This week marks a year since Covid began to take over our lives. At first, we were all determined to make the best of the situation. The world was filled with fervor: we were going to shut life down for two weeks to “Stop the Spread”/ “Flatten the Curve”, and as we did that, we were going to reclaim something humane about our lives. We were going to sit down to home-cooked family meals, bake bread, plant our own garden, learn a new language, and generally renew good daily habits. For a couple weeks, it really looked like we were going to have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as a civilization to stop our cultural downward spiral in its tracks and return to a simpler life, filled with family-oriented purpose rather than the demands of our job and endless basketball practices.

But then the reality of the spiritual sickness of our culture took firm hold again. Rather than growing together as local communities, united behind a common purpose, we became more and more isolated. We turned to screens as our solace rather than our neighbors or our Church (not that turning to our Church was much of a possibility for most of us because of the baffling reaction of most of our clergy to close church doors – seriously, when do we need Jesus more than during a global pandemic??). The multi-hour Zoom calls became a normal part of life, Netflix reported that almost 16 million new subscribers flocked to its streaming service in the first four months of the year, and rather than having the time to focus on making our meals at home from scratch, DoorDash and UberEats saw the largest boom of business in their companies’ collective histories. To put it bluntly, we completely failed in our ambitious desires to reclaim a humane part of our life. In fact, I would say we have not only reverted to any number of bad habits, we’ve formed new ones. More than any other time in human history, individuals and families find themselves isolated from their own physical community. Every household has been left to fend for itself. Unlike past crises in our history, “sticking together” is precisely the opposite of what we’re being told to do as we are constantly reminded to socially distance, mask up, etc. etc. We passed “precaution” and dived headlong into “paranoia” sometime last April or May. The constantly ticking death counter on cable news networks, newspapers, or podcasts has formed a psychosis amongst the American people. We’re afraid to live our lives and have bought the lie that we’re still able to “stay connected” with our community and loved ones through social media and video calls. This is not possible. The sooner we acknowledge this, the better.

Despite hopes that 2020 would, through its trials, be able to reunify our tattered social fabric, a couple months into 2021, we find ourselves at a loss. The protests and race riots over the summer, followed by our latest general election deepened and widened the chasm between Americans. Our country, our culture, seems only to have come closer to extinction in the last year. Our political leaders, Church officials, health gurus, and media all call for unity and civility, but rarely recommend straightforward direction on how to achieve these lofty goals. So, in all my accumulated political, ecclesial, and medical wisdom I’m here to make a simple suggestion: go take a walk.

No, I don’t mean this figuratively. Find a time when you and your family (the more the merrier!) can get out and wander around your neighborhood. Don’t revert to the nearby bike trail; don’t get in your car to take a hike that has some scenery. Walk the streets of your neighborhood. This is not about fitness goals or weight loss. This is about knowing the place you live and strengthening the bonds between you and your neighbors.

In the past 5-10 years (depending on when you fully bought into the digital age), we’ve managed often to forget that everyone we’re “connected to” online lives in a real house, in a real neighborhood, in a real, physical town. We often hear it hypothesized that this is where internet “trolls” come from – that people are willing to be gross and wicked because they can hide behind the anonymity of their screen. But I propose that something of the reverse is also true. In becoming sucked into our lives online, many of us have forgotten that we actually live near other breathing, eating human beings, who have thoughts, dreams, and passions. We might not see them online, but they still exist, and live only a few hundred feet from us. Of course, we can’t fail to notice some things about our neighbors, but more often than not it’s the things that annoy us. (“Why does he keep that hunk of junk on our street?”, “Why doesn’t she trim back her hedges more?”, “Do they always have to have people over at two in the morning?”) How many of us can honestly say that we are fulfilling Christ’s commandment to “Love thy neighbor as thyself”? And is it so crazy to propose that when Christ said “our neighbors”, he actually meant our neighbors? The people who live closest to us?

So here we are at a juncture in history when we might have the least amount of interaction with our neighbors than at any other time and could very well have the most need for them, and they the most need for us. Now, if you’re brave and have no problem with small talk, I strongly encourage you to find a small excuse and simply walk up to your neighbors’ doors, knock, and start talking. But the pandemic has complicated this possibility as well. It’s difficult to know for sure just how careful your neighbors may feel they need to be in answering their door and having a conversation, and there’s no need to be pushy. Not to mention, we’ve rather lost the art of conversing with those we don’t know, and many people are made uncomfortable in such a situation. This is why taking a neighborhood walk is a simple, easy starting point for establishing relationships.

