Walking Through The Villages

When Jesus walked through the villages of Galilee, was this because he did not have a vehicle?  We would suspect as much.  After spending most of the last 3 years without a car, and the last 10 or so living in places where it is simply more advantageous to walk than drive, I have come to really see the value of walking to where you are going.  I often walk around our city, reading a book.  It is incredibly peaceful.  It is a paradoxical discipline of isolating yourself from distractions like the chores of your home, but it also opens the mind to a liberating sensuality of being stranded in the middle of the city scape, with the sky as your roof.

Walking, especially without a cell phone, leads me contemplation and prayer, and it forces it upon me, because I tussle not with the temptations of shallow digital consumption.  It changes the way I read books, the insights are happening to me in the clarity of the outdoors.  It challenges my patience, because I can get places only as fast as I want to sacrifice my energy for the day.  It humiliates me, when it starts raining and I have walked myself downtown, a mile from my house…with no one to call and pick me up.  It forces me to drop into my friends’ local businesses and say hi as I pass.

I also see my neighborhood differently.  Our neighborhood, as I have mentioned, is teetering on gentrification.  There are people who want to better our neighborhood beautifying it and chasing out crime.  I have been critical of late that these ventures can be shortsighted.  I admit there is some restoration needed in our neighborhood, but I think I understand better why I am nervous about Neighborhood Associations and Community Initiatives.  I fear we are going to simply deport our misfits to another neighborhood.  Misfits walk around.  I do not want to categorize anyone by name here, but those are my friends I see walking.  There are people in neighborhood with schizophrenia, alcoholism, veteran post-traumatic stress, and maybe just an aimless wanderlust that turns to sloth with time.  We bump into each other in the streets.  See I have learned something walking here, in some neighborhoods, maybe the less clean, less kept, people do not use sidewalks in the broken down blocks.  These friends ask for a dollar for the bus or a soda, they forget my name, they ask about my puppy.

There are churches in our neighborhood, there are pastors, there are yuppie activists, and they want to see transformation, but in order for transformation to go deeper than the superficial beautification of our blocks or the improvement of our own properties, we have to walk our streets.  Not with our dogs, not with our children, just by ourselves, with the proverbial sign on our forehead reading, “please talk to me, I want to know you.”  That is what Jesus did.