Orthodox Motorcycle Brotherhood – Orthodox Christian Mens Association

1st Place Trophy 2025 for Most Members on Motorcycles presented by Michigan Confederation of Clubs.

“Unframed”

by Padre, Chaplain & Road Captain

Dead Orthodox Riding Club | Orthodox Motorcycle Association

Detroit, Michigan

May 17, 2025

“You still riding your motorcycle—you know—that suicide machine?” my younger brother asked, as I just smiled, acknowledging that his question reflected and was borne from the attitudes and ignorant perceptions of the masses outside of the motorcycling community who simply don’t understand! Any polemic or words of justification would fail to fully inscribe and convey the rewards of those who ride. It would be akin to a feeble attempt to have a single man, free from financial and family burdens, fully understand and appreciate the blessed rewards of the nuptial communion between man and wife, or of seeing his child born into the world. The risks, the life-long sacrifices, the toils and strains of family life melt away in the face of such ineffable rewards! So, with my brother’s question, I simply smiled!

Far from being thrill-seeking junkies with a death wish who mount roaring V-twin-powered steeds of steel and power, and far beneath the leather vests, beards, burly bodies, and tattoos lies a spirit and brotherhood of those who experience the world in all its rawness, and yet, are willing to die to the world, die for each other—to lose themselves in the freedom of riding. It is a transcendental experience that is not simply sensory or psychosomatic, but that touches upon the spiritual! Beyond a metaphor, the freedom of riding is an entrance into a world without frames.

Freedom on a motorcycle is not just the absence of doors, windows, and roof—it is the absence of filters—it is full exposure to the world and its elements. There is no fully-enclosed windshield, no metal skin between rider and world. The wind is not a sound effect piped in through a speaker; it is a force that pushes against your chest, stings your eyes, fills your lungs. Every contour of the road is not only seen but felt, every change in temperature registered on the skin, every smell both pleasant and foul sensed. You are not watching the world go by; you are in it, part of it, inseparable from it! The distinction between rider, road, and environment blurs and blends.

To ride a motorcycle is to surrender the illusion of safety granted by enclosure. The car offers a kind of simulated interaction with the world: landscapes framed behind glass and in the comfort of environmental controls, other drivers held at bay by reinforced doors. Likewise, the smartphone offers connection, but through another frame, a screen—through distance, through curation. Even our social selves are often riding in metaphorical cars: protected, composed, filtered. We speak through roles, postures, personas, and practiced narratives, hoping to be seen and known but not too closely, hoping to touch but not too deeply.

But the motorcycle rider knows a different kind of presence—raw, exposed, vulnerable, fully engaged. And in that exposure, something is set free.

Truly, a correlation exists between riding our bikes in the created order and the call of Christ in the spiritual order to step out of the frames that have kept us safe! In riding, we’re practicing that call to be vulnerable, to die to self, to take up our cross and follow Him.

To follow Him is not merely to believe a set of doctrines or dwell within the safety of familiar religious frameworks. It is to leave behind the persona we construct for others—the curated version of ourselves we share to be accepted, respected, protected. It is to set aside the comfortable images of God we’ve framed to feel in control—God as idea, as abstraction, as manageable presence.

Instead, Christ invites us into a terrifying and dangerous intimacy with Himself and our brethren. Like a rider shedding the enclosure of a car, we are invited to come out from behind the frame of glass—to feel the sharp wind of truth, the real-ness of grace, the ache and joy of being fully known. There is no filter here, no performance—only the living God and our unmasked soul in all its brokenness before Him and our brothers!

Freedom is not escape from the world, but full contact with it—not the protection of what we think we are, but the liberation into what God has always purposed us to be, when nothing stands between us and the truth—not glass, not screen, not mask, not even our carefully built idea of who God is!

This kind of spiritual freedom is not found in safety. It is found in risk: the risk of vulnerability, of surrender, of being remade. Just as the rider trusts his bike, the road beneath the wheels, and his brother riding beside him, we are called to trust the hands that formed us—no longer clinging to the frames that once kept us safe, yet distant from the imminence of God and communion with our brothers. It is real. And in that unframed encounter, that holy nakedness, we discover not the loss of self or safety—but the beginning of true freedom!

Christ does not meet us through the glass. He meets us on the open road. And in the rawness of that ride—in the holy risk of being fully alive, fully known, and fully seen—we begin to discover a freedom deeper than comfort and predictability: the freedom of life unframed, in Him!