Praying with My Feet

In December of 2012, just a short drive from our Portland home, a young man of about 20 sneaked into a mall wearing a hockey mask and carrying a rifle. He glanced over a crowd of holiday shoppers, then took aim and killed a hospice nurse and a vendor selling hats. Another young lady died later. Witnesses said that everyone dropped their bags and scattered in terror while the sound of Bing Crosby's voice echoed through the mall. Nobody ever turned off the Christmas music. Santa was there too—hearing the shots, he lay down with the elves and pretended to be dead. The young man ran down the hallways with his heavy gun, dropping unused bullets, and shooting at shoppers. He ran and hid in a service hallway. Sitting down, he put the gun under his chin, took a deep breath, and killed himself.

That was a horrible day in Portland.

I visit that mall quite often with my family. My emotion was compounded by the fact that I have a vivid imagination. I could see in my mind's eye the spots where two people lay bleeding to death. I knew exactly the service hallway where the man took his life. I'd walked passed it countless times. For the two days that they closed the mall to replace glass, fill holes in the walls, and clean up the bloody mess, I went through a good deal of personal lament as I imagined how it could have easily been my family there that day singing "White Christmas" and waiting to sit on Santa's lap.

Two days after the shooting, they re-opened the mall. Officials expected very few people to show up and shop that day. Understandable. But early that morning, for some odd reason, I awoke with the sense that I was to go to the mall that day. I'm not a particularly morbid person, but I felt that I needed simply to be there; to walk around and pray silently for the space.

I thought Jesus would go to the scene of a tragedy.

When I entered the mall, there was a dark feeling to the place. All of the employees looked suspicious. Everyone was looking over his or her shoulder. Everyone was sleep-deprived, tired, confused. What was most odd was that there was no sign whatsoever that any tragedy had taken place save one small bullet hole they had missed over a jewelry store.

I walked. I talked to some employees to see how they were doing. One of them, a 16-year-old who sold muffins, told me that he gave one of the deceased mouth-to-mouth. Sixteen years old! I asked how he was doing. He said he was okay. But from the dark circles under his eyes, I could tell he was lying. I kept walking. Praying. Silently. I stood in the spot a woman died. I prayed for her and her family. I stood in the spot the man died. I prayed for him and his family.

I wept in the bathroom.

Walking Our Prayers

My prayers at that mall are what we call a "prayer walk." In a prayer walk, we walk as we pray and pray as we walk. Walking my way through the mall, my prayers followed the geography—I'd pray for that store where someone I knew worked; I'd pray for that spot where a man lay dying; going through the food court, I'd pray for the darkness of that day not to become a pattern. Prayer walking like this is a unique spiritual action, wedding geography to spirituality—it takes us through the mall. We pray the space.

Truth is, when Christians began doing prayer walks remains a bit of a mystery—there isn't much historical knowledge on the subject. As Steve Hawthorne and Graham Kendrick say in Prayer-Walking, "It's unlikely that we'll ever find an original prayerwalker who stimulated the idea years ago … "

We do know that there are not many historical mentions of it prior to the 1970s and that there was a proliferation of its practice in the 1980s, particularly in Youth With a Mission (YWAM). Prayer walking played a massive role in the "March for Jesus" movement throughout Europe. On July 10, 2000, an estimated 7 million people marched for Jesus in thousands of communities throughout the world. All of this sprouted from a movement that began in 1987 with 15,000 marching through London in "The City March: Prayer and Praise for London." Between 1992 and 2000, it is estimated that nearly 60 million people participated in similar prayer walks.

Though we've seen an explosion of prayer walking in recent times, I suspect the practice of prayer walking is much more ancient. Prayer, quite simply, is talking with God. God, in the Bible, walks and talks with people quite often. For instance, in Eden God walked and talked with humanity (Gen. 3:9-10). Then, according to the Gospels, the same God—taking upon the flesh of a first-century carpenter—walked once again with humanity in Jesus Christ. Sometimes, like the story of the road to Emmaus, those disciples didn't even know they were walking with their Creator. Throughout the Bible, God walks and talks with people. In that sense, prayer walking is very ancient and the earliest prayer (in Eden) was one that took place on a walk.

