Why do you walk? 

This opening question was asked by Jennifer Nahas during our most recent Axia webinar, How to Prepare for a Walking Pilgrimage. Participants answered with statements such as:

Walking helps to calm me and ground me and also to connect me to the beauty of creation and to God.

Walking puts something substantive on my habit of prayer and silence and being.

To reset and get perspective.

To connect with a saint or sacred place.

I walk to focus my attention (and feel free).

Eighteen years ago, on behalf of the Fellowship of St. Moses the Black (of which she is currently President), Abbess Katherine Weston, whom Axia spotlighted last July before the work premiered, began experimenting with using African-American Spirituals as a source or inspiration for Orthodox liturgical composition. She finished the entire Jubilee Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in 2023 and premiered it at the Fellowship’s conference in Houston last October.

My pilgrimage to Patmos Island in Greece last fall really began on an earlier pilgrimage five years ago to England, sitting with Metropolitan Kallistos, who told our small group that “to 'pray without ceasing' is not something we should try to do as often as possible, but is something that we potentially 'are' ... to become a person who has been turned into prayer!”