Walking together

FOR many years now, I have been passionate about the benefits of walking. Recently, I have been thinking that I would like to start up a walking group for people who would like to re-imagine the church. I often see minister friends only fleetingly and often regret not making more effort to spend quality time with colleagues whose company I enjoy and wisdom I cherish.

If we are fit enough and able, there is nothing more uplifting than getting out into the green and sauntering through the countryside accompanied by good conversation. Some of the great philosophers have said that there seems to be a mysterious connection between the feet and the mind. They cannot get their minds working until their feet are moving.

I use the word ‘saunter’ deliberately. The root of that word apparently comes from France where, in the Middle Ages, villagers would see strangers walking past and ask, ‘Where are you heading?’ ‘A La Sancte Terre’, would come the reply, ‘To the Holy Land’. They were pilgrims on their journey to Jerusalem.

One of Dunbar’s famous sons is John Muir who, as a teenager, went to live in the United States and was a founder of the environmental movement. He would head off on long ‘saunters’ through the High Sierra. He said that walking was a bit like prayer or meditation. ‘Going out was really a going in’, is one of his famous phrases. Another ancient proverb is ‘Solvitur Ambulando’, meaning, ‘It is solved by walking’.

In the Church of Scotland just now, I have picked up a good deal of angst, frustration and stress. We have initiated so many changes and many people feel weighed down by what they have to cope with. The Church is going through massive upheaval right now and people feel it very deeply.

Stress is part of life, though, so I have wondered what lies behind this. Part of what I detect in numerous conversations is that, in spite of our Presbyterian system of governance, change has come about without people really feeling that they ’own’ the change that is coming. Maybe we have not spent enough time walking and praying and talking to others, I certainly feel that personally.

When people walk together and converse along the way, we can more readily find a common mind and share a vision. We feel heard and appreciated. I have a feeling that we just do not do that enough. Just keeping the show on the road can take up all our effort.

Walking and having conversation with others along the way is so valuable. Regardless of how visionary our plans might be, or how determined we are to effect change it will never work or embed itself if there is not good conversation, mutual understanding and shared vision.

“ Some of the great philosophers have said that there seems to be a mysterious connection between the feet and the mind.

Setting up a walking group might be just the thing that could help. The idea would be to get together and go for a saunter, a pilgrimage, in which we might have good conversation and read the story of the spiritual journey of our ancestors in the landscape we walk through. Our Christian story in Scotland runs far deeper than the 460 years of our Reformed tradition. Sometimes the best new ideas are ancient ones revisited. Reading that deeper narrative and spending more time in conversation with one another might contribute to the shaping of the future church. Theodore Zeldin once wrote that conversation is an adventure, ’in which we agree to cook the world together and make it taste less bitter’. I think we would all welcome that in the church. ¤

The Rev Dr Richard Frazer is minister at Edinburgh: Greyfriars.