A Theology of Walking

Got problems? Me too. Let's go on a walk, maybe solve them?

Audio voiceover available here for paid subs!

Everymorning the alarm cried just before 6am and I’d shoot up like a cricket bat of anxiety and caffeine smacked through me. I’d grab literal caffeine on the way down the wood steps of the 1k per month,¹ 3-roommate apartment on the corner of Melrose & Kingsley. My 12-hour shift didn’t start until 10, but Melrose goes from two lanes to one around 7, and parking enforcement had a martyr-ous passion.

So every M-F morning, I’d walk to find wherever I left my Ford Fusion with the wheel wells rusted out and google “hiking trails.” I wasn’t really granola, but I needed to get into quiet—any kind of urban oasis where my ears would stop ringing and my limbs could stretch around nature for awhile. If I had enough time and gas money, I’d aim to find some place along PCH.

The whole time I lived in East Hollywood, it felt like my brain didn’t work. Something about the pace and the rush and the traffic and the unfulfillment you’d see in every unfamous but desperate to be face. And the smog.

The only reprieve was those morning walks. They were healing. Like a balm for a soul that was desperate to resist adjusting to a sick society.² I’d talk to God; or just listen.

I still love walking. Now more than ever, probably.

Winter or summer, I walk around 4 miles a day.

There’s a boatload of research and writing on the philosophy and psychology and physiology of walking—but very, very little on the theology of it.

Which is interesting—especially considering that it was every biblical character’s primary mode of transportation.³

So here’s my best attempt to crack a theology of walking.

But here’s the gist: whenever you’re feeling stumped, overwhelmed, or overstimulated, one of the best possible responses is

GO FOR A WALK.

What Is a Walk?

Surprisingly, there’s lots of debate about what should count as a legitimate walk.

On one hand, we have “walk purists.”

These are the thinkers like Frédéric Gros who argue that carrying any technology, tracking your steps, or wearing a weighted vest to burn extra calories disqualifies the walk from being a real walk.⁴

Then there’s the “walk generalist.”

These are the folks who use walks as their time to catch up on podcasts and get their daily exercise. There’s not much art or style to it—it’s mainly functional.

Cards on the table, I’m somewhere inbetween on this spectrum. Sometimes I go full monk and walk deep into nature, other times I just walk on my home treadmill and get some extra reading in.

My philosophy is that as long as part of a walk’s goal is the walk itself, then it should count.

But one thing I’m picky about: we all need those purist walks every now and then.

A generalist walk is a great way to catch up on an audiobook and raise the heart rate.

But the meaty kinds of walks—the pure walk—are just plain elite; our souls run on those airplane mode, no pictures no noise, just you and God, kind of walks.⁵

Let’s start breaking down the “why” with

A Philosophy of Walking

Walking plays a weirdly crucial role in philosophy. Augustine, Aquinas, Rousseau, Rimbauld, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Thoreau all wrote about walking.

Philosophically speaking, in an era where we don’t have to walk—because, ya know, planes trains automobiles and those scooters you can rent via phone app lying on every corner—why is it that we still walk?

There’s a trope we see all the time in movies where a character who’s just been through something emotionally important gets asked, “Need a ride?” and the response is, “No, I’ll just walk.”

Few question this response because there’s something contemplative about a walk that’s universally recognized. We understand “I think I’ll just walk,” on a cellular level.

When my wife and I were first married, there were a couple tough months of adjusting to marriedness. And so whenever my wife needed a breather, she’d go on a walk. When she got back, she felt better.

And I never really had to question why. Walks process jumbled up emotions like few other activities can.

Throughout Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, his narrator walks around prodding existential questions about life. One of his thought sums up walking perfectly:

“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”⁶

Basically: a walk forces you to become whatever the opposite of distracted is. They pierce you through whatever dross is smudging up the soul so you can gather enough clarity to reprocess.

There’s a phrase attributed to Augustine that backs this up: solvitur ambulando (literally, “it is solved by walking”).⁷ Essentially, when you’re stumped with something emotionally or intellectually perplexing, a walk somehow forces your brain to cough up an answer.

Michele de Montaigne wrote that he walked “to stimulate his thinking, to move reflection forward, to deepen inventiveness. My thoughts sleep if l sit still; the mind needs the help of an active body.”⁸

That’s spot on. Whether the problem is philosophical, personal, or social problem—a walk can solve it. Not by making the circumstances surrounding the problem better, but by giving us a weirdly calm vantage point over all of it.

