Article

Creed

Sport

9 June 2023

6 min read

Sweating the soul

A mantra-laden spin class generated more than sweat for Alianore Smith, it raised philosophical questions too.

Alianore Smith

Alianore is a theologian, communicator and author. She works for a global charity based in London.

A spin class rider smiles and gives the thumbs up sign in front of other riders.

SoulCycle.

Last year, I learnt an important lesson: cycling and spin classes are not the same thing.

Of course, they both take place on bikes – one moving, one stationary. And they are both exercise. But the similarities stop there.

Let me explain.

I’m a cyclist – and a smug one at that. My cycle commute to work, three times a week, comes to a round trip total of about 15 miles.

So, when I was invited last summer to take part in a SoulCycle class in aid of a charity I care deeply about, I jumped at the chance. How hard could it be? I can ride a bike. My cardio-vascular fitness is above average. It’ll be an easy way to raise awareness of the charity, and maybe have some fun in the process.

How wrong I was.

My first clue that a SoulCycle class wouldn’t be like my normal commute was found on my visit to its website. The About Us page informed me that at a SoulCycle class – a ‘sanctuary’ – ‘tears will be shed’ and ‘breakthroughs happen’. The only time I ever cried whilst commuting was when I got my second puncture in a week, three miles from home, in the January rain. And, quite frankly, when you’re dodging taxis and swerving around pedestrians, breakthrough feels a long way off.

And so, I headed off to my SoulCycle class, equipped with my padded shorts and my charity-branded cycling jersey. I arrived, hired my shoes, and headed into the changing rooms. And it was there that I was greeted by the SOUL Etiquette sign:

SOUL Etiquette ‘To preserve soul sanctuary, we have a few simple requests’

No text & chat
No cell phones or communication devices in the studio. If you are a doctor or your child is sick, kindly leave your phone with the front desk and we will get you if there is an emergency

Skip the cross talk
Talking during class is a major distraction for the spiritual folks around you

Laundry
We ride close together so we can feel each others’ energy. That being said, your neighbour does not want to feed off your odor.

Kindness is cool
Respect the rider on your left and your right. Treat the front desk the way you would like them to treat you.

The pack
There is a direct correlation between your energy and your neighbour’s ride. If you want to do your own thing, please don’t ride in the front row.

I was fascinated. What lay ahead of me?

Well, let me tell you: nothing could have prepared me for the class I took.

A dark room, filled with mirrors, motivational quotes and – for some reason – grapefruit scented candles. About 30 stationary bikes, lined up in three rows. An instructor whose enthusiasm knew no bounds.

I took a bike at the back.

Within 10 minutes, I was sweatier than I have ever been, and questioning all my life choices up until that moment. Within 15 minutes, I had removed my charity-branded cycling jersey and drunk half of my bottle of water. There was still 30 minutes to go. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.

And yet by the end, I was buzzing. Whether it was the endorphins, the sense of community, or the relentless cheerleading of the instructor, I wanted more. It was… remarkable. I very nearly signed up for another class there and then.

From the signs in the changing rooms to the instructors’ soundbites, I was continually told what I could achieve if I tried.

The instructor – a bouncy brunette whose name I can’t remember – led the class with an exuberance that I am yet to see anywhere else. At one point, she got off her bike and danced up and down the aisle in front of the class. Quietly rasping for air at the back, I had no idea how she had the energy to speak whilst pedaling, let alone dance.

The thing that I found most fascinating about my SoulCycle class, though, was the ‘spiritual’ aspect. From the signs in the changing rooms to the instructors’ soundbites, I was continually told what I could achieve if I tried. That the ability to breakthrough my problems, to succeed, to achieve my dreams, was all held within me – I just needed to dig a little deeper, peddle a little harder, put my mind to it.

At one point, the instructor made us repeat after her: ‘I can do all things…’ it was there that she paused. As someone who grew up in the church, learning memory verses of Scripture week after week, I immediately wanted to yell ‘through Christ who strengthens me!’, but instead was encouraged to complete the sentence with something (I can’t remember exactly what) about my own abilities and force of will.

The whole class was deeply motivating. I left feeling like, quite frankly, I could achieve anything.

