“I number it among my blessings that my father had no car…The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his own two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine…The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it annihilates space. It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given…Of course if man hates space and wants it annihilated that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.” (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy)

What follows is the kind of congratulation-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. In the city where I live it is only the young and the poor who still use walking as a means of transport. Many of the 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. But all that aside, here are four reasons why walking may be a godly way to go.

1) Walking takes the world on its terms. 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 attention. When I walk, the puddle, the steep hill, the sub-zero temperature, the mosquitoes, the lilac bush, mean something to me. They have become a part of my world. In other words, my neighbourhood has become a place, not just a space to move through.

Driving, on the other hand, flattens the world into nonexistence. 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 –25°C.

It is not the walkers who complain of the cold but 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 neighbourhood. 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 small place seriously and 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, the seeds on 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.

2) Walking takes people seriously. When I walk, I take people seriously. Walking to church, for example, I pass through a real human community. I find people digging dandelions in their front yard. I see people reading their paper with the morning coffee. I step around hopscotch on the sidewalk. Neighbours’ dogs frighten me from the other side of the fence. I am a real person in a real human community.

When I drive, I paratroop into the church from nowhere. I am worshipping in No-Place. In my city many churches have literally become the Church of No-Place. Situated far from where anyone calls home, you can’t get there except by car, and the church’s neighbourhood matters not a whit.

This can be confirmed by the fact that, as far as I know, there is no such thing as sidewalk rage. Why is it that Layton Friesen, otherwise calm, cool and collected, when behind the wheel of a car, will fly into a fit of rage at other drivers? Two reasons: As the barber in Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow says about his recent car purchase, “Ease of going was translated without pause into a principled unwillingness to stop.”

My speed of travel seems directly proportionate to my annoyance at being interrupted. When I walk I am going too slowly to be interrupted. And besides, to a walker an interruption is a rest.

However, more importantly, I get angry with other drivers because those beings sitting in other cars are not real human beings. The glass and steel and the speed at which we drive have made them into an abstraction. The minute they become “real,” I am mortally embarrassed for having become so angry. Have you ever shaken your fist at another driver, only to discover that she is your next-door neighbour?

When I walk, people become people, and I have the possibility of relating to them, human to human. No one can love abstractions. There is good reason for the Bible telling us to love our neighbour. When I walk, I have moved from being something analogous to a pornographer (degrading others by dehumanizing them into abstractions) to being a neighbour (relating to people who present themselves to me in all their uniqueness). The essay to read here is G. K. Chesterton’s “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family.”

3) Walking contributes to my life. When I walk, my body makes a necessary contribution to my life. In this age of cars and planes, my body can quickly become a useless appendage to my mind. Much communications technology has little to recommend it other than making the real presence of my body superfluous to my life—cell phones, the internet. Automation has repeatedly bullied my body away from places where its skill was valued. My body seems to provide me with no essential service and so must be put on life-support called exercise.

My body becomes a means to nothing and so becomes an end, which is to say it becomes an idol. An idol is usually a good thing that has lost its place in life, and through that loss has taken on hideous proportions. The world I live in tempts me to idolize bodies, even while it seeks to eliminate every conceivable use for my body.

However, when I walk, I have no such idol. As a walker, my body has become a means to an end. It is getting me someplace. Its care is important because it has a job to do toward something I value. As something important, my body has again become a part of who I am, I have become more whole, which is another way of saying, more Christian.

4) Walking moves me at a human speed. When I walk, I move at the speed of a human being; when I drive, I move at the speed of the gods. We often laugh at the poor folks at the turn of the century who thought a person would die when 35 mph was exceeded. I wonder whether jet lag and the suffocating stress of my modern life may be their last laugh. Might I feel hurried, harried and hustled because I am being yanked about at demonic speeds?

Might there actually be speeds that are too fast for my health? Might the reckless speed of my travel be another manifestation of that grasping, agitated craving for divine power that alienated the Original Pair and that frustrated the Babel-raisers? Might my obsession with stretching myself over the world like a god wreak havoc on creation as well as my soul?

Walking seems gentle on my soul. As a walker I can entertain no illusions of grandeur. I cannot be pretentious about the limits of my world. There are certain places I simply can’t get to on foot. This kind of limitation breeds contentment.

My world becomes a small, human-sized world, and as such it is a world that can be reasonably appreciated, loved and tended by a human being. As a small human-sized world it is a world for which I can take a reasonable amount of responsibility. That just seems a lot more Christian to me.

Layton Friesen is senior pastor at Fort Garry Evangelical Mennonite Church and was previously associate pastor at Crestview Fellowship, both in Winnipeg. This article originally appeared in The Mennonite, January 18, 2005, and is used with permission.

Sauntering to heaven
While its origins are debated, the word “saunter” fits precisely a way for us to walk from time to time that can nourish our souls. It means an “unhurried or a leisurely walk.” The roots of the word, some believe, go back to the practice of pilgrimage a la Sainte Terre (to the Holy Land). When medieval pilgrims walked to the Holy Land, they took a leisurely pace that allowed them to see the blessings of God in the ordinary things of life.

Belden Lane says sauntering reminds us that our life as pilgrims on the way to heaven consists of both the mundane and the glorious, likely more of the former than the latter.

Writes Lane in Spirituality Today, “Rushing off to ‘sacred places,’ far from the humdrum tedium of life at home, we imagine the holy places always to be elsewhere. It is a fundamentally false dichotomy we draw between important and unimportant places or things, imagining the one always to be novel, romantic and engaging, the other repetitive and boring. What struck me as a pilgrim in Israel, ‘walking in the footsteps of the Saviour,’ was not at all the grandiose, but precisely the repetitive and boring, the wholly unromantic and commonplace.”

Concludes Lane, “The incarnation is nothing more than that—simply a matter of God being here, in the utterly ordinary, in all the smells and images that call us back to the limits of language, the feel of the earth, and the cry of justice. Here it is that the Christian theologian must set up camp, in the rank fields of the commonplace.”

(Harold Jantz)