My great-grandfather worked with the horses out in the country. This was before factory farming and combine harvesters.
Ploughing, planting seeds and harvesting were hard and visceral, physical work, in all weathers and in the relentless seasons.
A family saying passed down from him is “good, clean dirt” – often humorous but for him a simple philosophy. To come home sweaty and dusty (or more often, it being Scotland, mud-caked) was an honourable sign of a good day’s work well done. I can imagine that to him, the stained shirt collar of an office worker might be an unclean dirt (how can you be tired after sitting at a desk all day, once asked Gran when I said I was tired).
Good clean dirt was the rich soil where food could grow; the stinking horse manure that could be good food for the vegetable plants once it was broken down and composted.
How long it’s taken me to understand good clean dirt. In Hebraic and Christian myth, we ourselves are made of that mucky malleable clay Gxd takes in her very hands to shape; in Islam, even muckier, it possibly seems to us, is our formation from a blood clot. In other words, before we are even expelled from the garden for our transgressions, even in the very moment of our creation, we are dirty – and this, I feel, is part of our human glory.
Antibiotic-resistant infections come about because of overuse to cure us too much; allergies because as babies we don’t develop tolerance; even our guts are screaming out to us that they don’t have a good enough selection of bugs.
How hard it has been for me to let go of the spiritual and literal assertion of the Victorians that “cleanliness is next to godliness.” We are altogether too clean; even our clothes are washed so excessively often that we waste water and electricity in the process of wearing them out prematurely.
Spiritually, then, are we meant to be dirty? I was educated in my church to be “godly” and “nice.” I don’t intend to be ungodly and nasty any more than I can help. But aren’t we nice Christians perhaps just a little secretly jealous of the loveable rogue, not to mention the younger brother whose father was so prodigal in welcoming back that profligate scoundrel?
My good friend Eilish often reminds me that without her faults and struggles she would be insufferably self-righteous.
Me, I don’t mind confessing that I have fallen in the mud a few times and may I never forget that. Now, as I put my toe back in the water of Christianity, already I feel that sterile temptation to be a little too cleanly again.
Yesterday I went to Dores beach on the edge of Loch Ness. It’s so stunningly beautiful it shocks me every time I return to it. The water is dark with peat – organic fragments washed down from the hills all along its length. Flecked with pieces of dead leaves and twigs. It’s a stony beach and underwater it’s hard not to lose your balance as you wade in. My brother is younger than me and he managed it no problem but I … I was scared of falling. I knew I could fall into a swim but the hardness of those stones kept me from going in any higher than my knees. And as anyone local knows, it gets very deep very quickly, very cold. But in the shallows it felt good.
The weather was so hot. The water was so beautifully cool. I wish I’d fallen into a swim and been baptised into that dirty water. Sometimes we have to take a chance and hope against hope that getting our hands just a teeny bit dirty might be exactly what She wanted us to do. Gxd knows, her son’s crucifixion was messy enough, bloody and sweaty to the point of horror. I only risked skinning my knees and smelling of peat, for the reward of swimming in the sun.