Thing is, though, I’m an able-bodied, middle class, professional, white woman. I come from a two-parent family, and I’m happily married to a non-abusive partner. I have a stable income. Although some of these things are because of the work that I’ve done or choices that I’ve made, many of them are an accident of birth. The odds are – for the most part – stacked in my favour. The very fact that I would have been able to afford to attend this class if I’d wanted to (new riders pay £16 for their first class, and £26 per class from then on) shows a level of privilege that was seemingly completely overlooked.

When things are working in your favour, it’s easy to assume that it’s because you’re the one doing something right. That was the philosophy that was shouted in catch phrases from the front – you can do it, just try a little harder.

Breakthrough is on the other side of this spin class. Mind over matter. That’s the message of SoulCycle.

But every life philosophy, every ‘spiritual experience’, has a flip side to it.

But the problem with that philosophy, of course, is its flip side: if things go wrong – if you’re in an accident, if you get made redundant, if you lose your house or your health fails you – then, logic dictates, it must be that you’ve done something wrong.

If you can no longer afford a SoulCycle class, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough, or you didn’t peddle fast enough, or you didn’t put your mind to it.

Of course, this was never said during the class – it was far too positive for that. But every life philosophy, every ‘spiritual experience’, has a flip side to it. If everything happens for a reason, then sudden seemingly random acts of cruelty – cancer, the death of children, natural disasters – must be there to teach us something. If we can control the good things in our lives – the promotions, the achievements, the relationships – then if stuff goes wrong then it must be our fault as well.

Is that really true?

Human beings are relentlessly fickle. And we have a deep and overwhelming desire to think that we’re in control, that life is in our hands. And it’s comforting – when things are going well. But what when they aren’t?

In her book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, professor of the history of Christianity and Stage 4 cancer patient Kate Bowler writes that ‘control is a drug, and we’re all hooked’.

I can see how SoulCycle could get addictive. In fact, the day I was there, someone was celebrating their 750th ride at SoulCycle London. The endorphins, the encouragement, the relentless pursuit of ‘breakthrough’ and ‘growth’ and ‘progress’ – it’s intoxicating.

When you grow up in the church, you learn a different way of existing. It’s not that you can do all things through yourself, but – as aforementioned – through Christ who strengthens you. The idea of relying on something outside of yourself, something all-powerful, all-loving, is one of the ideas at the heart of Christianity. It’s less of an emotional crutch, and more of a ‘catch-all’ reality for those of us who have realised that we’re not as in control as we once thought, or as we would like to be.

Explainer

Belief

Climate

Comment

Sustainability

13 September 2024

7 min read

Living sustainably doesn’t have to be a burden, here’s the case for action

How not to get hot and bothered about climate change.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A protester holds up a green sign reading: 'It's hard to be green. Kermit'.

Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

The fundamental tenets of Christianity show why Christians are called to love not just one another but all created things.

1. God is love.

2. God created everything.

Therefore, God loves everything he created.

3. God appointed humanity as the guardians of creation.

Therefore, a fundamental part of our identity and calling as human beings is to protect and sustain all that God created.

This lies at the basis of everything Christians believe and do. But a case can be made that is more basic still because it appeals, not to anything distinctively Christian, but to natural human wisdom. The climate crisis is not a Christian crisis. It’s a crisis for everyone who cares about their future and that of our planet. The climate crisis may be something unprecedented in the history of humanity, but the principles that are needed to resolve it are not new at all. Sustainability is not a new or particularly abstruse idea. It is something everyone understands as basic common sense. If I cut down trees faster than they can grow, I won’t be able to do that forever. One day I will cut down the last tree and then there won’t be any more trees, ever again. If I catch fish faster than they can reproduce, then one day I will catch the last fish and then won’t be able to catch any more ever again.

But it’s not only about foresters and fishermen. Since the dawn of humanity, we have been living sustainably – wisely preserving resources and using only what we can replace, so that we and our descendants can continue to live. This applies to everyone regardless of their profession. All of us, if we spend more money than we earn, are living in a way that cannot last for long. If we use resources at a faster rate than we can replenish them, we will run into trouble at some point in the future. Every person possessed of reason and common sense knows this intuitively without having to be taught it. Only someone seriously deluded, foolish, or with some kind of mental health problem fails to understand the need for sustainability in order to have any kind of future at all, let alone a pleasant future.

