God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul

MILE ONE

SETTING OUT

Leave your simple ways and you will live; walk in the way of insight.

—PROVERBS 9:6

CHAPTER 1

Three Miles an Hour

My friend Norm can’t walk.

He once could, with poise, with strength. He wasn’t Buster Keaton, but he strode the earth with vigor and ease and effortless balance. But in as much time as it takes you to read this sentence, he stopped walking. Not by choice. He lost the use of both legs, and most of the use of both arms, when his horse, his trusted horse, threw him sideways and gravity pulled him earthward and he hit the ground at an angle that broke things inside him. In a blink, he went from agility to paralysis, from mobility to confinement, from standing most days to sitting all of them. One moment, his legs went wherever he told them. The next, they refused.

Norm once walked all the time but never much thought about it. He never contemplated the simple joy, the giddy freedom, the everyday magic of walking: to bound up or down a flight of stairs, to glide across a kitchen floor, to stroll a beach, to hike a trail. To move from here to there on nothing more than his own two legs, under his own locomotion. Now, Norm thinks about walking all the time. He watches others do it—Uprights, he calls them—bounding, gliding, strolling, hiking, and the dozens of other things most of us do with our legs with barely a thought about it. It stuns and saddens him. He would give almost anything to walk again, and if ever by some miracle of heaven or earth his capacity is restored, it’s almost all he will ever do.

My friend Norm can’t walk, but he thinks about it a lot.

Until recently, I was the opposite: I walked a lot but thought about it almost never.

Walking is, along with eating and sleeping, our most practiced human activity. But unlike eating and sleeping, we don’t need to do it to survive. And so walking, though our most practiced human activity, is maybe our most taken-for-granted one, and sometimes our most neglected. You can, after all, go only seconds without breathing, mere days without eating. But walking—you can pass an entire lifetime and still do little of that.

Until recently, I had lost, if ever I possessed, sheer astonishment at the simple, humble miracle of carrying myself every day everywhere. These legs are more wondrous than a magic carpet, more regal than a king’s palanquin. But only now have I come to see it.

THE SPEED OF OUR SOULS

Everyone who can walk walks, even the most sedentary, if only from bed to couch, from table to fridge, from desk to copier. We walk, for the most part, because we can’t help it—because an escalator or elevator or car or plane or train or golf cart is unavailable. We walk up and down stairs. We walk the lengths of hallways. We walk through malls. We walk from curbsides to restaurants, from parking lots to clothing stores. Walking, Evan Esar says, isn’t a lost art: one must, by some means, get to the garage.¹

Most of us walk unthinkingly, without gratitude, maybe even resentfully. Our walking is accidental, incidental, inevitable, maybe grudging. It’s what we do between sitting.

But not all of us. Some of us walk because it’s magic and beautiful and mysterious and sometimes dangerous. We walk because we see things differently when we walk. We feel more deeply, think more clearly. We walk to figure things out. We walk to sort ourselves out. We walk to get in shape. We walk to get a sense of the scale of things—the bigness of trees, the smallness of beetles, the real distance between places. We walk because we experience land and sky and light in fresh ways—in ways, I am tempted to say, closer to reality.

We walk because three miles an hour, as the writer Rebecca Solnit says, is about the speed of thought,² and maybe the speed of our souls. We walk because if we go much faster for much longer, we’ll start to lose ourselves: our bodies will atrophy, our thinking will jumble, our very souls will wither.

Do you not feel this?

I do.

I walk because three miles an hour seems to be the pace God keeps. It’s God speed.

A PHYSICAL DISCIPLINE

The seed of this book was annoyance, or grief, or something in between. I was annoyed or grieved or whatever it is that lies between that many spiritual traditions have a corresponding physical discipline and Christianity has none. Hinduism has yoga. Taoism has tai chi. Shintoism has karate. Buddhism has kung fu. Confucianism has hapkido. Sikhism has gatka.

Christianity has nothing.

This is odd. The very core of Christian faith is incarnation—God’s coming among us as one of us to walk with us. Incarnation is Christianity’s flesh and blood. And every part of Christian faith seeks embodiment, a way of being lived out here, now, in person. The church has fought tenaciously against anything that contradicts this. The earliest, most noxious, and most persistent heresy of authentic Christian faith is Gnosticism. Gnosticism says the body doesn’t matter—or worse, it’s evil. It’s a thing to be despised, maybe used, maybe indulged, but eventually discarded. It has no inherent value.

Gnosticism is incarnation’s mortal enemy.

Christianity insists that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, walked among us. And it insists that all words, all ideas, all theories, all theologies, all doctrines must become flesh and dwell among us. It calls us to walk out our faith, not just know it or speak it or argue it.

