I wish that Buchanan had done more to tease out the implications of a “slow God” who condescends to us, walking with us at the speed of love, which is also the speed of thought. Alas, he does so only very intermittently. Instead, in his first chapter, he makes a move that left me scratching my head and tugging at my beard. Under the subhead “A Physical Discipline,” he tells us that the “seed of this book was annoyance, or grief, or something in between.” What caused this feeling? Well, you see, “many spiritual traditions have a corresponding physical discipline and Christianity has none. Hinduism has yoga. Taoism has tai chi. Shintoism has karate. Buddhism has kung fu. Confucianism has hapkido. Sikhism has gatka.” But Christianity? Zilch. When I am not living in balance of being with God I become the fixer. A reconciler, Larry Webb recently said; “If I fix it, I get the glory. If God fixes it, He gets the glory.” When we move faster than God, our ego thinks that we are the one that is fixing and doing the work of reconciliation.

To be with people living with dementia, you need to slow down and take time for those things that the world considers to be trivial. When you do this, you will be surprised — and probably amazed — at what you discover, as you encounter people in the slowness of God’s love. There is a deep beauty in such illumination.

We lived on the same east coast seminary campus for two years, peripherally revolving around each other, but we didn’t take the time to know each other until this walk—and after much reflection, we believe it was meant to be this way. Here’s why: His last work was Theology and Violence: Towards A Theology of Nonviolent Love, published in Japanese in 2009 by Kyobunkwan, a publishing firm in Tokyo. May we take this seriously: that a group of Presbyterian strangers became friends over many miles, in a ‘three mile an hour’ world, to witness to the forced migration of climate change refugees and to discern the imago Dei in the PC(USA) on our dying planet Earth. May we stop and know that God is a ‘three mile an hour God,’ who sees it all—sees us all, and all of each of us. This is the Good News. The first was frustration. My faith seemed disembodied, not worked out in flesh and bone and breath, a thing mostly in my head, rendered as doctrinal tenets rather than a living and life-giving experience. And I noticed that many other Christians were struggling similarly with the gap between professed faith and lived faith. Virtually every major faith has a corresponding physical discipline—think of Hinduism and yoga. If we think about the way in which academic theology is constructed, it tends to be developed by well-educated people, usually within a university context. The questions that academic theologians ask are important. But the questions that they don’t ask are equally as important. Certain questions that come from other perspectives and other places within creation are often not asked of the tradition. One of these other places is the human experience of disability.

Think what it would be like if we did our politics gently — even, if we did our church politics gently. Think what it would be like if we did our relationships gently. You may say, well it’s impossible; but then you turn to someone such as Jean Vanier, and the L’Arche communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities live together, and you begin to see that a gentle way of life may actually be possible. In this beautiful, inspiring book, Mark shows us how the simple rhythm of walking can take us farther on the path of wholeness, joy, and God than we imagined possible. Poetic, poignant, and immensely practical, this book will change your life… one step at a time. Mark Buchanan: In the first half of the chapter, I confess my own struggles with prayer, especially prayer engaged from a sitting position: that for me is an invitation to either distraction or drowsiness. But my praying roars to life when I walk. Both praying and walking are about paying attention, within and without, and so praying and walking are good companions.

Other stories

During our walk, a striking contrast emerged: it took members joining our team one hour to drive 45 miles—a distance that took walkers three days to complete.