I first learned how to prayer walk when I spent a week in Belarus, a small holdout communist nation in the heart of Eastern Europe. There, you can't really preach. Christian preaching is seen as a kind of subversive, anti-government, anti-communist activity. Therefore, we had to shut up. During our week in Belarus, with no chance to really preach or speak, we only had one low-profile thing we could do: walk and pray. And we walked a lot. Prayer walking was literally all we could do. We could only walk and pray for God's powerful help.

Not unlike Belarus, getting up to walk and pray in that mall was the only thing I could do to help. Just being there. Prayer walking works perfectly when preaching or advice won't.

For a Christian who believes that God's Spirit rests upon them, every walk is a prayer walk. I remember the way Rabbi Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr., people of very different perspectives, walked should-to-shoulder through the streets of Selma to fight for the rights of all Americans and to see the end of the Vietnam War. Heschel once wrote about his act of walking, which he believed to be deeply spiritual at its core: "For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was both protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and waiting is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs praying."

Heschel learned to pray with his feet. After doing these prayer walks, I'm reminded that every step is a prayer. To be in my neighborhood is one of the most subversive, Christ-centered things I can do. As Jesus came into my neighborhood, I enter my neighborhood. As Jesus loves those mall-goers, I love those mall-goers.

It's good to learn to walk and pray at the same time.

Early Risers

Normally, I dread seven in the morning. But waking early has become a life-giving liturgy for my Friday mornings. On Friday mornings at seven, I wake early to walk and pray with people from my church.

We meet next to the red-striped shed by the old Episcopal church down the street from my house. This small yet brave (and often tired) group of Christians gathers in a circle to hold hands.

People look particularly exhausted this morning—I often think that holding hands is the best thing we can do to keep from falling to the ground asleep. We say "good morning," or whatever rote greeting we can muster in those confusing moments after the alarm goes off. Clearly, this morning, silence is our group's best greeting.

People are tired. As we wipe the sleep from the corners of our eyes, warming ourselves with a steaming coffee, someone opens us in prayer: "Jesus, we pray that you'd hear our prayers this morning as we … "

"Legs are not lips and waiting is not kneeling. And yet our march was worship. I felt my legs praying."

We've prayed this prayer many times before. Prayer isn't all that creative early in the morning; epic, creative prayers are for nighttime. After a lackluster, predictable opening, we commence our weekly trek up and down the still-dark streets of Southeast Portland. We walk. And we pray.

Our prayers follow every turn of the neighborhood's geography—we pray for that family whose daughter is struggling in school; we pray for that coffee shop whose owner is struggling in his marriage; going through the intersection, we ask God to provide for that business.

Prayer on the move is a unique spiritual action, which weds geography to spirituality—it takes it us through our neighborhood. As we pass certain locations we are brought to remember them in prayer. We pray in the proximate space.

Seeing Space Through Grace

Some of the mornings, I admit, are downright brutal—we'll be tired, hungry, out of prayers. When those mornings happen, our tendency is to want the prayer walk to become a prayer run back to the parking lot. We try and fight that urge, sticking to it even when our minds are tired.

But other times, we start out tired but soon feel enlivened. Our energy from the night before has been resurrected. One of the members in our group feels particularly led to pray that the porn store on Division would go out of business. We pray, in Jesus name. This often happens: an issue, a vignette, a theme will emerge in our prayer walks. Some might just call it coincidence or geographical happenstance—we've come to believe it's the Holy Spirit.

I go back to the mall regularly. My wife finds clothes she's been looking for. My little boy runs around with great hilarity. And I, content, walk with my family that I love.

When I do, I'm brought back to pray, silently, like I did that one Friday in December. I know Jesus is there. I know he was there. What does walking and praying in that mall, in the streets of my neighborhood mean to me?

What has it done to me? Simple: it has leveled the walls in my heart. I see my space through lenses of grace. And know, I trust, that in tragedy and normalcy, there is a God who walks our halls and darkened streets as well.

A.J. Swoboda is pastor of Theophilus, a church in Portland, Oregon.