Guest post by eco-theologian, scholar, and activist Rev. Dr. H. Paul Santmire
Read the original post, and more, by Dr. Santmire on his blog, "Walking Thoughts".
I first heard about the MIT social scientist, Sherry Turkle, in a radio news report, while my wife and I were stalled in commuter traffic. This was the story. She had required her students to turn off their electronic devices during her lectures. In the process, she had elicited much resistance. So I was not surprised to learn from a recent op-ed essay (Mattia Ferraresi, Boston Globe, September 29, 2024, K 5) that Turkle has more recently spoken out against the alienating effects of what she called constant connectivity, arguing “that people are condemned to be ‘forever elsewhere’ due to the dopamine lure of their screens.”
I have a response. Put down your screen and take a walk in the woods. I’m well aware that going out into the woods isn’t a fresh idea. I’m in very good company here. Henry David Thoreau once wrote a compelling essay on walking. And he did a lot of it in Concord and also elsewhere, from strolling along the beaches of Cape Cod to climbing the arduous heights of Mt. Katadn in Maine. John Muir likewise walked profusely and wrote about that experience profusely, as in his essay, “A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf.” I welcome all that kind of attention to walking. I think that one cannot say too much in favor of the practice, especially for folks of my advanced age.
Which prompts me, often these days, to venture out on many – very modest – walks of my own, especially the kind that often preoccupy me on the forest paths around my family’s old farmhouse in rural, southwestern Maine. I have written about those walks often.
But I’m not sure whether I have, by that writing, really reached many – any? – in today’s younger generations. Why? Those busy folks may be too preoccupied with their phones.
Be that as it may, I’m not going to give up celebrating walking whenever I can, because, in addition to everything else, I believe – with Thoreau and Muir – that walking can be a charged spiritual discipline, particularly for those who are seeking to follow the Christian way.
Christianity is a profoundly earthly religion. God Godself has taken on flesh, according to the witness of the Gospel of John (1:14). Christian creeds, in the same spirit, insist on “the resurrection of the body.” And everything ends, according to the witness of the Bible, with the dawning of a new heavens and a new earth. For Christianity, matter matters.
And Christianity has always been a religion on-the-way, a pilgrimage religion. My own daughter-in-law is currently walking the French Way of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, with countless other pilgrims.
When I was a child, and my mind would on occasion drift off during Sunday sermons, I sometimes wondered what heaven would, one day, be like. I now firmly believe that one thing that the saints will be doing in the time of the heavenly new creation of all things on the Last Day will be this: some, if not all, will be found walking in the heavenly woods, with, I imagine, no screens in hand.
I first heard about the MIT social scientist, Sherry Turkle, in a radio news report, while my wife and I were stalled in commuter traffic. This was the story. She had required her students to turn off their electronic devices during her lectures. In the process, she had elicited much resistance. So I was not surprised to learn from a recent op-ed essay (Mattia Ferraresi, Boston Globe, September 29, 2024, K 5) that Turkle has more recently spoken out against the alienating effects of what she called constant connectivity, arguing “that people are condemned to be ‘forever elsewhere’ due to the dopamine lure of their screens.”
I have a response. Put down your screen and take a walk in the woods. I’m well aware that going out into the woods isn’t a fresh idea. I’m in very good company here. Henry David Thoreau once wrote a compelling essay on walking. And he did a lot of it in Concord and also elsewhere, from strolling along the beaches of Cape Cod to climbing the arduous heights of Mt. Katadn in Maine. John Muir likewise walked profusely and wrote about that experience profusely, as in his essay, “A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf.” I welcome all that kind of attention to walking. I think that one cannot say too much in favor of the practice, especially for folks of my advanced age.
Which prompts me, often these days, to venture out on many – very modest – walks of my own, especially the kind that often preoccupy me on the forest paths around my family’s old farmhouse in rural, southwestern Maine. I have written about those walks often.
But I’m not sure whether I have, by that writing, really reached many – any? – in today’s younger generations. Why? Those busy folks may be too preoccupied with their phones.
Be that as it may, I’m not going to give up celebrating walking whenever I can, because, in addition to everything else, I believe – with Thoreau and Muir – that walking can be a charged spiritual discipline, particularly for those who are seeking to follow the Christian way.
Christianity is a profoundly earthly religion. God Godself has taken on flesh, according to the witness of the Gospel of John (1:14). Christian creeds, in the same spirit, insist on “the resurrection of the body.” And everything ends, according to the witness of the Bible, with the dawning of a new heavens and a new earth. For Christianity, matter matters.
And Christianity has always been a religion on-the-way, a pilgrimage religion. My own daughter-in-law is currently walking the French Way of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, with countless other pilgrims.
When I was a child, and my mind would on occasion drift off during Sunday sermons, I sometimes wondered what heaven would, one day, be like. I now firmly believe that one thing that the saints will be doing in the time of the heavenly new creation of all things on the Last Day will be this: some, if not all, will be found walking in the heavenly woods, with, I imagine, no screens in hand.