(Without a mention of high gas prices)
A thoughtful
essay lifting the merits of walking recently came to my attention. As written,
it is too long for this column so it will be presented in three columns. ER
What follows is the kind of congratulations-to-self that
occasionally sits in my mind when I find myself walking while others drive.
Nevertheless, it might serve as a kind of proposal for enshrining walking as a
Christian form of transportation.
It may strike you as odd that such a primal and common means
of transport should need a defense. But by now, mostly, it is really only the
young and the poor who still use walking as a means of transport. Others will
occasionally “go for a walk” but for the most part, we think and live by the
terms of the automobile.
If the tone here seems exaggerated and overstated it is
because I have set out to tangle with a tyrant; the automobile has such a grip
on our minds that only drastic measures can put it on the defensive.
When I walk, I take the world on its own terms. A rule of
stewardship says that what is stewarded needs to be taken with a measure of
seriousness and attentions. When I walk, the puddle, the steep hill, the
sub-zero temperature, the mosquitoes, the lilac bush, begin to mean something
to me, they have become a part of my world. In other words, my neighborhood has
become a place, not just a space to move through.
Driving, on the other hand, flattens the world into
non-existence. The steep hill is as flat as the plain, the puddle causes me not
a moment’s thought. The lilacs I see from afar, insulated from their aroma.
This elimination of the world is obvious when the weather plunges below -25C.
It is not the walkers who complain of the cold, it is the drivers.
When I walk, the cold becomes something to be defied; I dress and exert myself
to elude its grip. The icy world around me has become a formidable other to be
taken seriously (hence the satisfaction of coming in from a cold walk). When I drive,
the best I can do is sit helplessly shivering and curse, hoping my car warms up
before I arrive at my destination.
This, it seems to me, is where stewardship and incarnation
meet. God, in order to save the world, did not transcend it but moved into the
neighborhood. He became a particular Jewish man who never ventured far from the
village of his birth; he got about as far as he could walk. He took one place
very seriously and thereby delivered the cosmos.
By staying close to home and committing himself to one place
seriously, the birds of the air, the lilies of the field, and seeds of the
path, the figs on the tree and the foxes in the holes meant something. They
were lifted up as the stuff of salvation. They were noticed because Jesus the
walker had the time and the opportunity to live in the place where he was.
By Layton Layton
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