So it’s odd: that a faith so insistent on these things, a faith so inescapably incarnational, never developed a matching physical discipline to help its followers yoke their faith to practice: body to mind, holiness to breath, thought to movement, the inward to the outward.

Very odd.

Except, did it? Did Christian faith have a corresponding physical discipline, then lost it?

That’s what I’m going to argue here. And I’m going to argue that this discipline is the oldest and simplest practice around.

It’s walking.

It started very early with a God in the habit of walking in the garden in the cool of the day. Likely, he invited our first parents to join him, until that terrible day they ran away and hid instead. (See Gen. 3:8.) Even after that, holiness and walking with God were the same thing. Enoch walked with God . . . Noah . . . walked with God (Gen. 5:22; 6:9).

Later, the prophet Micah asks, What does God require of you? He considers a list of religious options: extravagant worship, costly sacrifice. But no. It’s simple and personal: God wants us to love mercy and to do justly. And then Micah throws in a third thing, or maybe it’s the one thing needed, the single activity that makes the other two possible: to walk humbly with your God (Mic. 6:6–8).

Later still, the peripatetic apostle Paul picks up the theme. Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children, he exhorts the Ephesians. Walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (Eph. 5:1–2).

Walking is a primary way of knowing God.

GOD SPEED

This is a book about walking. Particularly, it’s a book about walking as spiritual formation and spiritual discipline. In its pages, I explore many things—walking as healing, walking as exercise, walking as exorcism, walking as prayer, walking as remembering, walking as pilgrimage, walking as suffering and friendship and attentiveness. I am interested not so much in heroic or historic walking—pilgrimages, great marches, huge feats of endurance through parched wastelands or dense forests or precarious mountain passes—as in the ordinary, unsung walking most of us do every day. I’m interested in the simple, humble miracle of carrying ourselves around. I’m interested in the spirituality of walking, in the deep-down good it does us even when we’re not trying to derive any benefit from it.

Each chapter has a companion, a brief reflection on some theme emerging from the chapter, and ending, explicitly or implicitly, with a call to action (or inaction). I am calling these companion pieces God Speed. Because always, I circle back to one grand theme: walking is the way we keep pace with the three-mile-an-hour God. It is God speed. We walk with a God who seems in no particular hurry and who, it seems, enjoys the going there as much as the getting there. A God who is slow. This is a book about being alongside the God who, incarnate in Jesus, turns to us as he passes by—on foot, always on foot—and says, simply and subversively, Come, follow me.

Come, walk with me.

This book is about hearing this invitation as more than a metaphor. It is about working out on the ground, on the way, our friendship with God, and with ourselves and with others and with the good and fragile earth that holds us up and marks our steps.

SEVEN MILES WITH A STRANGER

Luke tells a story near the end of his gospel about two people walking and talking, trying to work out what’s happened to them. One’s named Cleopas, the other we don’t know. They are traveling from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles [away]. At three miles an hour, that’s more than a two-hour walk.

A long time to talk.

A long time to think.

Enough time to change your mind.

Enough time to have your world turned upside down. Cleopas and his companion—some think it was his wife or one of his children—are disciples of Jesus. Or had been. They are crushed by disappointment: Jesus is dead. Killed. Crucified. Before their very eyes. Unmistakable. Undeniable. Irreversible. Everything they had believed about Jesus has been proven false. Their words tell the story: We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel (Luke 24:21).

We had hoped. That he was.

Past tense. The swan song of the defeated, the coda of the brokenhearted.

As they walk, a man joins them. He walks with them. He is an unusual traveler. A bit odd, maybe a tad thick: he seems clueless about the events that have shattered these two people’s world and have gripped and rocked an entire nation. This traveler doesn’t seem to know a thing about Jesus—his life, his words, his works. His brutal messy death. Or anything about a strange rumor going around—angels, an empty tomb, the dead raised.

Then the stranger starts to talk.

It turns out, even if he doesn’t seem to be up on recent news, he does know a lot of Scripture. And he knows a lot about the great hope of the Scriptures, the promised Messiah. As they walk, he talks. He teaches Cleopas and his companion about how all roads, all Scripture, lead to the same place: the Messiah will suffer before he enters his glory.

At last, they reach Emmaus. The traveler tries to take his leave. He seems to have farther to go. But Cleopas and the other disciple are having none of it: They urged him strongly, ‘Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over’ (Luke 24:29).

So the stranger relents, enters their home. They serve him a meal. Then he does something very odd for a guest in someone else’s home: he takes charge. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them (v. 30).

And that’s when it happens—their eyes were opened and they recognized him (v. 31). He inexplicably vanishes at that very moment. But it’s okay. It’s enough. They know who he is. They’ve seen this very thing before—taking bread, giving thanks, breaking bread, giving bread.

