Читать книгу Every Step a Prayer - Thomas R. Hawkins - Страница 7

Teach Me Your Paths

Most walking paths are well marked: a yellow dot painted on a tree, a small arrow telling us which way to turn, or three blue stripes painted onto a post set into the ground. But sometimes the cues are more difficult to discern: a slightly rutted track in the ground where people’s shoes have compressed the soil or a subtle change in the landscape where the passing of many boots has stunted the grass. Because not all trails are well marked, walkers can take an occasional wrong turn. Encountering less clear pathways gives me a new appreciation for Psalm 107:4-5, which reads as follows: “Some wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to an inhabited town; hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within them.”

My guidebook once told me to follow the mowed path through a field until I reached a stone fence with a gate. Unfortunately, I was walking in mid-August and thousands of sheep had grazed the field for most of the summer. I found it impossible to tell where a mowing machine might have mechanically cut the grass and where thousands of small teeth had cropped it close to the ground. I consequently ended up hungry and thirsty at the wrong end of a very large pasture. The sun was setting and the nearest inn was miles away. Lost on an empty moor in northern England, I felt my soul fainting within me.

Another time, I followed what seemed to be the main trail. The rutted ground and worn grass suggested that I should keep following this path. I continued for more than an hour before I discovered that it was only an animal trackway that I could no longer follow because it dropped into a steep ravine full of brambles. Human feet had not worn this path. Hundreds of deer hooves had created it.

To avoid getting lost, I always look for clues that other walkers have left behind them. These signs tell me that I am on the right path. In the same way, other Christian believers have marked out particular practices as cues that help me find my way to God. They point me toward well-traveled pathways where I can cultivate a deeper love, knowledge, and service of God and neighbor.

Scientists have a name for this phenomenon. They call it stigmergy. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization and indirect coordination where one person or animal leaves a trace in the environment that stimulates others to repeat the same action. Actions build indirectly on one another over time to produce a visible structure or pattern. This emergent pattern then directs others to behave in the same fashion. A sheep wanders across a pasture, following the tender stalks of grass. The lone sheep presses down the grass, eats off the stems, and leaves the smell of its urine in the soil as it goes along. These subtle markers become cues that guide other sheep to follow the same path. As more and more sheep follow these signs and cues, they crush the grass still more. They leave behind still stronger traces of their scent. Gradually, the path becomes clearer and clearer. At some point, all the sheep can identify this broad, wide path that rambles across the pasture.

Stigmergy provides the answer to my father’s perennial complaint about roads with endless bends and curves: “Who designed this road?” he would mutter. “It must have been built by engineers who were following a cow path.” In fact, it probably did follow an animal trackway that later became a human footpath, which engineers made into a highway sometime in the last century. As stigmergy would predict, people kept following the same cues and signals as the road widened from an animal trackway to a highway. Stigmergy allows complex, coordinated action without any immediate presence or explicit communication. This underappreciated concept explains how systems organize from the bottom up.

Stigmergy explains how Christian spiritual practices like walking actually work. In these practices, simple, everyday human gestures become signposts that direct us from one way of being in the world to another. In worship, we rehearse these gestures. We distill and intensify them so that a clear pattern of cues and signals shape our lives, moving us from one way of being human toward another. As more people engage in these practices, the path becomes clearer and more focused. No one has to talk about what we should or should not do. Everyone simply follows the signs and cues that others have left behind them. It is a bottom-up way of organizing the Christian life. Stigmergic practices quietly direct people toward a certain way of life.

In Hebrews 12, the author reminds us that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who invite us to lay aside every weight and sin that cling so closely and “run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (vv. 1-2). Having rehearsed in Hebrews 11 the stigmergic signals of faithfulness to God that patriarchs, matriarchs, prophets, and monarchs across the ages have laid down, the author admonishes readers to “lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet” (vv. 12-13).

Every Step a Prayer

Christian practices that incorporate everyday gestures and actions typically involve our bodies: We speak, sing, eat, wash, or bow. We walk. By investing these gestures with new meanings, Christian practices shift our way of being in the world. The Incarnation means that God invites us to experience our physical, embodied existence as a dwelling place of the holy. As Paul says, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1).

Therefore, all physical gestures are charged with spiritual possibilities, and all spiritual practices can employ physical gestures legitimately. By acknowledging concrete, down-to-earth activities—eating, drinking, making decisions, generous sharing, hospitality, and walking—as the means through which God comes to us and by which we participate in God’s work in the world, Christian practices remind us of the sensible, everyday qualities of Christian life. Christian faith involves more than simply believing certain things about God. It is also a matter of practicing our faith. “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers. . . . Those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing” (James 1:22, 25).

Practices can establish a deep, embodied connection between us and God, whose grace permeates all things. They join us with each other, with Jesus, and with the communion of saints throughout time and space in an embodied way of life that overflows with God’s love for us and all creation. Practices awaken in us the same love and devotion that Jesus’ first disciples must have felt in his presence.

