Buddhist monks’ Virginia procession inspired St. Paul’s youth minister to bring silent, prayerful march to his own community

By Miles Layton

EDENTON — A chance encounter with Buddhist monks on a Virginia roadside planted a seed in Gary Stanley’s heart.

Sunday evening, that seed bloomed into something neither he nor anyone else at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church had quite anticipated.

More than 200 residents of Edenton and surrounding communities laced up their shoes and walked roughly two miles through the streets of their town in a Walk for Peace — a silent, prayerful procession that wound along Broad Street and back, taking just over 30 minutes and asking nothing of participants except their presence and their intention.

“No politics. No agenda,” said Stanley, director of youth ministry at St. Paul’s. “Just the hurt and the chaos that is near and afar. And what can we do as a faith community but respond prayerfully and intentionally? And so we decided we’d have a walk for peace.”

The turnout surprised even the organizers. St. Paul’s had prepared 100 wristbands for participants — and ran out well before the walk began.

“We had a hundred wristbands and gave out of those early on,” Stanley said. “It was just overwhelming.”

A gallery of photos appears at the end of the story.

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Inspired by monks in motion

The idea traces back to Stanley’s experience attending a Buddhist Monks Walk for Peace in Virginia. Watching hundreds of people move in silence together through public streets, he felt something shift. He came home to Edenton with a question he couldn’t shake: why not here?

The world, as Stanley sees it, offers plenty of reasons to feel that weight. He ticked them off almost reflexively — the Middle East, Ukraine, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba.

“A lot of the news is despairing,” he said. “It is overwhelming. But to stay centered and anchored and grounded in faith — that we do have a hope that we cling to — I just remind myself and others that we do have that hope. That’s bigger than me and bigger than you.”

If someone photographs this walk or reads about it the way Stanley once read about monks walking through Virginia, he hopes the message is simple: “There is hope. There’s hope in humanity. There’s hope in me and you. There’s hope as we gather collectively.”

Steps with intention

Before the group set out from St. Paul’s Parish Hall, Stanley led participants in a prayer that framed the walk in explicitly theological terms — but ones deliberately broad enough to welcome anyone carrying any kind of burden.

“We gather today to follow Christ’s example, which is to walk with intention, to walk with a mission,” he told the crowd. “Every step Jesus took was calculated. His steps were designed to usher in a new order where sons and daughters of humanity can have a personal relationship with God and have peace — both inner peace and outer peace.”

Stanley had been thinking about intentional steps for more than a week. Just days before the walk, he had hiked two and a half miles up — and two and a half miles back down — in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, and the experience had stayed with him.

“Every step that I took had to be intentional and thoughtful,” he reflected in his prayer. “I had to be mindful. In a split second, from one step to the next, I had to decide whether I was going to step on a rock that could possibly roll and cause me to stumble, or would I step to avoid that rock. I had to walk with full intention.”

Somewhere deep in those mountains, he said, he also observed what he called the Parable of the Forest — the way a woodland ecosystem slowly, almost tenderly, closes around fallen trees and fire-scarred gaps, filling spaces of loss with new growth. He has come to see it as a model for human community.

“At times, my heart is heavy when I consider the trouble, the chaos, the hurt around me,” he prayed, “but I am not defeated because I remind myself that I am a child of God and heir to peace. Like the majestic forest, I hope to fill gaps and rips with a hope of new and restored life.”

A community affair

Sunday’s event was notably cross-denominational. Stanley was emphatic that St. Paul’s did not intend the walk as an Episcopal gathering — the invitation was extended as broadly as possible, and the crowd that showed up reflected that.

“We were cross-denominations,” he said. “We try to be as inclusive as possible.”

The Edenton Police Department provided logistical support, with Chief Lafon arranging a lead car and a follow car to escort the procession safely through the streets. “Chief Lafon couldn’t be here, but he made arrangements for escort,” Stanley said. “They absolutely get a shout out.”

After the walk concluded, the Rev. Stella Brothers led the group in prayer. Then came a more festive touch: free snow cones and cookies, courtesy of Christopher and Rebecca Williams of the farm community in Martin County — a preacher and his wife who operate a snow cone business out of Williamston.

“It’s our treat today,” he said. “It’s on the house.”

A discipline, not a demonstration

Stanley is careful to distinguish what Sunday’s walk was — and was not. It was not a protest. It carried no signs, endorsed no candidates, demanded nothing of city hall. It belonged instead to what he describes as the tradition of spiritual disciplines: prayer, fasting, service, meditation, silence, simplicity.

“I am here to walk for peace,” he said simply, “the peace of the Living God.”

He closed his pre-walk prayer with a meditation on scale — the smallness of a Sunday evening stroll against the vastness of what the world needs.

“Let our 30-minute walk today tether us tightly and securely to the Prince of Peace,” he prayed. “May this walk be worship. Today, let a 30-minute walk equal a thousand years of peace; today may our two-mile walk take us a thousand miles closer to the Peace of Christ.”

Whether Edenton’s Walk for Peace becomes an annual tradition, a monthly practice, or something that simply lives in the memory of the 200-plus people who showed up on a beautiful Sunday evening remains to be seen. For Stanley, the turnout itself was already a kind of answer.

“There’s hope,” he said. “There’s hope in humanity.”