THE spring warmth has brought a flurry on the canals. As the temperature rises, it is safe to leave paint drying overnight; so there is a bustle of cleaning, de-rusting, and painting. Like Passover celebrants, we are dressed for the journey and labouring to make sure that the boats are ready to travel, too. Is the water tank full? How much fuel are we carrying? Too much, and we might run aground on the shallower parts of the canals. Too little, and we may have to make trips down the towpath to get supplies.
Planning the journey, we need to know where to leave rubbish, and where to find laundrettes and local shops — and where to leave our bodily waste, too. I’ve been reading about mokhhadi, the ancient purification code practised by Traveller communities across Europe. Steve Horne, in Gypsies and Jesus, redefines this as less about what is unclean or clean, and more about what is common and what is holy.
And mokhhadi shines a light on some of the most obscure parts of the Hebrew Scriptures in the Pentateuch, where cleanness and pollution — which I have long associated with obscure religious practices — make perfect sense if you are a travelling people. Your domestic spaces are as holy as 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 come aboard. It is my sacred space, and everyone who touches the boat does so as an honoured guest.
THE mokhhadi code extends to crockery, clothing, and the separation between men and women, and between humans and animals. Here, of course, as a regular but not constant boater, I live differently from the Traveller community, but the pretext for observing such codes is the same. When you travel, you need rules. Otherwise, you get sick; or you get into conflict inside your community and outside it. These rules have a religious force — not because your God has required every single morsel of compliance, but because it is an easier, holier way to live than the alternatives.
Unsurprisingly, this can cause tension. A fellow boater who is working on our boat tells me of the stress he experienced doing a painting job for someone 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 rules. A caravan with luxurious, deep carpets needed the interior repainting. How to do this without making a mess? How to do the job when there was no toilet in evidence (toilets being a pollutant that would not be used 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 no one wanted to accept the going rate.
His story reminded me that communities develop their own ways of working, and that can be difficult and stressful for outsiders to understand, because the rules are rarely explained, but the least infractions corrected.
AS CHRISTIANS, this should make us bolder in challenging the presumption that those who live in houses and worship in church buildings understand scriptures written and transmitted by those who were themselves dispossessed and living nomadically. Have we even noticed the disconnect? We are accustomed to scholars and interpreters of scripture who themselves have no experience of nomadism — indeed, are often identified by places they have never left.
Jesus warned a would-be disciple that the Son of Man had no place to lay 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 indicate by a show of hands whether they had ever had to couch-surf or sleep in their cars. I was startled when a full quarter raised their hands. Christians may be living more precariously than we realise, and the Hebrew and Christian scriptures match that precarity.
IT SHOULD also make us more pragmatic about holiness: less, separation from the everyday, but rather, a way to enter and possess the ordinary. We learn this from the purity codes that were fundamental in the wilderness, but continued as a way of life when the people of Israel were settled in houses, fields, and vineyards. And we learn it, supremely, in the life and death of Jesus Christ.
When the coffee-grounds are flung into the hedge as the last act before casting off the boat in the morning, the cardboard flattened, to be used for lighting the solid-fuel stove when the day becomes cooler, the engine heats the hot water as the boat travels, and the solar panels power the slow cooker, so that the casserole is piping hot and the meat tender at the end of the day’s journey, travelling is a way of going with God, and holiness is not an idea, but a practice.
John Griffiths is a Reader from the diocese of St Albans. He is somewhere on the canals.