Taking walks is the perfect way to casually bump into your neighbors while you’re out and about. As soon as you establish a route and routine that’s predictable, you will start to become something of a reliable, known quantity to them, harmless and endearing as you make your way past their house on a regular basis. In my experience, people are even more likely to be friendly and open up if you have young children or are in advanced stages of pregnancy (if you’re eight months pregnant and think your trip to the grocery store elicits a lot of comments, just wait until it’s the same people who see you waddle by day in and day out). This may seem an odd point to stress, but it’s a rare and special thing for others to see you as approachable. People seem to be growing ever-more suspicious of each other as cultural tensions heighten. It’s hard to know who to trust these days, and in our desire to protect ourselves and our loved ones from those we deem to be bad influences, or just downright dangerous, we’re quick to become over-protective. We become defensive and turn inward by reflex. We forget that, as Christians, we have a mission to reach out, to engage, interact, and share the Reason for our joy. And as citizens, we have a responsibility to the very community we live in. There are few better ways to begin the slow, sometimes boring, task of engaging with those around us and taking ownership of the place we call home, than by walking your own streets.

My promotion of this cause comes from my own experience. My husband and I have been in our current house for a little over three years and we have been taking regular walks for about two and a half. Out of every seven days in a week I would guess that we average walking through our neighborhood about five. Of course, there have been seasons we haven’t been able to do this. With both of our pregnancies there has come a point when I can barely make it around the block, and then there’s several weeks of rest that follow baby’s birth. We also have been inconsistent walkers in the summer when we are away from our home so much because of my husband’s job. But when we’re home and the weather isn’t too terrible, we suit the kids up, slip on the walking shoes, and hit the street just about every day.

The benefits of this practice have been remarkable for our family. Just on our block we’ve established a friendly acquaintance with about a dozen families and a quality friendship with at least three. This has started from bumping into these neighbors while out walking, but then becomes something of a real relationship when we find these people at the grocery store, post office, local coffee shop, or, most meaningfully, our parish, and are able to make far more genuine conversation in multiple interactions over a period of time. Even when it’s just a simple wave that’s being exchanged, there is a natural, undefinable comfort that comes from just seeing the same people day in and day out. You notice changes they’ve made to their house, they notice that your kids have grown. Then when the time comes for conversation, it seems far more natural. When the pandemic began last March, we baked a loaf of bread and wrote a note to most of the families who lived near us, giving them our contact information and reminding them that we were here in case of anything they might need. All of our neighbors, especially the elderly, expressed immense gratitude in knowing that there was someone nearby they could call on if they were in need. This Christmas we got to join another family from down the street and went caroling to a number of homes on our block, spreading joy and hopefully a little bit of the Gospel message too. With every month, it seems there’s something new we learn about our neighborhood, and more interactions with those who live in it.

Of course, with some circumstances, taking a daily walk is a far more difficult accomplishment, whether that’s job-related, weather related, or your neighborhood has no safe way to be traversed on foot. But for those of you who are capable and willing, I strongly recommend this method for getting to know your neighbors and neighborhood better.

Taking a daily walk in your neighborhood is not necessarily the cure-all for every ailment sickening our society, but it addresses some of the most important things we have lost. Many of us have lost our feeling of connection with those who live near us, if we ever had it in the first place (for some people in my own generation or younger, I would guess they have never known what it means to feel connected to people in their neighborhood). Many of us have lost the sense of duty that ought to compel us to get to know our neighbors and care for them. Most of us have lost the grounded-ness that comes with regularly interacting with real, physical people who are more than just a talking head on a screen. Walking provides you with intimate knowledge of your own place and facilitates interaction with your own people. It is exactly these kinds of relationships that need to be formed or healed if we are to recover a common culture and attitude of civility toward our fellow Americans.

Perhaps most importantly, taking a walk reminds you of what you can do to address the losses mentioned above. It directs your mind to the local realities of your life. There are very few of us who have the ability to affect change at a global, national, or even state level; yet it’s information about the global pandemic, or the national election that fills our newsfeeds and television screens. But true change begins at the localest of levels. It starts with the relationships you have with those in your community, especially those in your community who aren’t members of the same Church, political party, or social groups that you are. These are the people we must seek to form relationships with if we are ever to endeavor to love those with whom we have a difference of belief or opinion. We don’t just get to love those who already love us or who agree with us on everything. As Christ tells us, “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:46-48)

We must recover our relationships with our neighbors if we are to repair our social fabric and join Christ in advancing His kingdom. Go out and spread the Good News! Take a walk!