Solvitur Ambulando
"It Is Solved by Walking."
+ St. Augustine
+ St. Augustine
Recently, I was on a retreat at an Abbey, and I read the words, solvitur ambulando, "it is solved by walking," attributed to St. Augustine. (See also On the Road with St. Augustine.) They've been burrowing deeper into my soul ever since as a call to love, a call to obedience in becoming more like Jesus.
The theme of walking with God is written throughout all of Scripture, and has captivated me ever since I realized the Emmaus story recapitulating God walking with humanity in the cool of the day. And as I step into the next decade of loving Worcester with Emmaus City Church, I think sauntering the streets of my beloved city with God and praying along the way is going to be key to how I continue to learn how to love my neighbors, act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.
Before my friend and tattoo artist, Kevin Shattuck of Iconic Ink, started his journey of traversing the Appalachian Trail from March to August in 2024, I gave him a favorite book I read back in the summer of 2021 during my sabbatical. It's called God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul by Mark Buchanan. (Other books by Buchanan that have powerfully shaped my walk with Jesus include The Rest of God and The Holy Wild.) And now I find myself reading God Walk again. The words inside are profound and life-giving. And I think they are also vision casting in ways I may come to realize if I embody this invitation to walk with God more.
This post features excerpts from
Chapter 1: Three Miles an Hour:
God Speed: Walking Faithfully
God Speed: Walking Faithfully
God walks "slowly"
because He is love.
because He is love.
If He is not love
He would move much faster.
He would move much faster.
Love has its speed.
It is an inner speed.
It is a spiritual speed.
It is a different kind of speed
from the technological speed
to which we are accustomed.
It is "slow" and yet it is
lord over all the other speeds
since it is the speed of love.
+ Kosuke Koyama,
Leave your simple ways
and you will live;
walk in the way of insight.
+ Proverbs 9:6
Walking is, along with eating and sleeping, our most practiced human activity. We walk because three miles an hour, as the writer Rebecca Solnit says, is about the speed of thought, and maybe the speed of our souls.
(In terms of religious physical discipline)
Hinduism has yoga.
Taoism has tai chi.
Shintoism has karate.
Buddhism has kung fu.
Confucianism has hapkido.
Sikhism has gatka.
(What about Christianity?)
The very core of Christian faith is
incarnation — God's coming among us
as one of us to walk with us.
incarnation — God's coming among us
as one of us to walk with us.
Incarnation is
Christianity's flesh and blood.
Christianity's flesh and blood.
And every part of Christian faith
seeks embodiment,
a way of being lived out here,
now, in person.
Christianity insists that the Word
became flesh and dwelt among us,
And it insists that all words,
all ideas, all theories, all theologies,
all doctrines must become flesh
and dwell among us.
It calls us to walk out our faith,
not just know it or speak it or argue it.
Did (Does) Christian faith have a corresponding physical discipline? ... (Perhaps) It's walking. It started very early with a God in the habit of walking in the garden in the cool of the day. Likely, He invited our first parents to join Him, until that terrible day they ran away and hid instead. (See Gen. 3:8.) Even after that, holiness and walking with God were the same thing. "Enoch walked with God ... Noah ... walked with God" (Gen. 5:22, 6:9).
Later, the prophet Micah asks, What does God require of you? He considers a list of religious options: extravagant worship, costly sacrifice. But no. It's simple and personal: God wants us to love and to do justly. And then Micah throws in a third thing, or maybe it's the one thing needed, the single activity that makes the other two possible: "to walk humbly with your God" (Mic. 6:6-8).
Later still, the peripatetic apostle Paul picks up the theme. "Follow God's example, therefore, as dearly loved children," he exhorts the Ephesians. "Walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God" (Eph. 5:1-2).
Walking is a primary way
Walking is a primary way
of knowing God.
Walking as healing.
Walking as exercise.
Walking as exorcism.
Walking as prayer.
Walking as remembering.
Walking as pilgrimage.
Walking as suffering.
Walking as friendship.
Walking is the way
we keep pace with the
It is God speed.
We walk with a God
who seems in no particular hurry
and who, it seems,
enjoys the going there
as much as the getting there.
A God who is slow ...
being alongside Him who,
incarnate in Jesus,
turns to us as He passes by
and says, simply and subversively,
"Come follow Me."
Come, walk with Me.
 |
| Walking the Coast of Maine |
walking with God,
walking in the light,
walking in truth,
walking in holiness,
keeping in step with the Holy Spirit,
all through the Bible, start to finish.
It is the one physical discipline
that the Bible consistently associates
with a life of faith.
It's so common it's almost pedestrian.
Luke tells a story near the end of his gospel about two people walking and talking, trying to work out what's happened to them. One's named Cleopas, the other we don't know. They are traveling from Jerusalem to "a village called Emmaus, about seven miles (away)." At three miles an hour, that's more than a two-hour walk.
A long time to talk.
A long time to think.
Enough to change your mind.
Enough time to have your world
turned upside down.
Cleopas and his companion — some think it was his wife or one of his children — are disciples of Jesus. Or had been. They are crushed by disappointment: Jesus is dead. Killed. Crucified. Before their very eyes. Unmistakable. Undeniable. Irreversible. Everything they had believed about Jesus has proven false. Their words tell the story: "We had hoped that He was the one who was going to redeem Israel" (Luke 24:21).
We had hoped.
That He was.
Past tense.
The swan song
of the defeated,
the coda of
the brokenhearted.
As they walk,
a man joins them.
He walks with them.
He is an unusual traveler. A bit odd, maybe a tad thick: he seems clueless about the events that have shattered these two people's world and have gripped and rocked an entire nation. This traveler doesn't seem to know a thing about Jesus — His life, His words, His works. His brutal messy death. Or anything about a strange rumor going around — angels, an empty tomb, the dead raised.
Then the stranger
starts to talk.
It turns out, even if he doesn't seem to be up on recent news, he does know a lot of Scripture. And he knows a lot about the great hope of the Scriptures, the promised Messiah. As they walk, he talks. He teaches Cleopas and his companion about how all roads, all Scripture, lead to the same place: the Messiah will suffer before He enters His glory. At last, they reach Emmaus. The traveler tries to take his leave. He seems to have farther to go. But Cleopas and the other disciple are having none of it: "They urged him strongly, 'Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over'" (Luke 24:29). So the stranger relents, enters their home. They serve him a meal. Then he does something very odd for a guest in someone else's home: he takes charge. "When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them" (v. 30).
And that's when it happens — "their eyes were opened and they recognized Him" (v. 31). He inexplicably vanishes at that very moment. But it's okay. It's enough. They know who He is. They've seen this very thing before — taking bread, giving thanks, breaking bread, giving bread.
This the signature
of the very Jesus
they thought was dead:
taking, thanking,
breaking, giving.
It's Jesus.
But the long walk isn't
beside the point.
It isn't wasted breath.
It is preparation.
"Were not our hearts burning within us," they asked each other "While He talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?" (v. 32).
This — like so many stories in Scripture — is both about other people and about us. It is about these two people, one named Cleopas, who lived long ago, far away.
It's about their discovering
Jesus present with them
even as they lament His absence.
But it's also about us.
Jesus keeps doing this,
becoming present with us
even as we lament His absence.
He keeps showing up,
showing us things,
walking beside us,
making out hearts burn within us.
We might not recognize Him
at the time.
That often comes later.
And it usually takes
some walking to get there.
+ God Walk,
pgs. 4-17
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With presence and peace in Christ,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
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