Every Step a Prayer. Thomas R. Hawkins

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СКАЧАТЬ marches that seek to shape public opinion, influence the political process, or celebrate their heritage or identity. The National Park Service annually issues approximately 3,800 permits for marches on Washington DC’s National Mall.

      I am an avid walker. Walking trails lace the woods surrounding my family’s home, and every morning and evening I walk our family dog, Spenser, along them. On vacation, my favorite activity comes in walking through urban and rural landscapes, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells. Some of my favorite childhood memories include walks with my grandfather to hunt for mushrooms or to dig sassafras roots for tea.

      Until that August church council meeting, however, I had never considered all the opportunities for walking that our congregation’s ministries build in. Nor had I realized the extent to which members integrated walking into their daily routines.

      Beneath our society’s renewed interest in walking lies a yearning to slow down in a 24/7 world; to reconnect to the natural world in a crowded, technological society; and to express our protest in a political climate where many people feel they have a vote but not a voice. This deep yearning intersects with the spiritual resources of our Christian faith, which has always understood walking as a means to and an expression of prayer. As we rediscover how every step can be a prayer, we walk a well-marked path traveled by our Christian forebears who understood that walking—like many other simple, everyday gestures—can be a spiritual discipline and an act of prayer.

      The following chapters invite us to explore walking as a discipline that can inform our spiritual life. They examine how taking to our feet in worship reminds us that walking is a Christian spiritual practice that can deepen our awareness of God’s Spirit in our lives. They discuss the anatomy and physiology of walking and how the movement of our feet influences the movement of our mind, our hearts, and our breathing, all of which shape our receptivity to God’s Spirit in us and our world.

      We seldom walk alone. Even when we are solitary walkers, we walk roads and paths that others have traveled before us and that still hold the memory and imprint of their presence. In the same way, we as Christians are never alone but are always surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, the communion of saints, who support us as we run the race set before us in our own lifetimes.

      Finally, our feet typically lead us both across our doorsteps into the world and then guide us back home. In the same way, walking as a spiritual practice directs us to our ultimate home-coming in God’s love and grace.

      The book of Genesis tells us that from the very beginning, God wanted us as faithful walking partners. (See Genesis 3:8.) The Bible’s poets and prophets continually invite us to return to the God who requires that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly alongside our divine companion. (Read Micah 6:8.) By entering into these pages we respond to the invitation to discover how walking as a spiritual practice can lead us along the paths of righteousness, guide us to still waters, and restore our souls. (See Psalm 23.)

      At the end of each chapter you will find questions and activities for further reflection. Each chapter includes a specific exercise or exercises designed to help you walk prayerfully. I typically walk on a sidewalk or in a natural area. In times of inclement weather, I walk on a treadmill. You may adapt these exercises to whatever setting is available and comfortable to you.

      You may use these activities and questions to guide your personal reflection. If you are reading this book with others, discuss the questions and your experience of the activities together when you meet. As the basis for a small-group experience, you will want to include a feedback or debriefing time that allows everyone to share their responses to the suggested walking activity.

      I encourage you to create a special “walking journal” to keep track of your observations, questions, and insights. Use your journal to record what days you walked, where you walked, how long you walked, and how far you walked. If you have set walking goals, these records can help you measure your progress. One worthwhile goal would be to work toward walking ten thousand steps daily. Start where you are, and add more steps each day.

      

       Teach Me Your Paths

      Most walking paths are well marked: a yellow dot painted on a tree, a small arrow telling us which way to turn, or three blue stripes painted onto a post set into the ground. But sometimes the cues are more difficult to discern: a slightly rutted track in the ground where people’s shoes have compressed the soil or a subtle change in the landscape where the passing of many boots has stunted the grass. Because not all trails are well marked, walkers can take an occasional wrong turn. Encountering less clear pathways gives me a new appreciation for Psalm 107:4-5, which reads as follows: “Some wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to an inhabited town; hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within them.”

      My guidebook once told me to follow the mowed path through a field until I reached a stone fence with a gate. Unfortunately, I was walking in mid-August and thousands of sheep had grazed the field for most of the summer. I found it impossible to tell where a mowing machine might have mechanically cut the grass and where thousands of small teeth had cropped it close to the ground. I consequently ended up hungry and thirsty at the wrong end of a very large pasture. The sun was setting and the nearest inn was miles away. Lost on an empty moor in northern England, I felt my soul fainting within me.

      Another time, I followed what seemed to be the main trail. The rutted ground and worn grass suggested that I should keep following this path. I continued for more than an hour before I discovered that it was only an animal trackway that I could no longer follow because it dropped into a steep ravine full of brambles. Human feet had not worn this path. Hundreds of deer hooves had created it.

      To avoid getting lost, I always look for clues that other walkers have left behind them. These signs tell me that I am on the right path. In the same way, other Christian believers have marked out particular practices as cues that help me find my way to God. They point me toward well-traveled pathways where I can cultivate a deeper love, knowledge, and service of God and neighbor.

      Scientists have a name for this phenomenon. They call it stigmergy. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization and indirect coordination where one person or animal leaves a trace in the environment that stimulates others to repeat the same action. Actions build indirectly on one another over time to produce a visible structure or pattern. This emergent pattern then directs others to behave in the same fashion. A sheep wanders across a pasture, following the tender stalks of grass. The lone sheep presses down the grass, eats off the stems, and leaves the smell of its urine in the soil as it goes along. These subtle markers become cues that guide other sheep to follow the same path. As more and more sheep follow these signs and cues, they crush the grass still more. They leave behind still stronger traces of their scent. Gradually, the path becomes clearer and clearer. At some point, all the sheep can identify this broad, wide path that rambles across the pasture.

      Stigmergy provides the answer to my father’s perennial complaint about roads with endless bends and curves: “Who designed this road?” he would mutter. “It must have been built by engineers who were following a cow path.” In fact, it probably did follow an animal trackway that later became a human footpath, which engineers made into a highway sometime in the last century. As stigmergy would predict, people kept following the same cues and signals as the road widened from an animal trackway to a highway. Stigmergy allows complex, coordinated action without any immediate presence or explicit communication. This underappreciated concept explains how systems organize from the bottom up.

      Stigmergy explains how Christian spiritual practices СКАЧАТЬ