In late 2025, nineteen Buddhist monks set out from Fort Worth on a 2,300-mile journey to Washington DC. The walk is done. The journey continues at facebook.com/walkforpeaceusa. I wrote a series of posts and discover deepening faith along the way.

The Venerable Bhikkhu Paññākāra and his fellow monks are nearing Washington DC now, over 100 days and more than 2,000 miles since they left Fort Worth, Texas on foot. They have walked through communities across the South, stopping in each state capital, drawing thousands of people who came not for spectacle but for something harder to name, maybe a hunger for peace that we all share regardless of what tradition we call home.

As they passed through Virginia this week, I found myself reflecting on some of the wisdom the Venerable has been sharing along the way and I was struck by how much of it resonates with teachings I know from my own Christian tradition. Not because one tradition borrowed from the other but maybe because these truths are written into something deeper than any single tradition, something fundamental about what it means to be human and to seek peace.

The Bathroom Mirror

Many who follow the monks may have already heard the Venerable Paññākāra’s teaching about cleaning a bathroom mirror right after your morning routine, wipe it while the water and soap spots are fresh and it takes no effort at all, but leave it for weeks and those spots harden and now you’re scrubbing. Of course he wasn’t really talking about mirrors. He was talking about our minds and hearts, how small disturbances and negative thoughts are so much easier to address when they are fresh. Let them accumulate and take root and then when something big comes along to shake us, all those buried things surface at once and overwhelm us.

This brought me back to about 14 years ago when I was going through a painful time and studying meditation. I was trying to use meditation to run away from my suffering so my practice was all wrong. My instructor asked me to imagine a calm pond with crystal clear water and trees lining the banks. Dust and small particles naturally fall into the pond and if I just let them sink to the bottom, the surface stays calm for a while. But when a large stone drops in, it stirs everything up from the bottom and the water becomes muddy and takes a long time to settle. However, if as each pebble falls I notice it, find it right away and toss it out, then when that big rock inevitably comes the water remains clear. The ripples settle quickly and I can deal with the rock itself without all the accumulated muck.

This same wisdom appears in the Christian tradition. Paul wrote that we should not let the sun go down on our anger and not give a foothold for darkness to take root in our hearts (Ephesians 4:26-27). The Psalms speak of searching our hearts in the quiet moments before sleep (Psalm 4:4). The Christian practice of daily prayer and self-examination is really about this same principle, tend to the mirror daily, deal with what disturbs our peace while it is still fresh.

Whether we call it mindfulness or prayerful self-examination, whether we sit in meditation or kneel in prayer, the wisdom is the same: pay attention to what enters our hearts and address it before it takes root.

The House With Many Doors

The Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, a beloved teacher from a different school of Buddhist practice (the Zen/Mahayana tradition), once offered another image that I think speaks to all of us. He asked us to imagine a house with many doors and windows but we have locked them all shut except the front door. We stand in this darkened house, staring at that one open door, insisting that happiness must come through it. We have decided what happiness should look like and where it must come from and we wait and wait.

But what if we threw open all the doors and windows? What if we let light flood in from every direction and allowed fresh air to move freely through the house? Happiness might come through the back door, or a side window, or even through the attic in a way we never expected.

This resonates deeply with what I understand from the Christian scriptures too. The proverbs teach us to trust in the Lord and lean not on our own understanding of what we need (Proverbs 3:5-6). Isaiah reminds us that God’s ways and thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9). Jesus himself taught that we need not be anxious about what we need because our Creator knows us intimately, He made us after all, and He knows what we truly need before we even think to ask (Matthew 6:8).

How often do we insist that the answer to our prayers must come through that one front door we are staring at? How often do we miss the blessings that came through windows we didn’t even know were there because we were so fixated on our own idea of what we needed? Maybe part of finding peace, in any tradition, is learning to hold our expectations loosely enough that we can recognize goodness when it arrives in unexpected forms.

Loving in an Impermanent World

Perhaps the most profound teaching I’ve been reflecting on is about love and attachment. The Venerable Paññākāra has spoken about how attachment to impermanent things causes suffering. At first this troubled me because it seemed like the teaching was saying we should avoid love altogether since all things in this world change and everyone we love will eventually be gone. If loving leads to suffering when loss comes, wouldn’t the logical conclusion be to not love at all?

But I don’t think that is what the teaching means. I think it is saying something much more beautiful. That we should love deeply and fully but not grasp so tightly to what we love that we cannot bear the inevitable changes that come. When someone we love is gone, we can hold the joy of having loved them without being destroyed by the fact that the time has passed. In fact, recognizing that our time together is precious and impermanent can make us love more deeply, not less. Every moment becomes more precious when we understand it will not last forever on this earth.

The teacher of Ecclesiastes recognized this same truth thousands of years ago when he observed that everything under the sun is fleeting, like vapor (Ecclesiastes 1:2). And yet the same teacher also wrote that there is beauty in enjoying the gifts we are given in this life, in eating and drinking and finding joy in our labor as gifts from God (Ecclesiastes 3:12-13). The recognition that earthly things are impermanent doesn’t make them meaningless…it makes them precious.

In my own tradition, Jesus taught us to store our treasures not in earthly things that rust and decay but in the eternal things that cannot be taken from us (Matthew 6:19-21). We are comforted in loss because we believe our loved ones return to the arms of our Creator and that this separation is temporary. The Buddhist tradition also points beyond the impermanent world to something transcendent and lasting, a state of enduring peace beyond the changes of this life.

I think both traditions arrive at a similar place through different paths. Both recognize that clinging too tightly to what is temporary causes suffering. Both point toward something beyond this world that is lasting and real. And both teach us that the answer is not to love less but to love with open hands, trusting that what is truly precious does not end with this life.

Walking Together

What moves me about the Walk for Peace is not just the physical endurance of these monks who have walked over 2,000 miles barefoot and in silence. It is that their walk has become a living teaching that people from every background can receive. They are not asking anyone to convert or to abandon their own tradition. They are simply walking in peace and inviting us to find the peace that already exists within our own hearts and our own traditions.

I have found that studying the wisdom of the Venerable Paññākāra and other Buddhist teachers has not weakened my own faith but has deepened it. It has helped me see truths in my own scriptures that I had overlooked or taken for granted. When I hear a Buddhist teaching about mindfulness and then find the same principle in the Psalms, it doesn’t make either tradition less true, it makes the truth feel more universal and more real. It reminds me that we are all human beings with the same hearts, the same struggles, the same longing for peace and connection.

We have far more in common than we have in difference and the things we share are at the very core of who we are. We all want peace. We all want to love and be loved. We all struggle with our own minds and hearts. We all sense that there is something more beyond this impermanent world. Whether we find these truths through the Buddha’s teachings or through the words of Jesus or through another path, the truths themselves seem to be woven into the very fabric of what it means to be human.

As the monks approach Washington DC in the coming days, I pray that they arrive safely and that the peace they carry in their hearts and their steps continues to touch everyone they meet along the way. May we all find the courage to clean our mirrors daily, to open the doors and windows of our hearts, and to love deeply even in this impermanent world, trusting that the deepest truths transcend any single tradition and belong to all of us.

May there be peace 🙏🧘