On our wall hangs a placard with two photos of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The caption on the placard reads, "’When you pray, move your feet.’ -African Proverb." One of the photos depicts people committed to Kingdom-like justice crossing the bridge in one of the famous marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. This example of nonviolence in action helped our country take large steps toward respecting the dignity of the lives of African-Americans through the just application of the law. The people who engaged in those marches, must have understood the proverb, "When you pray, move your feet."

Others have understood the proverb as well. Gandhi’s Salt March helped the people of India move toward a society that respected the dignity of all, especially the oppressed poor of that nation. When slavery was the accepted norm of our forefathers, the Quaker John Woolman put feet to his prayers and journeyed through the American colonies convincing fellow Quakers that slavery was inconsistent with Christianity and that abolition of slavery was the necessary path to restore the dignity of slave and slaveholder alike.

Thereafter, Quakers led our country boldly toward ending that cruel and subhuman institution. And, of course, Jesus of Nazareth moved his feet into the presence of people with religious and political power and among the people most marginalized and least valued. Jesus’ prayers also moved him toward Jerusalem, confronting religious and political systems that denied the dignity of so many lives and distorted God’s highest values in favor of more convenient and better selling versions of ‘truth.’ Too often I see only evidence of belief in a different proverb; something like "When you pray, move your lips." As powerful as I believe all prayer is, overreliance on that kind alone neglects the active engagement of listening prayer in which one’s lips and thoughts are stilled in favor of hearing what God would have us do and where God would have us go on the one hand, and on the other hand leads to an inactive passivity that we know isn’t worthy of applying to the things we consider most important; else we would rely on it alone for our needs for shelter, food and security. Why then rely solely on the prayer of moving lips for helping move the world toward manifesting the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed?

At Nazareth House we seek a healthy rhythm of work and prayer. Without prayer, nothing we do makes sense.

Without it, we would dry up and die or simply collapse under the weight of the grief and suffering of the families with whom we walk. We value formal prayer, silent prayer, spontaneous prayer – a wide array of prayer. We seek to embody unceasing prayer. A great many of our prayers are for people on death row and their families, the families whose loved ones have been executed, people wrongly convicted of murder, and victims of murder and their families.

Sometimes our prayer is an attempt somehow to imagine and embrace the pain and grief of all these persons and to unite that suffering with the passion of Christ, to hold it in God’s Presence so that it can be transformed rather than transmitted.

Because we want to do more for the families for whom we pray and because the African proverb makes sense to us, we set out on June 15 walking from Raleigh to Washington, DC. The 2008 Pilgrimage of Remembrance: Making Strides toward Abolition & Reconciliation is about moving our feet as we pray. It is an attempt – and sometimes it feels like a desperate attempt – to do something more with our prayers. The Pilgrimage is devoted to remembering all people impacted by murder and by the death penalty and remembering what is forgotten or ignored in every act of violence – violence sponsored by the State and violence done in our neighborhoods – that we are brothers and sisters of one another, each one of us is a child of God. And having seen up close the damaging effect of the death penalty on so many, including families of murder victims, we also call for abolition of capital punishment.

We so want people to remember and think about the human beings caught up in this system. We see far too many people guilty of forgetting that our brothers and sisters on death row are our brothers and sisters. We too often see their families forgotten by and invisible to most of the community. We also have learned that the families of murder victims are often as forgotten and neglected as anyone. Perhaps people just can’t deal with their pain. For all the protestations we hear along the lines of "What about the victims’ families?!" we have found that those words are rarely combined with action.

So we call on our communities to remember. Remember the families! Remember the victims! Remember that even the person who has committed the most atrocious and violent act is still a child of God, our brother or sister.

We walk, we pray, we remember. We call for abolition of a reaction to violence that only creates and exacerbates pain and for the will to find and enact responses that provide safety, healing and prevention.

If you can’t move your feet on this Pilgrimage with us, then let your feet – or let your fingers do the walking on the telephone or keyboard – but do something to reach out to someone on death row or their families and to family members of a murder victim. And contact your local district attorney, legislators and candidates for office and tell them you’re tired of the empty promises and misplaced reactions of "tough on crime" talk and that you want responses that are "smart on crime" and responses which are compassionate and supportive of the families of victims and perpetrators alike. – Scott Bass