Faith Works 10-16-21

Faith Works 10-16-21
Jeff Gill

Prayer is afoot in Licking County
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One of my preferred prayer practices is walking prayer.

Twenty years ago I found a book titled "Long Wandering Prayer" by David Hansen, and he presented a practice I realized I'd been stumbling towards for some time. In seminary, I walked a neighborhood around the church I was serving then with a number of clergy who were concerned about an increasing murder rate. We paused to pray specifically at places where violence had occurred, praying of course for peace, and for healing, and for the community.

Since then, early in any ministry I've taken on, I've done that: simply to pray a circuit widely around the "parish" neighborhood. And when I'm burdened and needing some intensive prayer, I find myself more able to do so while in motion. It's not the only way I or anyone else should pray, but it's a tool for spiritual health I've found helpful.

The practice started for me in an urban setting, but obviously for peace and quiet as I'm looking to do some "long wandering prayer" getting out into nature is helpful.

This is one reason I support the replacement levy in the November election for the Licking County Parks. I have the pleasure of having been around for much of the first days and years of this county program, starting in the early 1990s, and as the properties have been set aside and rails-to-trails program woven into their work, the some 1,600 acres they manage include a marvelous set of walking paths and places to stroll.

Obviously, the bike path through Granville and Newark, which I live fairly nearby, is a great way to walk and pray through both urban and natural settings, and as someone who often walks around in cemeteries, there's the passage alongside Maple Grove Cemetery which I appreciate almost as much as the views of Raccoon Creek as a spiritual metaphor.

Coming into Newark, though, past fast food places and highways and then into the city itself, there's a revelatory sense of what needs our prayer, and how we fit in, both from nature into the city, and also peeling back the downtown experience layer by layer into the trees and along swamps and river bottoms and on into the countryside.

But Infirmary Mound Park, on Route 37 south of Granville, is perhaps the outdoor church I've prayed my way through most often (Taft Reserve a distant second, but that's my logistics more than how well it serves the need). More up and down, along pavement or back into the woods, and to the equestrian area to the east side where the ancient mound, now plowed down, is itself a bit of a ghost. I can see it, but it's not really quite there anymore. You could say I'm haunted by it.

And when I go there, a young man of the 1880s with pick and spade haunts me; I speak to him occasionally, knowing the later arc of his career as an archaeologist better than he would have in life at that time, a Denison student playing hooky. Warren Moorehead would come to regret some of his more random, unstructured digging later in life, and would come to defend both living Native Americans in print and through public service, as well as a chastened attitude towards disturbing the dead and plundering artifacts. Some events in his life would haunt him, and he'd change and grow. But there are evenings I go up there and find him still digging with youthful energy, and we talk, him now eighty years and more dead.

If talking to the dead isn't prayer, I'd be greatly surprised.

And yes, there are a few trees I talk to, with divine intercession. I don't hug trees as a rule, unless we're longstanding friends, but I'll talk to any of them, even a silver maple. Oaks are slow talkers, but deep thinkers.

What I most enjoy is communion with great blue herons. They have their spots along the creeks and rivers, and a number of our county and city parks give you access to where they might pass by and give you the time of day. I appreciate the bald eagles as much as anyone, but it's the heron perspective that gives me pause, even if they don't. Their steady stroke of wings in flight, their ability to disappear as a couple of sticks in the water at creekside, and a truly gimlet eye: herons, I believe, really know how to pray. If you want to pray better, get closer to those who already do.


Jeff Gill is a long wandering sort of pray-er; he's open to other disciplines more building related, but this is his default mode. Tell him how you best focus your spirit at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.