Walking also has a weird way of making us more aware of who we are. And it does this, oddly enough, by disconnecting us from our sense of self.

The sociologist Hartmut Rosa notes that walking chips away our desire for control.⁹ Even if we know the path, we’ll never know who we’ll run into, the animals we’ll see, the sensations we’ll experience.

As such, the uncontrollability of a good walk reminds us that we’re not gods. It teaches us more about our creatureliness.¹⁰

And once we come into a deeper awareness of being created and not Creator—that we’re simply God’s imagers occupying one microscopic blip in time and space—we shed off the nagging thoughts that tell us to derive a sense of worth from our lifestyle, CV, and daily tasks.

This fits with what Gros, the walk purist from earlier, says:

By walking, you escape the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake—for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait—a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not having to be anyone.¹¹

Precisely. The walk is where we notice the creases where the false self strives for superiority over the true self. We build resilience against the stupidity of buying into the false self’s promises that we’d be happier if we let it run the show.

So when we walk—no ads, notifications, temptations to be someone we aren’t—we process our emotions, existential crises, intellectual conundrums, and, best of all, we become who we are.

A park where i do lots of walks. she aint much but she gets the job done.

Next up:

A Psycho-physiology of Walking

In 1909, to shake things up, the 70-year-old Edward Weston decided to start walking from Times Square to Union Square. Ya know: a casual stroll from NYC to San Francisco.

And 105 days and 3,925 miles later, he did it.

Scientifically, this was a brilliant idea. The journey likely slowed down Weston’s mental and physical deterioration to the point that it probably tacked on a couple extra couple years to his life.¹²

Walking comes with an astounding number of (1) physiological, (2) social, and even (3) religious benefits.¹³

(1) Physiological

Like the philosophers noticed, scientists also point out that walks “make our minds mobile.”¹⁴ It’s not just the quiet; there’s something about the rhythmic process of putting one foot in front of the other that syncs your brain to a frequency that affords more clarity, resonance, and joy.¹⁵ Going on consistent walks has even shown to decrease the risk of depression by a full 25%.¹⁶

(2) Social

Walks click our minds off from individualistic styles of thinking and help us see everyone as interrelated and dependent on one another.¹⁷

It’s one reason why it’s easier to make friends while out hiking—we literally see them less like strangers and more like another member of our expansive social web.

It’s also why, instead of doing early morning coffee, I prefer to ask my friends to just go on a walk instead. Like musicians that feel more bonded after playing a set together, so the physiological synchronicity of walking with someone leads into mental synchronicity.¹⁸

graphic’s a bit complex, check the source for more info

Is it a coincidence that my wife and I’s first date was a walk through a nature preserve because it was Covid and nature was the only place we were allowed to hangout? The walk was how I nabbed her.

(3) Religious

Even those who don’t feel like going on a walk claim that they feel better, emotionally and physically, after walking.¹⁹ Famously, when Kierkegaard wrote to his sister-in-law who was bedridden from depression, he said:

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.²⁰

Kierkegaard isn’t just thinking along the psycho-social benefits. He understands what scientists are just starting to: that walks are transcendent.

Which is a good segue into

A Theology of Walking

There’s no chapter and verse, “thou shalt walk,” proof text. But we do know that when God incarnated, He transported himself by putting one foot in front of the other, traversing each and every terrain at roughly 3 miles per hour.

Now, God speaks anywhere God wants to speak—but it seems like a big chunk of that speaking occurs after walking into the wilderness or up a mountain (1 Kings 19; Mark 1:35; Luke 5:16; 22).

One of the most profound cases of God’s speaking happens through a recently resurrected Jesus as He walks alongside two people on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). They have a profoundly literary back-and-forth while moving in step.²¹ They only realize who Jesus was after arriving at their destination. And then they start walking back to Jerusalem.

Which means: their walk was essentially destination-less. The journey itself became the plane of enlightenment. By walking nowhere, they discovered where they were going.²²

The story is also just an excellent illustration of how God works much more slowly (and confusingly) than most would prefer. As Kosuke Koyama writes in Three Mile an Hour God,

I find that God goes “slowly” with his educational process of man. “Forty years in the wilderness” points to his basic educational philosophy. Forty years of national migration through the wilderness, three generations of united monarchy, nineteen Kings of Israel and twenty kings of Judah, the hosts of prophets and priests, the experience of exile and restoration. Isn’t this rather a slow and costly way for God to let his people know the covenant relationship between God and man?…God walks slowly because of his love for us. If he did not love, he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed; a spiritual speed.²³

Amen and absolutely.