Christian practices are thought-full. They invite us to a reflective, thoughtful way of life. They guide us toward increased mindfulness of how we live a life that becomes the gospel. Christian practices enable us to experience everyday gestures and actions as channels of grace through which we glimpse the depths of God’s love and care.

These practices are not burdensome tasks or rules required to become “good Christians.” Instead, they are gifts from God that nurture openness and receptivity to divine love that streams continuously through the people, events, and places of our world. Walking represents one such Christian practice.

Walking is not only a way to move ourselves from one place to another but also a Christian practice imbued with the same intent as every other Christian practice: to guide us into a way of being human that bears witness to God’s work of healing a broken, wounded creation.

When I walk, my life slows down. Rather than speed past the world around me, sealed in my car with the radio playing, I move slowly. Moving at the speed of my feet, I hear the sounds of birds, insects, and the wind blowing through the trees. The rhythm of my footfalls invites me into an awareness of myself and the world around me. This awareness leads me beyond creation to the Creator. When a friend and I walk across the campus where I teach, our conversation takes on a different quality than when we sit in an office or around a lunchroom table. Walking, like all Christian practices, makes me more open and receptive, more mindful and aware.

Walking is woven into many parts of Christian worship, hinting at how it functions as a Christian practice. In the church I serve, acolytes walk down the aisle to light candles as worship begins. They return at the close of the service to walk the light of Christ out into the world. The choir and pastors walk down the center aisle in a procession as the congregation sings the opening hymn. People leave their pews and walk around the sanctuary to share the peace of Christ. Worship leaders walk into the midst of the congregation to read the Gospel lesson. Ushers walk up and down the aisles to gather worshipers’ tithes. They walk the offering plates forward as we sing the Doxology.

When my church celebrates the Eucharist, worshipers walk forward to receive the bread and cup. Patrick, a member of the congregation, now uses a cane as a result of a stroke. He moves very slowly as he comes forward to receive Communion. Patrick could sit in the pew and let the servers bring the bread and cup to him, but coming down the aisle expresses his gratitude to God for walking beside him during his hospitalization and recovery. “Every step I take is a prayer. It’s how I praise God for my recovery,” he says. Everybody waits patiently behind Patrick as he walks forward because they all know what it means to him.

On the third Sunday of each month the church takes up a special offering for hunger relief at the beginning of worship. People walk forward to drop pennies, dimes, and quarters into a large metal bowl, making it ring with the sound of offerings. Coming forward with coins enacts in a concrete, visible way the congregation’s commitment to feeding the physically and spiritually hungry. Church members can feel the energy in the room as people come down the aisles. Walking reminds us that we are a pilgrim people on a journey toward God’s future, seeking to be signs of healing in a broken world. Passing the offering plates in the pews would not have the same impact. It might be quieter, less confusing, and more efficient, but symbolism and spiritual power would be lost.

During Lent and Easter, my congregants take to their feet more frequently in worship. On Ash Wednesday, they walk forward to have the sign of the cross made on their foreheads. They gather for Lenten midweek services of evening prayer, which begin when someone walks down the aisle with a lit candle and places it on a stand. On Palm Sunday they walk in a procession that begins in the fellowship hall and concludes in the sanctuary. On Good Friday, they walk the Stations of the Cross to accompany Jesus on his way of sorrow and suffering. At the Easter Vigil on the Saturday night before Easter, church members gather in a garden courtyard outside the church. Following prayers and songs, they walk in a procession to the sanctuary for the first celebration of the Resurrection. Throughout Lent, we receive invitations to walk with Jesus as he journeys to Jerusalem for his passion, death, and resurrection. These opportunities for walking throughout Lent offer a clue to its critical importance in the Christian life.

“Whoever sings, prays twice,” a choir director noted. But no one has ever said to me, “Whoever walks, prays twice.” A spiritual director once asked me to calculate the percentage of worship that involves spoken or silent prayers: opening prayers, prayers for illumination before the reading of scripture, prayers of confession, prayers over the offering, or pastoral prayers. She emphasized the centrality of prayer in worship and the need for worship leaders to be people of prayer if they are to lead the Christian assembly in praise and prayer. But no spiritual director has ever asked me to list all the times when people walk in worship.

We take our many ways of walking during worship for granted without pausing to consider their spiritual significance or their connection to other times and places that we take to our feet. When we think about walking in worship, we usually see it only as a practical matter. But walking in worship is so much more than a practical matter.

Worship as Rehearsal Time

In Christian worship, we use the familiar gestures of everyday life to proclaim God’s activity in our lives. In worship, we rehearse in a distilled, concentrated way the gestures—the practices—through which we grow in the love, knowledge, and service of God. We stand when we recite the creed, for example, as a rehearsal for all the occasions when we will stand up for our beliefs and values in our workplaces, homes, and neighborhoods. We share our tithes and offerings in worship to practice living generously with others.

