Walking

Today's sermon concerned walking - the Road to Emmaus, the pastor had mentioned CS Lewis talking with Tolkien and Dyson on Addison's Walk at Magdalen College to me before he preached, Deuteronomy 6:7 You shall teach them (commandments) diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. Jesus taught as he walked. He did get away to quiet places by himself, but he spent much more time walking. It didn't have to be that way.  Many teaching rabbis of the time were not itinerant. Students came to them. I never like to point to a single reason and say "There! This is it! This is why God did this thing!" because it's usually more complicated than that.  Jesus is likely doing a hundred things at once. But he did choose this style, and it does provoke a certain type of teaching, learning, listening.

Walking provokes a certain type of thinking that is both reflective and prospective, that gathers in information and organises it. Joggers and runners will say that their pace clears the brain better, and that there is good data that shows that information retrieval is better before and after running far more than with walking, and that their subjective experience is of very clear thinking and working things out. This could well be so.  I do not begrudge them this tool and their joy. I do suspect that by the nature of running, where so much more attention must be put on foot-placement and signals of the body, that what is happening to them might be a pruning, a recognising what is not essential to understanding, rather than new things added in. That has been my experience in the very few periods when I attempted to restart running (usually in secret). But I may be entirely wrong on this.  I am no expert, certainly.

Devotional books stress silence, meditation, removal from the world to find God and to find the Kingdom of God. It is common in many places for the worship leader to begin, as she does at our church, by encouraging others to clear their minds of the outside world in order to enter a worship space mentally. I think it just feels holy to people to do that. I have mentioned a few times before that this is generally opaque to me.  People made some good helpful suggestions last time, and I think I begin to see what this Desert Fathers approach is good for. But I still think that this is secondary. I don't think we get to the Kingdom of God by leaping over some chasm from our world into that one. We bring the world we have into the worship space and ask that it be changed. The bread of the Eucharist is just bread from our world, but it is brought into the presence of God and it is changed. The wine is just wine until Jesus infuses himself into it and changes is into some sort of Kingdom of God food, some food of grace. But neither is that Eucharist something that drops out of the sky, some magical potion deposited on the altar as if delivered by some space alien.

It is our world of broken relationships and received insults that we bring into worship asking for repair, and I think that is true of the worship that takes place throughout every hour of our week as well. Our lives are not abandoned, they are transformed. When complete, it may well be that all the old earthly parts are dead and only new Kingdom parts remain, but they are not a replacement but a completion of our earthly acts. 

We start with the idea that heaven is a place, or at least I think I started there as a child.  It is not the only place to begin. God barely mentions heaven in the Scriptures until near the end. Before that, participation in the community of God's people is the ticket. When Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God he seems to be referring to something more like that, but deeper, a place of living-as-if, so that we gradually take on the coloration of the Kingdom. But for me that was not the beginning. I was aware as a child that this world is deeply unjust, yet saw that I could only know this if there were something just to compare it to. Even if that place were remote and inaccessible, even if God would not let me in, I knew there was a God-world out there. And I wanted to get to it. It was not only injustice against me personally, but against my younger brother, wonderful but unrecognised, friends who had abusive parents. The automatic categories occurred to me. Black people. Disabled people. People born in horrible places. 

When I read the CS Lewis explanation that trying to disprove God by pointing out how unjust this world is is impossible, for if there were not some immovable idea of justice we would not even recognise injustice, I saw it immediately. It was the thought behind my years of thoughts.

Our hymn-language and folksong language talks about a Promised Land, an echo of the early type in Exodus, our stories are about heaven as a place, but that was always unsatisfying to me. If getting to this God-world was supposed to be the end result, then didn't all our actions here mean essentially noting?  Just entertainment for angels until we died and got picked up and moved to a better place? Ridiculous. As I learned the teachings that we start finding the Kingdom of God by attempting to enact it here it seemed mere evasion and excuse-making. I had to come at that through more sci-fi/fantasy ideas of people inhabiting two worlds and carrying characteristics of both. We enact the Kingdom of God, partly ceremonially, partly by effort and show, mostly by grace, and the enacting transforms us. And I don't think this is done by sitting with our eyes closed, but by dragging our world, like Jacob Marley and his chains, along some path with the intention that some pieces fall off, some are cut off, but many are instead transformed. We hear the music of the other world and we hum it here; whiffs of clean air from that world sneak in and fill our lungs as we go; we treat those along the way the way they will be treated there in wasys that are first ceremonial and then real.

It is motion.  The Pilgrims Progress (and the Pilgrim's Regress and the literature of the devoted rather than devotional literature) is a journey. It is also why we do not always know what is the true road and what is a distraction. Many distractions have turned out to be the True Road in my life.  I am highly suspicious of Christians who think in terms of setting goals. They impose visions on God. Don't Immanentize the Eschaton, as the saying goes. On a walking path to reach the Kingdom, the back-doublings and pauses to look out over the valley for a bit may be more important than the distance covered.