Some ancient Jesus followers said that walks encouraged righteous headspaces. Apparently, early monasteries prescribed walks to monks who were struggling with acedia. Which is a difficult word to translate, but it’s almost like a self-obsessed inward concern that manifests as sloth, solipsism, or apathy. Acedia is the opposite of a flourishing life with God because it makes God’s gifts seem delusional. And so one of their cures was going for a purposeful walk.²⁴

It makes sense: walks get us outside of our anxieties, depressions, until our daily worries start to feel more delusional than the life God’s highlighted for us. As the director Ingmar Berman said, “The demons hate it when you get out of bed. Demons hate fresh air.”

Pilgrimages

It’d be a crime to talk about walking without mentioning the Songs of Ascent (Psalm 120-135). Israel would chant these 15 psalms while walking on their tri-annual journeys to Jerusalem:

These Psalms themselves are essentially walker chants: they either sing of the sadness of exile, of the eternal stranger, or speak longingly of the Promised Land. Psalms do not call for much intellectual effort on the level of meaning or content. They are meant to be uttered, articulated, chanted, embodied. They should be actualized in the body, and when chanted by several people, made real in the body of a community.²⁵

Beautifully, these Jerusalem journeys have continued on in church history thanks to “pilgrimages”— essentially, “spiritual journeys to sacred places.”²⁶ A pilgrimage separates you from the twistedness of the world and catapults you into Beatitude.

Pilgrimages are surprisingly alive and well today—particularly the Camino de Santiago. Starting at St-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France, this journey requires typically 30-35 days of constant walking, literally “walking 500 miles” to wind up at the door of the Cathedral of Santiago. It’s said that those who are perplexed about their lives should take the pilgrimage to find profound spiritual enlightenment.²⁷

The Santiago de Compostela Archcathedral Basilica

In one of the most harrowing caminos studied, a husband and wife made the pilgrimage after discovering that their son had done something atrocious to their daughter. In a mountain of confusion and hurt, they started the walk. For days, they walked wordlessly. Afterward they said they didn’t need to articulate their pain, because the pilgrimage did it for them. While consciously walking together in light of God’s presence—sharing silence, sharing pain—they gained peace and direction over their situation.²⁸

The Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks and his wife did the Camino de Santiago when he was in a phase of his career where he was confused about what to do with his life. They made the whole trek, and by the end of it, he knew what his calling was:

“I will lift people up and bring them together in bonds of love, using science and data.”²⁹

Since then, he’s gone on to have a mind-boggingly successful career in teaching on meaning and happiness. And its genesis was the pilgrimage.

I related to Brooks’ story because it’s almost exactly how I found my calling. Long before I ever started writing or teaching, I was doing silence and solitude in the dead of winter, walking around a frozen pond over and over again, asking God to speak. And it’s one of the only times I felt like I heard from Him with undeniable clarity:

Teach and write and live the Bible.³⁰

And since then, that’s what I’ve done.

not the exact aforementioned pond, but close to it

Challenge: Go on a Mini-Pilgrimage

Describing the beauty of pilgrimage, the psychologist Joshua Knabb argues:

To “walk with God” and ponder his attributes and actions may be one of the ultimate spiritual disciplines, given that we are pairing the use of our God-given mind with physical activity. We are doing so as we employ our God-given senses (e.g., our sense of sight by watching God’s creation, like the birds, trees, and surrounding mountains or hills; our sense of sound by listening to the birds chirping in the trees or dogs barking in the background; our sense of touch by feeling our feet make contact with God’s stable earth below us or the cool breeze make contact with our face as we slowly walk through our neighborhood) to enjoy God’s magnificent, vast, mysterious world.³¹

So your challenge—my challenge, too—is to make an effort to intentionally enjoy God’s magnificent, vast, mysterious world by going on a walk this week. The pure kind. It can be a day, a half a day, an hour, or during whenever you have childcare. I’m aiming to take at least a half day pilgrimage either next week or the week after.

