Walking in the World

I went down the three flights of stairs, a bag of garbage in one hand, and my two-year-old clasped in the other.

After a visit to the dumpster by our condo, we walked hand-in-hand into the morning world.

My son seems to have this awareness of the world around him that it’s easy to lose, as an adult. He points out the noises and things he sees around him, using his best words to tell me what is happening.

My daughter, too, on our walks, tells me of the “street sparkling in the rain” or the “purple cloud in the sky” after twilight.

Their awareness of the world has prompted me to reevaluate why it is that I have moved away from it, and how to reclaim this awareness. Also, I’ve wondered: is awareness of the world a good thing? And can it be part of Christian spiritual practice?

Body and Spirit

I teach a class on the history of civilization, and one of the striking things to me is that both the separation of the human and natural world, and the separation of the natural and spiritual world seem like relatively modern developments.

Paleolithic shamanism and more recent polytheistic and monotheistic religions little acknowledge such divisions.

A Lion-Man carved by hunter-gatherers shows a union of the human world and the animal world

Yet, we’ve come to a place as a society where I effectively have my own insular reality operating independently of the others. What I want to see and whom I want to interact with are increasingly mediated by technology and my own timing.

Walking abolishes all that–if you let it.

Walking as an Observational Practice

Before turning to the Christian aspects of walking as a spiritual practice, it is important to establish what happens on a fundamental level on a walk.

During my walk with my son, it became clear to me that I do not control much.

The wind gusted to thirty-five miles an hour, chilling an otherwise unseasonably warm day. Workers tore windows off a house, without so much as a glance my direction.

My son gazed at the trees, fell in love with the “flamingo house,” with its assemblage of impossibly colored, plastic flamingos (purple, green, blue, and so on), and listened for trucks.

The emergency siren test started. Unbidden, I recalled the drills I conducted at school to its sound, the students whispering about Russia bombing us, as the teacher spoke.

As my son gazed up, I saw a dead squirrel on the grass at our feet, its tail twitching in the strong wind. I thought how alive that motion seemed; I thought how I’d someday die. What did that mean?

Would I die in a peaceful way, or would the world turn back to the ravages of war, disease, and hunger that are so common in history and even today, in places?

On a walk, the world intrudes in unexpected ways on our consciousness.

Walking as a Spiritual Practice

Almost anything can be a source of spiritual reflection, on a walk.

But, how?

I suppose the spiritual dimension started for me when I went jogging after vacation bible school in the summer. My brother, our friends, and I went jogging.

It was a strange juxtaposition: the songs, scriptures, and God existed in the same world as sweat, exertion, and the warm summer evenings that felt like they were ripped from Ray Bradbury’s nostalgia-tinged, uncanny prose.

Jogging was an escape from the world where everything was part of an emotional-cerebral-spiritual complex and the body was denigrated from a position of importance, to something in service of the mind.

When the sensations of pain or pleasure and perceptions of the world around us combine with the spiritual highs and lows we face, we can become grounded in the reality God created us to inhabit.

Living in Reality

In grad school, I listened to a lecture, in fact, pointing out that walking has long been integral to the creation of art and philosophy. Without input from the world, the artist or thinker is bankrupt.

This prompted me to get out there. I thought of the psalmist praising nature as a revelation of God. Even the pessimism of the preacher in Ecclesiastes stems from his observations of the world.

Jesus’ prayer that we are (like him) in the world but not of the world (John 17:15-16) seems metaphorical for the idea of not participating in the moral attitudes and immoral deeds of our culture.

But, also, on some level, we have to be present in the world in a literal way. As long as we are alive, there is no escaping the reality that we move in and the ways we interact with the system of the world around us.

A Starting Point

You might ask yourself:

What am I noticing around me?
What thoughts and feelings does this prompt?
What do these thoughts and feelings tell me about my spiritual life?

Some days, nothing will speak to you. Other days, the environment you are in will provide a rich experience with more facets than you can fully document. Either way, taking a first literal step out your door, with the intent of being present mentally and physically in the outside world, is where I’d begin.