Earlier this year, I had the privilege of watching a group of Buddhist monks on the Walk for Peace travel through my city. Crowds lined the streets, straining in the cold to watch 19 men dressed in orange and browns live out their convictions one step of their 2,300 mile journey at a time.
As I stood waiting, I wondered what all these people had come out to see. As I reflected, I thought of another man, also unusually clad and living out his convictions in counter cultural ways. Jesus had asked that very same question to the crowds who had gone out to see him.
When the monks finally arrived, it was over in a moment. Nineteen men is not a very long parade.
As they passed, the crowd fell in behind them, filling the street as far as I could see. What struck me most was the relative silence in which we walked. This was the largest crowd I had ever been a part of, and yet all these people made remarkably little noise. In that moment, simply being together was enough.
Standing in the crowd, my mind was drawn back in time to the 1963 March on Washington, and then even farther back, to the crowds following Jesus, which sometimes swelled beyond 5,000. We were not the first to gather in the face of violence and oppression, and we would not be the last.
Even so, I wondered what it all meant. What had we all come out to see? Had our short walk changed anything?
I was surprised, then, to discover the ripples the walk made in other areas of life. My dinner table conversations, church chats and office lunches kept circling back to the monks. “Where were you? What was your experience like?” we asked each other. Though the crowds had dispersed, this shared act of peaceful resistance continued to draw us together with others who had come out to see.
Perhaps that is at least part of what it all meant. Walking through town after town, the monks stirred people up. Coming out to see this group committed to making whatever difference 19 people can, I saw thousands of my own neighbors show up.
The monks, of course, didn’t stay. But their coming turned us toward each other.
We often talk about Lent as a journey.
For me, Lent has often been a solitary journey, focused primarily on my vertical relationship with God. The monks reminded me that this is not the only dimension of the journey.
As we near the end of this year’s Lenten journey, I invite you to pay attention to who else is on this journey with you. We may be doing work that makes little sense to the systems and power structures of this world, but we are not alone in this work. And when it feels like there aren’t nearly enough people on this path with us, remember the difference that 12 disciples and 19 monks can make.