Take a pencil and notebook and write down whatever comes to mind. Maybe you’re wrestling with a question or your stumped on how to process something. Bring that with you. That’s where most of my ideas that turn out to be any good come from. Most importantly, if you’re wrestling with the biggest questions pertaining to meaning relationships, calling, whether a new opportunity is best for your family, a pilgrimage is likely one of the best possible ways to wrestle with God all the way through those milestone decisions.

It is solved by walking.

1. This was a lot in 2018. Now it seems kind of cheap.

2. This isn’t intended as shade on LA. I’m just not a city boy. My Midwestern upbringing makes them tough to digest.

3. Sadly, no academic dissertations have been penned on whether this is true. While horseback (and donkeyback/camelback/boat travel) was definitely a frequent form of travel, I’m assuming walking was still the most popular; it definitely was for Jesus, by my guess.

4. Gros’ book inspired so much of this essay. Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking (London: Verso, 2021).

5. Already I’ve said “walk” so many times that it’s lost all meaning.

6. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Vintage International, 1998), 70.

7. As far as I can tell, there’s no hard evidence that Augustine actually said this. A Huffington Post article attributes it to Augustine, but it’s more likely that it arose from the earlier philosopher Diogenes.

8. Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, 142.

9. Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (London: Polity, 2021), 55-56.

10. Everyone’s been talking about Brian Brock’s Joining in Creation’s Praise, since it dissects our theological creatureliness. I have read the whole thing (it’s huge), but from what I’ve read, it’s stunning.

11. Quote lightly edited because the translation was a bit wonky, imo. Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking (London: Verso, 2021): 28-29.

12. I first read about this story in an article on Psychology Today. Can’t find it now for some reason. Oh well. Does anyone read these footnotes? I hope, but the chances seem small some days. Alas, it’s a gloomy day out and I’m letting that get to me.

13. Kirsten Weir, “Nurtured by Nature: Psychological Research Is Advancing Our Understanding of How Time in Nature Can Improve Our Mental Health and Sharpen Our Cognition,” Monitor on Psychology 51, no. 3 (2020).

14. Shane O’Mara, “Biopsychosocial Functions of Human Walking and Adherence to Behaviourally Demanding Belief Systems: A Narrative Review,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021): 654122.

15. O’Mara, “Biopsychosocial Functions of Human Walking,” 654122.

16. For similar findings, see Z. Zhu, H. Chen, J. Ma, Y. He, J. Chen, and J. Sun, (2020). “Exploring the Relationship between Walking and Emotional Health in China,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17 no. 23 (2020): 8804.

17. Frances E. Kuo and Taylor A. Faber, “A Potential Natural Treatment for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Evidence from a National Study,” American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 9 (2004): 1580-1586; Bai, et al., “Awe, the Diminished Self, and Collective Engagement,” 185-209.

18. O’Mara, “Biopsychosocial Functions of Human Walking,” 654122.

19. J. C. Miller and Z. Krizan, “Walking Facilitates Positive Affect (Even When Expecting the Opposite),” Emotion 16 (2016): 775.

20. Because I’m annoying and wanted to signal this connection but couldn’t work it into the body of this text, I just want to note here that Percy was heavily inspired by Kierkegaard, which is likely his inspiration for thinking so highly of walking, Anyways: Soren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard: Letters and Documents, trans. Henrik Rosenmeier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 214.

21. N.T. Wright calls this interaction one of the best sketched biblical scene in the Gospels. Luke for Everyone (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 292.

22. I’m thankful that someone out there did write up a good theological meditation on walking. See Paul Axton, ”Why ’Walking Theology?’” Forging Ploughshares, August 2, 2018, https://forgingploughshares.org/2018/08/02/why-walking-theology/.

23. Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God (New York: SCM, 2021), 7.

24. Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, 142.

25. Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, 143

26. S. Welch, A Labryinth Prayer Handbook (New York: Canterbury, 2014), ix.

27. For scrutiny’s sake, some dislike the notion of calling any walk that doesn’t specifically pertain to a religiously significant site a ’pilgrimage.’ I have no qualms with this. What I am describing here is more like a knockoff pilgrimage or even a labyrinth walk.

28. K. Egan, “I Want to Feel the Camino in My Legs: Trajectories of Walking on the Camino de Santiago,” in A. Fedele and R. L. Blanes, Ed(s). Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices: Anthropological Reflections (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), 3-22.

29. Arthur Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life (New York: Penguin, 2026), 245.

30. Yes, God hates commas.

31. Joshua Knabb, Worship and Awe in Christian Psychology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2026), 148.