This is the signature—even more than his Bible teaching—of the very Jesus they thought was dead: taking, thanking, breaking, giving. It’s Jesus.

All this happens at the table. But the long walk isn’t beside the point. It isn’t wasted breath.

It is preparation.

Were not our hearts burning within us, they ask each other, while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us? (v. 32).

This—like so many stories in Scripture—is both about other people and about us. It is about these two people, one named Cleopas, who lived long ago, far away. It’s about their discovering Jesus present with them even as they lament his absence.

But it’s also about us. It’s our story. Jesus keeps doing this, becoming present with us even as we lament his absence. He keeps showing up, showing us things, walking beside us, making our hearts burn within us. We might not recognize him at the time. That often comes later.

And it usually takes some walking to get there.

I started this book in a place I often visit, usually to write. It’s called Fireweed: a private retreat house on twenty-six secluded acres. It is ringed with deep coastal woods, and on its eastern side lie sloping fields of tall wild grasses. In the middle of the property is a marshy lake plied by three families of beavers, who come out at dawn and dusk and swim in leisurely circles or zigzags, and slap their tails hard and loud on the glassy water, to spook the fish, I guess. Or maybe to entertain me, which is a theory I’m quite attached to. In the spring and summer and fall—I write this in the early days of winter, nudging right up against Christmas—the lake’s edge is laced with lily pads, preternaturally green, many of them supporting the weight of a frog camouflaged to match its habitat. Each frog sits in perfect stillness, sometimes for hours, waiting for a winged whirring buzzing thing to fly within reach of its blindingly quick and sticky tongue. The reeds circling the lake are haloed with dragon and damsel flies, and all manner of birds flit or perch or wade round about.

It is a small and perfect paradise.

Each day I’m here, I walk the land. A trail encircles most of the property’s edges (the marsh at the western edge is impassable), and many other trails crisscross through its forests and fields. I walk most of these trails most days. It maybe takes an hour, more or less, depending on my mood, the weather, how sodden the low places are, what catches my eye. I must have walked this land, some length and breadth of it, in some order, fifty times. Every time, it becomes a little more familiar, a muscle memory, a room in my heart. And yet every time it holds fresh discoveries, like a place I have never been before and couldn’t have imagined. Walking deepens the familiar and yet keeps revealing the new.

ATTENTIVE TO NUDGES

The seed of this book, I already said, was annoyance. But the catalyst for it was something else: the suspicion that when the Bible talks about walking in the Spirit or walking in the light or walking in truth and so on, it means this in more than a figurative way. My suspicion was that Paul and John, and others, meant it equally in a literal way. After all, these were people who walked. Paul especially. He covered a lot of ground on foot. Someone has calculated that his missionary travels alone covered ten thousand miles. So when he exhorts, say, the church in Galatia to keep in step with the Spirit, it’s likely that his exhortation is rooted in his actual experience. As you walk, he is saying, from your house to your neighbor’s house, or from this town to that town, do as I do: be attentive to the nudges and whispers of God’s Spirit. Be listening and speaking to the one who walks with you. Follow his lead.

When Paul visited Athens, he walked around and looked carefully at [their] objects of worship (Acts 17:23). He was attentive to the spiritual condition of people in that city, to this man’s beliefs, that woman’s practices. Especially, he was attentive to the way each man’s and each woman’s spirituality congealed into a zeitgeist, a spirit of the age, an overall mood. If one person believes something deeply, it hardly registers. But if a million people believe it, it takes on a shape, a weight, a force. Paul felt in Athens the weight of what the people there believed. It bothered him what he saw, what he felt. Actually, earlier, he kind of pitched a fit over it: While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols (Acts 17:16). Greatly distressed: in the Greek, it means he could hardly breathe.

But he kept walking, walking around, looking at everything. Thinking, praying. Maybe, in his walking around, he remembered what his fellow apostle once said, "how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him" (Acts 10:38, emphasis mine). Jesus never pitched a fit over people’s spiritual condition. Rather, he loaded up with divine power and set out with healing in his wings. Jesus went on a mission of restoration and liberation. Was Paul remembering that? Is that what helped him recover from his own little pharisaical hangover? At any rate, by the time Paul gets up to talk to the Athenian elite down at the Philosophers’ Club, he’s in a much better mood. He sees that, underneath the Athenians’ distressing idolatry, is a deep longing, a holy hunger, a searching for the God who is as close as breath and ready, at the slightest prompting, to turn to each and all with healing in his wings.

All’s to say, I am pretty sure walking is how Paul largely worked out his faith. He kept God speed. In this, he would have simply been following a habit so ingrained it was second nature. Indeed, the earliest name for Christianity was the Way, suggesting that it was not a set of doctrines to