Before We Had Churches We Walked in the Woods

Why do we need to “get up and go’’ somewhere? The need to “do something”

The woods are crowded. Relatively speaking. More people than ever are walking through wooded trails.

Do they know this is where our ancestors went before there were churches, temples, workplaces, or even communities?

“I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees,’’ Henry David Thoreau wrote.

Before there were videogames or playscapes or amusement parks or back yards or sandboxes or roads, we went to the woods. When the world was locked down, most recognized that people inherently need to escape, to at least go outside. To go somewhere even if it’s nowhere in particular.

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in,” John Muir explained.

Before you work, sort out thoughts, find your priorities

Writing isn’t just something you do at a keyboard: the writing process continues every moment you are thinking thoughts. Words and some of the best ideas come to us when we are walking, driving, or sleeping.

Words — and even the most incredible ideas — flow through us the moment we stop trying so hard and instead just let go and let a bigger force take over, relaxing, opening our hearts and minds.

When you are working from home, it’s easy to get right on the computer, tap keys, saying “I need to get this done’’ and quickly get lost. We struggle, finding it’s taking forever to get certain words out.

One sentence can turn into a roadblock, a wall blocking the rest of our writing. Taking a walk or going somewhere to pray (or both) can open you up: the ideas can just flow.

“When you just get up and walk down to the soda pop machine to get a Coke, it feels like you’re goofing off but you’re actually writing because the words are moving through your head, sorting themselves out,’’ Rich Aregood, a Pultizer Prize-winning writer from of the Philadelphia Daily News once taught us.

I LOVED Rich’s message, of course: because it validated what I considered wasted moments of “goof-off time.’’ Writers never actually rest. Even when we relax, we continue “writing” in our heads.

We are either gathering thoughts and ideas (researching) or actually typing them somewhere (physically writing), but both are part of the writing process.

The afternoon I walked 15,800 steps through the woods, I carried my iPhone with me, opening the Notes app, recording notes as workable ideas came to me.

Distractions could bury those better ideas, lost like a penny in a mountain of beach sand.

The silence of the woods enables us to think “what was that idea’’ and with a bit of patience, it could come back just long enough for me to get it in writing before it washed away in the never-ending flood of frantic texts, news alerts, worries, cute memes, and snarky comments.

When I returned three hours later, tired, sore, and ready to sit, I told myself I’d been writing. The notes were the basis of three or four possible articles.

Before I became a regular church-goer, long walks (either in the woods or on the beach) were where I went to find God. Or at a minimum, some level of sanity. The words, emotions, and random thoughts sort themselves out between less essential and very important.

What matters rises to the top

For the last six years, I went to “the primary source’’ of love and truth itself, going to Church as many days of the week as I possibly could (often every day), stopping to pray and get my marching orders.

“OK, what do you want me to do,’’ I asked the Author of the Universe.

Typically, something would come. If not in words or thoughts, then in walking out and seeing something telling me: That’s it.

When the pandemic shut down communities, including churches and gyms and every form of public activity, we found ourselves returning to God’s playground, the woods.

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot,’’ Bill Bryson writes. “A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable… The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know… Life takes on a neat simplicity, too… However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods.’’

Regaining perspective

Maybe that walk just helps with perspective? We need to know which tasks are vitally important. Which are good? Which are meaningless?

Josef Pieper argued we work in order to enjoy our times of leisure, whose spiritual focus on God made this time the “basis of culture.’’ Both capitalism and communism told people to focus on work but they can forget to tell us why we need to work.

Workaholics can lose their sense of culture, their roots, and their purpose.

An excellent shared meal, Pieper argued, offers

“a spiritual or even a religious character… the heart of leisure consists in ‘festival’… celebration and festival are the heart of leisure… And this is worship… If someone needs the ‘unusual’ to be moved to astonishment, that person has lost the ability to respond rightly to the wondrous, the mirandum, of being.’’

We are here to become great men and women… learn to walk with God, and do something tangible every day to increase the happiness of mankind,’’ Christian Larson argued.

I needed to go for a long walk to nearby Bishop Lake. It’s more than a five-mile trip but walking to a lake and back somehow feels like an accomplishment for both man and beast.

My wife didn’t want to walk that far, and she didn’t want me to go alone, but she gave in and let me take the dog, which showed even dogs need to go somewhere, to feel like we were doing something.

Answer to prayer? Early this year, I prayed in the morning Mass and wondered, “What would my life be like if I always had enough money to pay my bills?’’ If I had that “guaranteed source of income’’ people like Andrew Yang promised everyone? Or at least a set amount from retirement accounts?

What would I do with my day if the main goal wasn’t earning a living? So often, our daily agendas are set by our habits and routines and by frantic calls or emails from elsewhere telling us we need to talk to someone or do something or be somewhere. The pandemic changed all that with governors telling us we had a new job: to stay home.

The need to work? At some point, we need to get out, to go somewhere, to do something. Maybe this is why even dogs seem to take on “jobs’’ like barking at a strange passerby or needing to “go for a walk,’’ to feel we are accomplishing something.

“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul,’’ Thomas Merton said.

So perhaps these walks, these moments of prayer in the woods, help us sort through all these somethings, sifting through them to find which ones will give us our daily path forward?

This story is published in Koinonia — stories by Christians to encourage, entertain, and empower you in your faith, food, fitness, family, and fun.

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