2012-01-09 An Ode to Walking (Part One)

(Without a mention of high gas prices)
A thoughtful essay lifting the merits of walking recently came to my attention. As written, it is too long for this column so it will be presented in  three columns. ER
What follows is the kind of congratulations-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. But by now, mostly, it is really only the young and the poor who still use walking as a means of transport. 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.
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 attentions. 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 neighborhood 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 -25C.
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 neighborhood. 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 place very seriously and thereby 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, and seeds of 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.