![]() ![]() ![]() The already escalated nervous systems of our own two dogs cannot handle us saying the word walk or talk or even rock, and I was happy to see Dad’s dogs behave the same. The heart may hold impressions longer than the land. In his chapter titled Walking as Attentiveness, Buchanan writes that “walking…keeps driving a place deeper into us and yet keeps opening up its secrets if we are attentive as we walk.” I just barely began to know Dad’s place on my summer visit, but the few walks I had there bound me to a landscape that holds the imprint of my father: his footsteps, the wake of his boat as he fished, the shelves he hung in his new garage, and the 12 paw prints of the dogs he walked daily. Everything internal in me begins to move to a place of order and peace. Something about moving through the world quietly, without hurry, lacking any intention but to live, makes me feel wholly human-which is to say, created in God’s image. Walking is prayer and attention and remembering. “It’s too bad you live in such an ugly place,” I said to Dad, in the sarcastic vernacular of my family. Birds uplifted and dove quickly into birdhouses lining the walk. A doe bounded the fence line to stand in the middle of acres of wheat, watching us without fear. We ambled slowly, but the last 10 years have been rough for his health so it was a grace to even do that. The six of us, accompanied by Dad’s three small dogs, walked the mowed, green trails through wildflowers and tall grasses, Dad telling me how much stronger he’d gotten on the hills since moving there in January. ![]() We had a small window of time between school and summer jobs when at least two of our children could make the trip, so Tim and I took our boys to see my dad and his wife in their brand new home. In June I walked the rolling hills around Flathead Lake in Montana, at the base of the gargantuan Mission Mt. Several times a week I purpose to walk for exercise, and Buchanan prompts me to remember that my step count is not as important as walking at God speed-the not-so-metaphorical rate of the soul in step with God. I walk mostly as mode and not means, bustling myself here and there between destinations. Rarely is the walking I do as purposeful as the pilgrim’s trek to some holy site. “Walking is medicine, therapy, and workout all bundled together.” But it takes intention to achieve this triple benefit. Walking, the most pedestrian and universal form of transport, is the method Buchanan asserts has brought spiritual formation and discipline to God’s people since the beginning. He writes this book as an argument that at one time, Christianity actually did have a physical discipline, something concrete and tied to the body in a way that honored and shaped the practices of the faith. In God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul, author Mark Buchanan asserts that Christianity is a religion lacking a corresponding physical discipline. ![]()
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