THE spring warmth has brought a flurry on the canals. As the temperature rises, it’s protected to go away paint drying overnight; so there may be a bustle of cleansing, de-rusting, and painting. Like Passover celebrants, we’re dressed for the journey and labouring to ensure that the boats are able to travel, too. Is the water tank full? How much fuel are we carrying? Too much, and we would run aground on the shallower parts of the canals. Too little, and we could have to make trips down the towpath to get supplies.
Planning the journey, we want to know where to go away rubbish, and where to seek out laundrettes and native shops — and where to go away our bodily waste, too. I’ve been reading about mokhhadi, the traditional purification code practised by Traveller communities across Europe. Steve Horne, in Gypsies and Jesus, redefines this as less about what’s unclean or clean, and more about what’s common and what’s holy.
And mokhhadi shines a light-weight on among the most obscure parts of the Hebrew Scriptures within the Pentateuch, where cleanness and pollution — which I even have long related to obscure religious practices — make perfect sense in the event you are a travelling people. Your domestic spaces are as holy because the tent of worship. When an engineer arrives on the canalside, he doesn’t tell me to lift the bonnet as a roadside recovery man would; he asks for permission to return aboard. It is my sacred space, and everybody who touches the boat does in order an honoured guest.
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THE mokhhadi code extends to crockery, clothing, and the separation between men and ladies, and between humans and animals. Here, in fact, as a daily but not constant boater, I live otherwise from the Traveller community, however the pretext for observing such codes is similar. When you travel, you would like rules. Otherwise, you get sick; otherwise you get into conflict inside your community and out of doors it. These rules have a non secular force — not because your God has required each morsel of compliance, but since it is a better, holier method to live than the alternatives.
Unsurprisingly, this could cause tension. A fellow boater who’s working on our boat tells me of the stress he experienced doing a painting job for somebody living in a Traveller community. The owner was directing the painting from the United States, but using her neighbours to oversee the job — not very discreetly. And there was no explanation of the principles. A caravan with luxurious, deep carpets needed the inside repainting. How to do that without making a large number? How to do the job when there was no toilet in evidence (toilets being a pollutant that might not be utilized in caravans)? And, when the job was done to the owner’s satisfaction, that opened the floodgates of requests to do more painting, also involving extensive bargaining, as nobody wanted to simply accept the going rate.
His story jogged my memory that communities develop their very own ways of working, and that might be difficult and stressful for outsiders to know, because the principles are rarely explained, however the least infractions corrected.
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AS CHRISTIANS, this could make us bolder in difficult the presumption that those that live in houses and worship in church buildings understand scriptures written and transmitted by those that were themselves dispossessed and living nomadically. Have we even noticed the disconnect? We are accustomed to scholars and interpreters of scripture who themselves don’t have any experience of nomadism — indeed, are sometimes identified by places they’ve never left.
Jesus warned a would-be disciple that the Son of Man had no place to put his head. When did a commentator on that passage ever recuse themselves because they lived under a roof and slept in a bed with pillows, so had no experience to match Jesus’s own? Starting a sermon on Jacob’s dream of the ladder, I asked a congregation to point by a show of hands whether or not they had ever needed to couch-surf or sleep of their cars. I used to be startled when a full quarter raised their hands. Christians could also be living more precariously than we realise, and the Hebrew and Christian scriptures match that precarity.
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IT SHOULD also make us more pragmatic about holiness: less, separation from the on a regular basis, but somewhat, a method to enter and possess the atypical. We learn this from the purity codes that were fundamental within the wilderness, but continued as a lifestyle when the people of Israel were settled in houses, fields, and vineyards. And we learn it, supremely, within the life and death of Jesus Christ.
When the coffee-grounds are flung into the hedge because the last act before casting off the boat within the morning, the cardboard flattened, for use for lighting the solid-fuel stove when the day becomes cooler, the engine heats the new water because the boat travels, and the solar panels power the slow cooker, in order that the casserole is piping hot and the meat tender at the tip of the day’s journey, travelling is a way of going with God, and holiness isn’t an idea, but a practice.
John Griffiths is a Reader from the diocese of St Albans. He is somewhere on the canals.
