Anyone not living in the southern bit of the United Kingdom (which amounts to most of the world, now I think about it) might need reminding that we’ve had quite a bit of rain in the last couple of months. Almost all the rain, in fact, and then some more.
Given that Oxford sits on a flood plain most of it ended up in the water meadows alongside the Isis, as our bit of the Thames is known. The jihadis, by the way, can go whistle – we had the name first, and we’re keeping it, so there.
Christ Church Meadow quickly disappeared underwater, and with it the boat houses at the far end, and the sports pitches at Magdalen College School, and the allotments and playing fields either side of Osney Island (site of the great Augustinian abbey that once dominated the medieval skyline), and Port Meadow to the north where the young people gambol in high summer, feed the wild horses, and in the long warm nights lie in the grass and count the shooting stars.
The flooding happens every year, so it came as little surprise. Perhaps it was higher than it has been recently, with ingress here and there, but on the whole it was a very picturesque scene indeed – until I found myself trying to change a flat tyre in a puddle in a bus stop in the dark, getting more sodden by the second. It was a very different story further west, where the water levels caused serious problems as the River Severn dramatically broke its banks in three counties.
“It’s good for the garden,” they say; and then suddenly the goldfish from the pond are swimming about in the kitchen. Often newer properties suffer disproportionately; our forebears knew better where and, more importantly, where not to build. Tewkesbury bears the brunt of the Severn inundation every time it happens, and yet the water never quite seems to encroach upon the Abbey. Those monks knew what they were doing, all those centuries ago.
As necessary as it is for life on earth, then, water certainly has its down sides. It is true that without water we die; the crops fail; the land burns. And yet too much water and we drown; the crops are ruined; the land washes away.
At pretty Bosham in West Sussex the tide rushes in so fast that day-trippers frequently lose their parked cars on the foreshore; a poignant plaque on a house near the church recalls the memory of a treasured daughter, “claimed by the sea”.
The old way of blessing water – or anything else, for that matter – involved an act of exorcism in the first place and of hallowing thereafter. It was simply assumed that there was something nasty lurking inside whatever the item was, ready to cause mischief to God’s people, which needed to be got out of it before anything else happened. A less dramatic liturgical representation, if you like, of the story of Jesus, the demoniac and the Gadarene swine.
A similar tension exists in the Bible, which is full of water, from Genesis to Revelation. The Spirit moves over the waters in creation; a universal deluge follows. Jesus uses water in parables to teach of salvation and eternal life; you can hardly move for water in the Psalms. The Lord’s first miracle turns water into wine at Cana of Galilee, with kaleidoscopic theological nuance. As Dr Daley once slurred in Bless Me Father: “and if it had been the other way round, who would ever have believed He was the Son of God?”
The Christian life begins with water, literally, at the font. Thereafter the metaphors continue: “Will your anchor hold in the storms of life / When the clouds unfold their wings of strife?”; “The rain came down and the floods came up / but the house on the rock stood firm”; “As pants the hart for cooling streams / when heated in the chase, / so longs my soul, O God, for thee, / and thy refreshing grace.” The old hymns and children’s choruses seem to be inexhaustible.
We cannot last long without water, of course. Every single process of our physical body relies on water for its function: movement, digestion, thought and all the rest. Depending on bodily reserves, in extreme circumstances humans can last for days, even weeks, without food – but only for about three days without water.
And yet, for all of us there will come a time – sooner or later, suddenly or expected – when we will have no more physical need of water at all.
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That is what we are bidden to recall as Father marks our foreheads with ash mixed with – yes – holy water. Even in death, however, our spiritual need will remain; one more experience of water, which Ezekiel prophesied two and a half millennia ago; a gushing, sparkling stream that washes, and cleanses, and heals all who approach it; flowing from the right side of the temple, and rising like a flood.
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