February 5, 2026 // Columns

The Purposeful Walk of an Everyday Pilgrim

Molly Jo Rose

Many years ago, on my way to class, I drove through snowy, unplowed side streets, past sorority houses quiet in morning light and family homes just starting to wake up to breakfasts and sleepy children. I nosed my winter beater carefully toward school and came upon an old woman, shoulders rounded as she slowly advanced down the snow-trampled sidewalk.

While it wasn’t dangerously cold, there was something so measured about her pace, I worried she was struggling until I noticed a certain busyness of her hands gathered in front of her where they swiftly worked the beads of a rosary. By then, I had slowed my car considerably to ask if she needed help. She looked up, smiled, and triumphantly thrust her rosary in the air as if to say, “Good morning! I’m fine! Don’t worry! I’m praying for you, too!”

The image of her on that blue cold February morning taking what was likely her daily morning Rosary walk glows white hot in my memory. In her, I saw a portrait of who I wanted to be – an old lady brightening her neighborhood with the regular practice of prayerful walking.

Happily, I have part of her nature down as I am a walker. I walk through snow and rain and temperatures exceeding ninety. I walk up mountains, along busy roads, and through drifts of snow. I walk in spite of bunions, tight calves, and back pain because I know if I don’t walk, life will become too big and chaotic. St. Augustine is attributed with saying, “Solvitur ambulando” – it is solved by walking. Done with intention, the propelling of our feet forward both solves problems and becomes prayer. There is something about walking that both intensifies prayer and is prayer. No other physical activity can claim the spiritual history of the pilgrimage.

There are times as an everyday pilgrim when a rosary swings in front of me just as it did in my mentor’s hands. But often, I walk without beads, knowing that footsteps accumulate reflection, that movement can be prayer. What is it about walking that encourages a curious bubbling in the mind and heart, a flowing stream that anxieties and hopes pool into, pulling our feet along in its current? When I walk, I have the certitude that I am in the right place at the right time. I am fully present to myself, the world around me, and the things God wants me to consider. I adjust to terrain and nod to the group of gentlemen I see walking several mornings a week. They, too, are somehow a part of my prayer, a reminder of the community God put me in, all moving toward Him at our own pace with our own stride.

In walking, we put one foot in front of the other. The body and mind work together to handle questions like: Is that black ice ahead of me? Where should I cross the street? How can I help my daughter with that friendship? Which route will return me home in about a half hour? How will that work issue resolve? Don’t step in that. When I walk, I am thinking about nothing and everything all at once.

The rhythm of walking is persistent, methodical, and metronome-like. Even when others join me, walking is prayerful. My walking partners keep pace side by side with me. Our arms swing loosely in unison. Facing forward, we do not see each other, but we hear each other better than we would anywhere else. The repetitive monotony of footfalls encourages us to bring up things we have shoved down, that we are worrying over. The open air makes these things less tangled and ugly. Often, my walking partners and I are silent, inhalation and exhalation our only exchange. We speak in the soft swish of our coats and in the slap of our shoes on the pavement. The prayer of walking expunges the record of our days.

There is no weather we cannot walk in. There is a special grace in the crunch of leaves and the careful shuffle we do across ice. Snow and rain are no match for us. Occasionally, I listen to music when I walk, and through my earbuds, Regina Spektor sings, “I have a perfect body because my eyelashes catch my sweat,” meaning God made us so perfectly, He even considered a tool to manage water coming down on us. As in life, we can walk through anything if we suit up properly.

And so, every day, I suit up. I wrap myself in warm clothes, wind the rosary in my pocket around my fingers, and I walk. The streets of my neighborhood know my feet. They have absorbed my unique pitter and patter, the way I stretch my gait longer or shorter to keep pace with a walking partner or with my thoughts. I know every house I pass. The cracks in the sidewalks are my familiars. Someday maybe, you will see me, my measured pace walking toward you. Imagine me with a rosary or without one, but know my feet and hands are praying for you. My back has not rounded yet with age, but mile by mile, I am walking toward becoming her, that everyday pilgrim who still inspires me to hold up my community in prayerful movement.

Molly Jo Rose is a writer living with her husband and three children in Fort Wayne, where they are parishioners at St. John the Baptist. She walks a lot and writes a little.