An ode to walking

(without a mention of high gas prices)

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 in 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 defence. In the city where I live it is really 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, 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.

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, begin to 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 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 -25&176;C. 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 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 very seriously and thereby delivered the cosmos. By staying close to home and committing Himself to one place, 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 opportunity to live in the place where He was.

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 their 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 parachute into 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 what 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, will fly into a fit of rage at other drivers when he gets behind the wheel of a car?

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. Besides, to a walker an interruption is a rest.

More importantly, however, I get angry at 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 she is your next-door neighbour?) When I walk, people become people and I have the possibility of relating to them, human to human.

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, like cell phones and internet for example, has little other to recommend it than making the real presence of my body superfluous to my life. 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. 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 towards something I value. My body has again become a part of who I am, and I have become more whole.

Walking moves me at human speed

When I walk, I move at the speed of a human being. 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, that frustrated the Babel-raisers? Might my obsession with stretching myself over the world 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 places I simply can’t get to on foot. This limitation breeds contentment.

My world becomes a small, human-sized world, and as such can be reasonably appreciated, loved and tended by a human being. 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 pastor of Fort Garry Evangelical Mennonite Church, Winnipeg. This article was first published in The Messenger, August 18, 2004.