Of hiking, prayer and the sacredness of both

 Sometimes, you pray on your knees in private, perhaps while standing during liturgy at church, or through a thought or whisper at your desk . . . maybe it's while spreading mud for bricks, raking the grass, or quickly, at a stop light in stalled traffic.

 Prayer, or perhaps what you might call thoughtfulness, meditation -- whatever connects you to the Divine -- centers you in realities beyond your five senses. 

 For me, that reality is the Triune God taught and worshiped for the past 2,000 years within and through the prayers, scriptures, teachings and traditions of Orthodox Christianity.

 And, personally, that is increasingly expressed not only within Sunday and occasional weekday Divine Liturgy services (precious as they are to me), or even daily moments in my "prayer corner" at home, where candles are lit, a thin stream of burning incense fills the air, and the icons of Christ, the Theotokos and several saints reflect the flickering flames.

 Heaven and earth also meet, and ask for your company, in nature, where sunlight dapples leaves of pine, oak and cedar and a breeze moves flower pedals in testimony to creation and creature. 

 The trees, grasslands and soft forest floor are icons, too, and birdsong the splashing of rushing streams are the eternal cathedral's hymns.

 And so, I went to church -- again -- along the trail systems of Murray's Wheeler Farm area, where the sights of flora and fauna, sounds and scents of the natural world, and the glow of sunlight on my neck, punctuated the slow movement of prayer rope knots slipping through my fingers.

 Miles passed under my feet. But Eternity was in the moments, with each heartbeat, and riding every breath.

 I sensed that this particular communion is how it was meant to be. . . when we take the blinders off, when we pay attention. 

 Saints and sinners. Author and former monk  Thomas Moore wrote that, "Walking inspires and promotes conversation that is grounded in the body, and so it gives the soul a place to live."

 Added Friedrich Nietzsche: "All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking."

The late Fr. Alexander Schmemann put it this way:

"The natural dependence of man upon the world was intended to be transformed constantly
communication with God in whom is all life [but] when we see the world as an end
in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value . . .
only in God is found the meaning of everything, and the world is meaningful only
when it is a 'sacrament' of God's presence...."

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