The times that we take to our feet in worship are not merely incidental, random movements. When we take to our feet in weekly worship, we rehearse the dance steps with which we move to the music of God’s grace throughout the week. Recognition of how walking is woven into the fabric of Christian worship acknowledges it as a Christian practice in which every step is a prayer. When we take to our feet in worship, we rehearse together how God desires us to live as God’s pilgrim people in the world.

Just as athletes and musicians need regular opportunities to rehearse their skills and hone their techniques, we need rehearsal time for Christian practices. Worship etches into our habits and muscles the movements of mind and spirit that enable us to participate in God’s project of redeeming a broken world. Walking in worship prepares us for walking to alleviate hunger or to oppose violence against women. It gives us cues for how to walk the corridors of power where people make decisions that affect the lives of many.

Without such opportunities, we can wander off the path and find ourselves in some cul-de-sac of existence. Our frantic schedules can throw us off balance. Cable news and social media distract us with an endless tsunami of information and images that encourage us to skim along the surface of life. Living in the shallows of being, we never “taste and see that the LORD is good” (Ps. 34:8). Speed limits our ability to live mindfully in God’s moment-by-moment care. Christian practices such as walking, eating, or washing help us stay on the path that leads to a life of fullness and spiritual depth.

When we take to our feet in worship, we are being invited to place before God all those men and women with whom and for whom we walk during the week: the elderly parents whose arms we hold as they walk from the bedroom to the kitchen or the child whose hand we take as we walk across a busy street. Our walking in worship reminds us of our daily call to solidarity with the refugee who has walked to safety across a desolate war zone. It becomes an act of confession and penitence for all the people we have walked away from because we were too afraid, too busy, or too self-absorbed to care about them. The places, people, and purposes for which we walk are gathered together, sanctified, forgiven, and blessed as we take to our feet in worship. When we walk as a Christian practice, we silently pray with the psalmist, “Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths” (25:4).

Walking in worship forms us into a people who are moving steadily toward the New Jerusalem, where God will dwell with God’s people; death will be no more, and God will wipe away every tear. When we begin to rehearse music, the director usually says “take it from the top.” But when it comes to a spiritual practice like walking, it would be more accurate to say, “Take it from the bottom” because the spiritual practice of walking begins with the soles of our feet.

Walking Suggestions

Each chapter will conclude with some suggestions for prayerful walks.You may wish to try one or more of these suggestions as an activity during the week. If you are reading this book as a group, you may choose to try these suggestions together.

Each chapter will also conclude with some questions for further reflection, which invite you to consider specific connections between what you have read and your personal experience. If you are reading this book as a group, the questions can serve as a basis for group discussion. As we start our journey, here are two simple suggestions to help us begin.

Keep a Written Log of Your Walking

You may wish to purchase a notebook or journal in which you keep a written log of where and when you walk over the course of a day or a week. If you have a pedometer, keep track of how many steps or miles you walk each day (you can purchase an inexpensive pedometer at most sporting goods stores). Then ask yourself the following questions:

•How much time do I spend walking?

•Where do I walk?

•With whom do I predictably walk?

•What times of day do I typically walk?

•What motivates me to walk? leisure and relaxation? spending time with friends? my health?

•What does my pattern of walking say about my life?

Make some notes in a journal about what you discover, and share your observations with others in a small group or spiritual friendship.

Go for a Walk

Go for a walk sometime this week. Just walk. Do not plan your walk for a purpose, such as going to a store, visiting a friend, or taking your dog outside. Just walk. Let your feet take you where they want to go. Leave your iPod and smartphone behind. Be alone with your feet and your thoughts. When you return, make notes about the experience of walking:

•What did you observe in the world around you as you walked? How does the world look different when you walk instead of drive?

•What thoughts came to you while walking? Did you notice anything different about the kind of thoughts that arose?

•What did you find difficult about this exercise? What was easy?

•What did you notice about your body as you walked?

•What did you observe about the interplay between the physical motion of walking and your emotions?

Questions for Further Reflection

1.Using your church bulletin, examine all the moments when people take to their feet in worship. Who is walking at different times during the service (worship leaders, congregants, choir, acolytes, ushers, readers)? What are they or others doing when they take to their feet? What symbolism could these moments hold? What do they model about how to live as a disciple of Jesus?

2.When have you walked in or helped with a charity fundraiser? What motivated your participation? What could you learn from this experience that would inform the Christian practice of walking in worship and in life?

3.When did you last walk in a parade or march? What was this experience like for you? What can you learn from this experience about the Christian spiritual practice of walking?

4.What are some current practices or Christian disciplines that you have incorporated into your spiritual life? In what ways do these shape how you live? believe? practice your faith?

5.Describe a time when you got lost. What did you feel when you realized you were lost? What strengths or resources did you call upon to find your way?