Lindsey Krinks - Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets

WHEN I SET OUT to write this book, I realized there was simply no way to name all the people, organizations, and faith communities who were present and active in many of these stories. Im mindful of the outreach workers, service providers, volunteers, and movement friends who played significant roles in the events herein but are not named. I remain deeply grateful to be accompanied by so many of them and to share this work, this life, and this calling with them. None of us can do this alone.

Nearly all the people who appear in these pages have given me permission to use their real names. The only exceptions are a few public figures and ministers who could be easily found through an online search and a handful of friends from the streets who I was not able to track down; I have changed their names to protect their privacy.

The events that unfold in this book are told with as much accuracy and adherence to history as I am able to recall. In order to write this book, I spent extensive time going through newspaper articles, recorded interviews, documentaries, blogs, and old journals. Any errors are my own.

A note about the title: I first came across the expression praying with our feet as a college student. I was captivated by the marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts of the civil rights movement. While I was reading about the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, I stumbled upon Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish mystic, philosopher, and scholar of the Hebrew prophets.

Heschel grew up in 1930s Poland, where several of his family members were killed by Nazis. After fleeing to New York in 1940, he connected the evil of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Europe with the evil of racism and segregation in the United States. Compelled by his faith, Heschel became involved in the struggle for civil rights, becoming a friend and confidant of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Marching alongside King, Heschel said he felt as if his legs were praying. Like other mystics, Heschel knew that prayer is more than a stationary act confined to the spiritual realm. Prayer moves. It reaches into the physical, material, economic, and political realms. It takes on flesh so that our beliefs become uttered not only with our lips, but in our lives.

Before being introduced to Heschel, I was familiar with other spiritual leaders who spoke of embodying their faith through action. The apostle James said, I will show you my faith by my deeds (James 2:18). Francis of Assisi is often attributed with saying, Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun, is believed to have said, Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh taught that walking meditations can move us into greater awareness of the interconnectedness of all things.

Less than a week before the contract for this book arrived in the mail, my husband, Andrew, and I attended the unveiling of two historical markers in Nashville to remember victims of lynching and racial terror. One of the speakers, a Black organizer with We Remember Nashville, recited an African proverb. When you pray, she said, move your feet. The next week, I learned that Frederick Douglass, a former slave, author, and nineteenth-century abolitionist, put it much the same way. I prayed for twenty years, he is credited with saying, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.