Walk the Walk: Final Day - Alexandria, Virginia to Washington, DC

August 29 2020
August 29 2020

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Well. 130 miles later and we marched down the Mount Vernon Trail and into the Capital this morning. Fourteen of us walked from Charlottesville, Virginia to Washington, DC over nine days. About twenty folks folded in and out over the course of the week, with over a hundred walking in with us this morning.

One of the organizers of this group, Doug Pagitt, who founded Vote Common Good, walked the distance with us and spoke at the Lincoln Memorial as part of the March on Washington today. Our group was enthusiastically welcomed by Rev. Al Sharpton today, who, with Doug, had an editorial in Time Magazine - an appeal aimed at white Christian evangelicals to do what Jesus would do now. Vote as if all our lives depend on it. Because they do.

We remembered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the speech that stirred the nation 57 years ago today. We remembered Emmett Till, who at fourteen years old was lynched 65 years ago today in Money, Mississippi, for speaking to a white woman.

We prayed outside the church where Trump wielded a Bible as a prop, speaking our own verses from our own traditions. The verse that I have carried with me all week is from John 11:35. “Jesus wept.”

I know Jesus weeps still. And I know something else - there is a better world that we all know in our hearts is possible. It’s happening even now. The old is dying and the new is struggling to be born. But be born, it will. It just needs midwives.

We are the midwives.

This walk is over. I am marked. (Oh, Lord, my heart is marked, and so are my feet). I am grateful. And I am fired up. Imagine all we can do as a church and community in this time.

Linda

Emmett Till
Emmett Till

8.28.1963

8/28/1963

8.28.2020

8/28/2020, taken by my friend and fellow pilgrim, Matthew Carter.

Sneaks

*I am participating in a nine-day, 140 mile walk from Charlottesville, Virginia to Washington, DC as part of the national “Walk the Walk” pilgrimage of white faith leaders to RECKON with the anti-Blackness that permeates our past and present as a nation and as faith institutions, RESOLVE to advance racial justice in our faith traditions and nation, and REFRAME the faith narrative in this nation. This is co-organized by Faith in Action, the national network of POWER Interfaith, of which our congregation is a part. More here at https://walkthewalk2020.us/

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