direction, growth or reliance on grace—the preconditions for self-transcendence, for fulfillment and happiness.
The ancient Greeks highlighted a specific kind of internal change that’s a form of motion distinct from change in physical location or in quantity (such as 15 pounds!). Change either enhances and perfects our being, or results in a diminution, a reduction in our capacity to act in ways essential to realizing our human potential. Class of 2025, consider the innumerable changes you’ve experienced in your +/- four years in high school or college:
• The weaning away from certain relationships once integral to your life as you met and formed new friendships;
• The likely one, two, three or more changes in your major and minor, as you encountered new bodies of knowledge, confronted certain cognitive limits, were awakened by mentors and peers in collaborative projects, or service learning opportunities.
Further, how has your own spiritual life changed, matured, or waned? Are you able to perceive traces of the Kingdom of God in our midst, a reign of justice and charity where no bent reed is broken, no smoldering wick extinguished, no recent arrival to our community treated as anything other than a sister or brother whose bloodlines are ultimately traceable back to the Creator of the Universe?
And while we might have various stances toward the fact of global climate change, are you ever more adept at articulating and doing your part to help cultivate a truly human ecology in your niche in life? Do you bear a deeper sense of solidarity with local communities and larger society that is geared toward a common good achievable only as we listen and collaborate with one another? Do you enable others to take part in conversations and activities that reflect our diverse capacities and gifts, enjoying goods and fruits that are not diminished in being shared?
I hope you can answer ‘yes’ more than ‘no’ to these questions, and even more foundationally, that this is not the first occasion these questions have occurred to you. For this whole dynamic of change and personal development of young persons and those who take part in their formation is very much in keeping with the mind and heart of the Church.
At every level of education, especially at the college or university level, the bond between teacher and student optimally should awaken and cultivate a felt connectedness with reality in all its truth, goodness, and beauty. This dynamic should happen regardless whether one is pursuing physics or engineering, literature or music performance, kinesiology or philosophy.
A tremendous mystery unfolds before us, but is only accessible for those who linger long enough to observe, who can stand the strain of staying with one object, one image, one person for more than a nanosecond instead of flitting aimlessly from one thing to another in the fashion of what the late Pope Francis, citing Thomas à Kempis, calls “spiritual voyeurism” (see Evangelii Gaudium n. 91).
Or alternatively, we can complacently lean our life’s bike against a wall, which is different than leaning on others in times of challenge or trial or even joy-filled celebrations. Time does seem to stand still when we experience genuine communion, when we lean on one another for friendship, love, and life. We become vulnerable enough to be transparent, and bold enough to embrace the tension that if we lean on others, they are sure to lean back to an extent that their needs, their priorities, their sense of direction about where we should aim take precedence.
To let others, and to let God, not only accompany us but help chart our destination, means allowing for insecurity, a form of unknowing that cannot be remedied by crunching numbers and amassing more data that will drive our internal processors. This is an insecurity that calls for trust, for natural and supernatural faith, where we walk, run, or race toward places, performances, and people—ultimately, SOMEONE, who is only disclosed in the course of life’s pilgrimage.
One key bit of instruction I received when I was getting into cycling some 25 years ago is to always keep one’s eyes on where one wants to go and not where one doesn’t want to go. For if one does the latter, inevitably the bike will deviate from the straight and secure path and one will likely get a flat and be stopped dead in one’s tracks. So, too, for those of us embracing a form of bicycle spirituality, we are in constant need of people who refine our vision, who keep us fixed on our destination, and who bring the personal passion, faith, and integrity to their vocation as leaders and guides.
Isn’t that who our new Pope Leo XIV is called by Christ to be for the entire Catholic Church? Isn’t he the leader for keeping us focused on our mission as Church to foster unity, to be champions of peace and reconciliation, to cast aside fear and boldly build bridges among people like us and unlike us? We are startled and exhilarated by the fact of a pope born in America, yet who freely undertook a missionary vocation in Peru, who worked both with the poor and with seminarians, embracing the charism of the Augustinian order. From Chicago to Chiclayo, Peru, and then to Rome as one who helped guide the process of choosing our world’s bishops—and now is the first among equals as bishop of Rome and servant of the servants of God—what a life’s bike ride indeed!
For all who are graduates, my concluding encouragement to you is in the key of Delbrêl’s bicycle spirituality: Don’t stay here. Go! Get and keep moving, growing, being formed and forming others in your own right! The road will be steep at times, and you may feel yourself tilting, but know those to whom you can turn to keep your balance and your vision, your course set on what matters most. The God of communion who loves you and needs you has set in store good things for women and men like yourselves. May you become who God has called you to be!
Photo credit: CNS photo/Lola Gomez