The call to live sustainably can lead us to feel burdened by a permanent sense of guilt, a feeling that we ought to be doing more than we are...

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We are burning fossil fuels at hundreds of times the rate they can be produced. We are producing plastics that cannot be recycled, meaning we have to dump them in landfills that are growing all the time. We are pouring carbon dioxide into the air faster than anyone can take it out. All of these things mean that there is a time limit on the kind of lifestyles we are all leading now. If we carry on in this way, then one day we will cross a line from which there is no returning. As Mark Scarlata has pointed out, the solution cannot be technological. Even if we find a way to balance carbon outputs with inputs, we are only kicking the can further down the road. Our inability to live within our means will simply resurface somewhere else later on. The problem is spiritual, not technical.

Everyone understands this at some level even if it’s the kind of truth from which we prefer to avert our eyes. The harder problem is to understand why this basic common sense isn’t proving effective. Why are we living collectively in a way that only a foolish or insane person would live, when most of us taken by ourselves are neither foolish or insane?

The problem, at least in part, is that we are all entangled in systems that make it very hard for us to live sustainably. If I am an ordinary Brit living in an ordinary town or city, and I need to buy toothbrushes or nappies or cucumbers or strawberries, I go to the local supermarket: and the only options available are made of plastic or wrapped in plastic that will not decompose for 500 years, and often brought here from the other side of the world using huge amounts of carbon emissions. Most of us are busy people with limited financial resources. We don’t have the time to find sustainable alternatives and often they are too expensive even if we can find them. The societal structures that we live in limit the choices we have. The call to live sustainably can lead us to feel burdened by a permanent sense of guilt, a feeling that we ought to be doing more than we are, but also an inability to see how we could be doing more given all the pressures, needs and constraints on our time and money.

Christians do not naively believe that God will sweep in and fix everything if we just wait. That would be to deny our responsibility, and it is not what hope means.

We are all culprits in part, since we all contribute to non-sustainable living. But we are also partly victims of forces beyond our control, large cultural forces that shape and determine our actions more than we can imagine. We have very little power over those structural forces and currently things do not look good. Common sense principles aren’t working. The climate crisis is only getting worse. So, what do we do?

It is at this point that Christianity has something special to offer to the problem.

First, Christians are never called to be defeatist or to throw in the towel. This is because we are called to an enormous hope, a hope that surpasses understanding, a hope that the world cannot understand because it stands over against all the odds and all the possibilities. This hope is rooted in the conviction that our God is God Almighty, that he has not abandoned his creation, and that he has power to save. He is a saviour. He is the God of our salvation. This is the God we believe in. The climate crisis may look bleak right now, but Christians need never despair or become indifferent. If we do our small part, we can trust that God is in control of what is out of our control.

Secondly, Christians believe that every human being is a free agent with the capacity to choose how he or she will act. Our freedom may be limited by the societal structures that shape and constrain our choices, but it is not destroyed. We can still make choices within those limits to buy and live more sustainably – anything from choosing a holiday destination within driving distance, to giving up beef (by far the worst food for carbon emissions). There is something all of us can do.

Thirdly, Christians believe in a God who transforms hearts and lives, winning them to the power of the gospel and to a new way of living that is free of the shackles that this world – the structures of society – puts on us. This transformation is slow – slower than we would like it to be sometimes. We feel the shackles still gripping us at times. We are not expected to change everything all at once, to become holy overnight. Nevertheless, God gives us the power to change our lives, and to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The way towards sustainable living is not to try to change everything at once, but to ask: what one thing can I change in my daily lifestyle that would make it more sustainable? And then once we’ve mastered that and integrated it so we no longer even think about it and it’s just a default, then we can ask: what’s the next thing I can do? All of a sudden what looks like an unimaginable height of transformation, when it is broken down, becomes a series of manageable steps.

Even if we do everything in our power, we cannot by ourselves avert a possible catastrophe. We are small players in a big game. Christians do not naively believe that God will sweep in and fix everything if we just wait. That would be to deny our responsibility, and it is not what hope means. Hope means the opposite: that we continue to fight to avert climate disaster even when it seems hopeless. Christians are called to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. We are called to live in such a way that, if catastrophe comes, it won’t be because of us – to live in hope that our actions are meaningful and worthwhile and that we are in the hands of a God who is far more powerful than the most powerful forces in this world.