Three Mile an Hour God

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THE theology of disability begins with a question: what does it mean to be disabled — sometimes profoundly disabled — to be made in God’s image, to be fully human, and to be beautiful, just the way you are, without having to change anything? Striving to answer such a question takes one into places and ways of thinking that are not available by other means. I walk because three miles an hour seems to be the pace God keeps. It’s God speed. A Physical Discipline I spoke to one of my colleagues, who works in a busy hospital, about the three-mile-an-hour God. He said: “This place means that I have to move at nine miles an hour!” I said to him, “Well, who are you following?” If Jesus is walking at three miles an hour, and you’re walking at nine miles an hour, who is following whom? When you travel at three miles each hour, you can’t avoid the beauty—the God—in the details. You embrace the shade of clouds, you respect the oozing blisters on your feet, you feel the asphalt heat bathing your face, you smell the scent of the wildflowers, and you get the name of the woman mowing her lawn at eight in the morning. We witnessed the details, and in doing so, we were reintroduced to the imago Dei (image of God) in ourselves, the imago Dei in each other, the imago Dei in southern Indiana, the imago Dei in southern Illinois, the imago Dei in East St. Louis, the imago Dei in MRTI, and the imago Dei in a fossil-free PC(USA). Think, for example, about the calling and vocation of Moses. He has a significant speech impediment. God says, “Listen, I’ve got a big job for you.” What does Moses respond? “I can’t do it because I’ve got this speech impediment. Could you not send somebody else?” God basically says to him “Do what you’re told!”

Norm once walked all the time but never much thought about it. He never contemplated the simple joy, the giddy freedom, the everyday magic of walking: to bound up or down a flight of stairs, to glide across a kitchen floor, to stroll a beach, to hike a trail. To move from here to there on nothing more than his own two legs, under his own locomotion. Now, Norm thinks about walking all the time. He watches others do it — Uprights, he calls them — bounding, gliding, strolling, hiking, and the dozens of other things most of us do with our legs with barely a thought about it. It stuns and saddens him. He would give almost anything to walk again, and if ever by some miracle of heaven or earth his capacity is restored, it’s almost all he will ever do.

Make a point of slowing your pace down so you can be sensitive to the pain of those around you. You will find that great things can be accomplished at three miles per hour! The world is full of people who feel shut out from the presence of God. They feel they have no access to healing, hope or salvation. If we slow down enough to allow them to touch us, we will find that Christ will still extend his healing power and gracious salvation through us to those in need.

We walk because three miles an hour, as the writer Rebecca Solnit says, is about the speed of thought,2 and maybe the speed of our souls. We walk because if we go much faster for much longer, we’ll start to lose ourselves: our bodies will atrophy, our thinking will jumble, our very souls will wither. Most of us walk unthinkingly, without gratitude, maybe even resentfully. Our walking is accidental, incidental, inevitable, maybe grudging. It’s what we do between sitting. Three Mile An Hour God is a collection of biblical-theological reflections that loosely centers around the theme of the slow, Christian God. In short, God is slow, so slow to the point of a 'full stop' -- 'nailed down' -- at the cross! Koyama claims the fastest God goes is three miles an hour, or the average walking speed. Indeed, God walks with us, not ahead of us.

a b Cohn-Sherbok, Lavinia, ed. (2002). "Koyama, Kosuke". Who's Who in Christianity. London: Routledge. p.172. ISBN 978-1-134-50956-0. In works such as Water Buffalo Theology and Three Mile an Hour God, he defended a theology that he considered to be accessible to the peasantry in developing nations, rather than an overly academic systematic theology. In total, Koyama wrote thirteen books. One of his most well-known books, "Water Buffalo Theology", was described as "ecological theology, liberation theology and contribution to Christian-Buddhist dialogue". [3]

God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would move much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is “slow” and yet it is lord over all the other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depths of our life whether we notice it or not, whether we are currently hit by a storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks. Koyama was born in Tokyo in 1929, of Christian parents. He later moved to New Jersey in the United States, where he completed his B.D. at Drew Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary, the latter on the interpretation of the Psalms of Martin Luther in 1959. [2] I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.’ V24Hull concludes, however, that there is no single way of being human. To be human is a wide range of possibilities, all of which teach us something about how to love. It is only when we learn to value and appreciate the diversity of the human condition that we begin to understand the beauty of the diversity of being human — and the beauty of the diversity of participating in that community that is Jesus’s body. This book is about hearing this invitation as more than a metaphor. It is about working out on the ground, on the way, our friendship with God, and with ourselves and with others and with the good and fragile earth that holds us up and marks our steps. Watch the video urn:lcp:threemilehourgod0000koya:epub:a0d4744c-53ab-4266-bbe1-f8d0d71bb044 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier threemilehourgod0000koya Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1rg6033s Invoice 1652 Isbn 0883444739 Lccn 79024785 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-7-gc75f Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9470 Ocr_module_version 0.0.11 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18488 Openlibrary_edition Jesus talks about gentleness. In the Beatitudes, he says “I am gentle.” Think about that: “I am gentle.” The God who creates the universe, the one who is all-powerful, who knows everything, is not only slow, but is also gentle. A fundamental aspect of being made in the image of that God is gentleness.

In Scazzero’s Daily Office he quotes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; “Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you. And accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Michael Harter, S.J., ed., Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits) What God does not do is say, “Oh, hold on a second, I’m going to heal your speech impediment and then you can go off and fulfil your vocation.” He says: “I’ll send people to help you, but nothing of you is going to change.” And Moses, that powerful disabled leader of God’s people, discovers his vocation through that encounter.

The Church Times Archive

Koyama confronts both the West and the East of their obsession with technology -- especially its convenience and the idol of efficiency at the expense of others. He is both moral and spiritual in his call to action. He names the evil within our idolatrous thinking and lifestyles -- like a good Lutheran! He is sharp yet not inaccessible -- in fact, his writing is surprisingly accessible for English as his second language. If you have read Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, you will recall a striking and oft-quoted passage that Buchanan refers to in his first chapter, when he suggests that we walk not only for utilitarian reasons but to be “closer to reality”: a b Martin, Douglas (March 31, 2009). "Kosuke Koyama, 79, an Ecumenical Theologian, Dies". The New York Times . Retrieved April 1, 2009. Alas, I never found such a figure. More’s the pity, too, since in the past 20 years alone, enough good walking books have been published to fill a number of shelves in that imaginary library: not only superb chronicles of walking but also books about walking, the most influential and widely imitated of which is Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. In recent years especially, there has been a vogue for books that champion walking with considerable fervor. (See, for instance, Antonia Malchik’s A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom One Step at a Time, and In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration, by Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin.) And for readers who want to have their cake and eat it too, there’s a subgenre I call “cynical-inspirational,” including books such as John Kaag’s Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are and Erling Kagge’s Walking: One Step at a Time, both published in the past couple of years. (Someone should tell these pedestrian philosophers that a walker never takes “one step at a time”: Before one step is complete, another step is already in progress.) But it’s its own little miracle. Dr. JoAnn E. Manson of the Harvard Medical School says: “If there was a pill that people could take that would nearly cut in half the risk of stroke, diabetes, heart disease, reduce the risk of cognitive decline, depression, reduce stress, improve emotional well-being—everyone would be clamoring to take it, it would be flying off the shelf. But that pill, that magic potion, really is available to everyone in the form of 30 minutes a day of brisk walking.”