Why am I Walking?

It is four years since I participated with a group of fellow Christians, indigenous, and unionists in a walk from Edmonton to Calgary, Alberta. It was one of those occasions spanning two weeks and about 300 kilometers. I have provided snippets of that walk in other articles written since that memorable experience. Interesting how time flies, and how that kronos of months and years can be compressed in one's memory bank almost as though it happened but yesterday; and that memory a kairos moment which remains for the rest of your life. This walk did that. A short article of self declaration prior to that walk qualifies as fodder for further reflection - very much worth thinking about as my walking journey continues, even if only to hold my Type 2 diabetes at bay or to help a local political candidate prepare for upcoming election (see "On Behalf Of" Dec. 12, 2022)! 😘 Hear ye! Hear ye! To some of my elder coffee drinking limping buddies who like to spend a lot of time exercising the jaw, nothing better than to keep it all moving! Here's that earlier article.

Walking for Common Ground

May 18, 2019           

WHY AM I WALKING?

Why am I walking?  Good question.  Increasingly my original clarity of the first ‘declaration of intent’ has suffered some review, and a slight muddying of intent, especially as I notice myself carefully choosing the occasions where I tell others of my intent to walk this walk.  The early lighthearted trepidation of walking along speedy highways is now a minor concern as I read about treaties and contracts, and always with a good dose of covenant (I am after all a preacher). Treaties and subsequent colonial history is an exercise of reflection – and indeed self- reflection – and some cause for self-critique. 

I notice announcements and invitation for walkers in Area Church website and also appearance in church bulletins. I sense however a certain distance. There are several of us declared walkers, but further comments seem avoided, and no groundswell of others a-coming – at least not yet! Perhaps it’s because we just finished the Alberta election and people would rather breathe a sigh of relief on that – and hope for the best (!?), and now here is the month of Ramadan and some also feel uncomfortably obligated to learn a few things about our Muslim friends, and then Pentecost just around the corner (yes outpouring of the Holy Spirit on fresh new Christians already hailing from varying backgrounds).  So what’s a guy to do?  While I think about all this I’m also reminded of a troubling verse in the Bible, 2 Timothy 3:7, “always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth”.  

I think I will be somewhat quiet as I tread these kilometers; not a sullen quiet but a meditative quiet.  There are important things to think about – indeed many even beyond the constraints mentioned above.  The topic is large, larger even than Settlers or Colonialists, larger than Canada or Turtle Island.  As I walk there may be a slight wringing of the hands, perhaps along with Pontius Pilate who did that long ago as the religious ones clamored for the death of Jesus, and Pilate yielded, yet still wondering “What is truth?”  

Okay I’ll say it.  Truth is larger than the benefactors or the victims of Treaties, not fully described in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  As a Christian, fully committed to Jesus Christ my savior and Lord, and beneficiary of Treaty 6, I confess also, “What is truth?” 

Randy Woodley, in an article in Sojourners, “The Fullness Thereof” (May 2019) says “Change your lenses please. Okay, maybe you can’t change lenses right now, but would you at least notice the lenses you are currently wearing? If you are like, say 99.9% of us in the U.S., you have been influenced by a very particular set of perspectives that interpret life from an Enlightenment-bound Western worldview.”   Dr. Woodley, an Indigenous Christian seminary professor, reminds his fellow Americans –  and us too – that dualistic thinking, inherited from the Greeks, has absolutized the realm of the abstract (spirit, soul, mind) and reduced the importance of the concrete (earth, body, material) disengaging them from one another. 

Without going into further implications of this assertion, I say at this point that this will be on my mind in the next while. As an Anabaptist Christian I am not enslaved to the polemics of systematic theology or Christian apologetics, but nonetheless confess that I too am a product of much dualistic thinking, and a changing of the lenses is essential for history to move forward in a God-honoring truthful just manner. 

I will be pleased to walk quietly thinking about this, and to spend considerable time in talking circles, not necessarily to hammer out a new land-rights strategy, or a new inclusive Christian indigenous theology, but to learn a new angle on truth.  It behooves this preacher even in his retirement years.  I believe it behooves all of us.  And please pray with me that my body (flat feet) doesn’t give up before my mind (spirit) does.
😫😉