WHEN I travel on the waterways of England, its beauty seems inexhaustible — all the time different, all the time fresh. I reach for my mobile to capture each recent prospect. It seems inconceivable to take a foul photo. As the phone storage fills with images of wonder after wonder, I even have needed to learn restraint. Technology has limits where nature has none. A daily pastime on the boat is rating the canals and rivers that we’ve travelled, and trying to precise what characterises each and distinguishes one from all of the others.
The bowing, flowering hawthorns on the North Oxford, offering blossoms beneath the shivering larches. The aimless perambulations of the Leicester line (anything but a straight line) through rural Leicestershire — ignoring villages as so few canals do, and slipping past the shoulders of the slight hills. The Erewash, like a water garden, with clear water filled with lily-pads and swarming with fish. The mighty Trent, whose banks are affected by the debris of years of flooding, and whose pontoons protect boats whether the degrees rise or fall ten or 15 feet. The Keadby canal, stretching straight across the south-Yorkshire plain, where swallows tumble and roll, sipping the water a number of feet in front of the boat’s prow.
WE HAVE travelled 500 miles up to now this yr, but we’ve barely touched one quarter of the canal and river network. We got here to the north-east since the spring drought was drying up the canals to the west. We got here in quest of water — enough water to maintain moving. In Staffordshire, Shropshire, and the West Midlands, the movement of boats is restricted, because, each time a lock is emptied to maneuver a ship up or down, 50,000 gallons of water move, and far of it’s lost to the accompanying streams. Boaters are having to stop and wait for rain for the canal to begin to maneuver again.
Our goal is to succeed in Liverpool, but we won’t have the ability to cross the Pennines until the autumn and winter rains enable onward progress. In the mean time, we will visit Sheffield, York, and Leeds. Then we wait.
BACK in April, because the buds opened in vivid green, I used to be confronted with life that was just days old, but that may have faded, folded, and fallen by the tip of the yr. But I do know that, once I am not alive to witness it, this cycle of growth and death shall be as recent and vivid because it is now.
In her book God is at Eye Level, the photographer Jan Phillips offers several perspectives on what happens after we take a photograph. In one, she describes the moment of opening the shutter as life in search of life: “When the god force inside and the god force without collide and result in the creation of something recent” — as if we momentarily see what God sees.
But my favourite is her suggestion that God will be seen all over the place if we make ourselves present: “Everywhere I look, there God is, looking back, looking straight back.” As the times and weeks pass and the seasons turn, it’s one long have a look at the Presence. Sydney Carter put it well in that song beloved of faculty assemblies: “You are older than the world will be, You are younger than the life in me; Ever old and ever recent, Keep me travelling together with you.”
THE Genesis account of creation has a voice making and approving all the weather that make up our world: not making a habitat for humans, but a spot where God is present, sees that all the things is nice, moves in, and makes the earth somewhere price living in — the dwelling somewhat than the possessing; the seventh day, the primary holy thing that has been made. Holiness understood through sabbath is less perfection and otherness than encounter and relationship with the God who chooses to make us and to be present with us.
This time on the canals has made me change my mind in regards to the divine presence. In my youth, I learned the stories of the kids of Israel hunkering down behind the pillar of fireside and cloud. Wherever it went they followed, and the conclusion (though there isn’t a evidence of cloud or fire once they entered Canaan), when following the presence, was to slaughter whoever stood in the best way.
There is a unique way of telling those stories. Every evening, the presence paused, and so they pitched camp around it. They placed the tent of meeting where the presence was. When the presence moved, they moved, too, to remain near it. I now consider the shekinah as a presence that invites me closer and towards which I’m all the time travelling, and shall be for the remaining of my life. The promise is that, at some point, the travelling shall be over, and I’ll rest in that presence — for ever.
John Griffiths is a Reader from St Albans diocese. He is somewhere on the waterways of the north-east.
