Guest commentary by Robert Hoch
Summer in our family often means a walking holiday, usually in England, since this is my wife Rebecca’s first home. Last year, it was the coast-to-coast walk and this year it was the Dales Way, beginning in the town of Ilkley and ending at Bowness-on-Windemere, near the southern edge of the Lake District.
These are long walks. The Dales Way, our most recent journey, is just about 81 miles (not counting the time we missed our turn near Sedbergh or lost the footpath as it led to the M6 overpass). And maybe if we include rain sodden socks and sore calves, we could add a few additional miles, rather like weather forecasts calculate degrees of cold or hot, depending on wind chill or humidity.
But in the end, we do not walk for the miles but rather for the conversations that are born along the footpath. Like the blossoming foxgloves or the song of the curlew, they spring up according to their own sense of time and place, descending again into earth or sleep, only to be awakened in different forms, just as the land itself changes.
Often I will take a line from a psalm, which speaks to me or breathes within me the quiet companionship of God’s wisdom: “Happy are the people whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way” (Psalm 84:5).
As for our regular conversations, they are not overly complicated or deep. Sometimes we visit about the walk itself, or think about previous walks, comparing notes. We philosophize – or rather, reflect on life. Sometimes we share silences as a kind of communion.
One of our conversations on the Dales Way was hatched somewhere between Appletreewick and Linton, two small villages nestled alongside the River Wharfe. Human beings, we observed, walk at about the same pace. Some, of course, walk slowly, others quickly, with long loping strides; but mostly, walking aims for companionship rather than competition. You walk abreast of your partner, or just a little ahead, never out of earshot. As you go through a stile, you wait on the other side, hand extended to help stabilize your walking companion.
Friends of the footpath, people who live nearby, seem to relish this aspect of walking culture. We were only about five miles into the Dales Way when we came around a bend to see an older woman standing next to the stile we were about to cross. I thought, “Odd, but okay.” But then, still watching her, I noticed her toss a single flower over the edge of the rock wall and onto the footpath below. For a moment, she simply stood there, leaning against the wall, as if in prayer, gazing down at the flower she had dropped.
She had not seen us coming and, on seeing our curiosity, she explained: It was a ballerina flower and she hoped through her secret mischief to give walkers some mystery of color to unravel.
This, I suppose, goes to a paradox of the road: If it compels us forward it also yields into small eddies of pause, rest or wonder. Sometimes they are quite ordinary, as was the place we chose to sit down between Kettlewell and Buckden, a piece of deadfall serving as our bench and a bar of chocolate as our feast in the rain.
But we had more than chocolate to nourish us that day. Perhaps we thought about Linzi, whom we had visited earlier at the Scargill House, an intentional Christian community.
We had almost determined to pass the community, but something invited us to turn up the narrow road to pay a visit to their house and chapel.
I suspected we might be offered a cup of coffee or tea, which indeed we were. But we were also given much more – namely, the warmth of Linzi’s smile and hospitality. As we visited, she shared some of her story: She joined the community two years ago with her daughter, who is now 12. I remember what she said: “It was as if I hadn’t breathed for a very long time.”
I suppose she meant that she was free to become more fully human, more at peace with herself and God, singing the songs of Taizé, practicing hospitality to strangers — which we were — perhaps grieving and healing in this beautiful place that she had come to call home and family.
As I thought about Linzi’s story, the psalm from that morning came back to me: “The Lord rebuilds Jerusalem and gathers the exiles of Israel. The Lord heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:2-3).
Jesus said, “Consider the lilies of the field. . . .” Maybe, in the end, we are all a reflection of God’s peculiar prayer, the holy mischief of the One who so loved the world, whispered and sung through a thousand voices, meeting us on the pilgrims’ way.
ROBERT HOCH was born in Fairbanks, Alaska. Growing up, he asked his step-father about whether it was “love at first sight” when he met his mother, an Alaska Native: “No,” he answered, “not really. She knew I had a moose in the deep freeze, so she figured she would have enough to feed you and her through the winter.” Maybe we should rephrase the saying to subsistence at first sight. Robert’s writing reflects something of the spirit of this story: earthy, humorous, occasionally heart-breaking, but always hopeful. He is ordained as a teaching elder in the PC(USA) and serves as a theological educator at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. His most recent major publication “By the Rivers of Babylon: Blueprint for a Church in Exile” lifts up the symbols of the church as exilic community.
