The Morning Watch begins with a single word: wash. Cold water on the face and hands at least, the page says; the full washing of the Essenes was a ritual bath in living water, and a shower will do. For many students that line is enough, and they never think of it again. This page is for those who have begun to suspect that the washing is not merely a way of waking up, and who want to know what the ancients knew about water and what a student today might do with it.
It is not a seventh practice. It is the first act of the first practice, opened up.
What the Ancients Did
The historian says that the Essenes, after working until the fifth hour, girded themselves with linen and bathed their bodies in cold water, and only then, purified, entered the hall for the common meal. The ruins by the Dead Sea are threaded with water: an aqueduct from the gorge, great cisterns, and at least ten stepped pools of the kind used for immersion, some with a low partition down the steps so that the one going down unclean did not touch the one coming up clean. The Damascus Document rules that no one may bathe for purification in dirty water, or in water too shallow to cover a man. The washing was not a splash. It was a going under.
And the Rule is clear about what the water could and could not do. The one who refuses to turn from his wickedness, it says, will not be made clean by any water of washing, nor purified by seas and rivers. The water was for the turned heart. Without the turning it was only water.
Around the Essenes, in the same centuries and the same valley, water was everywhere in the life of the pious. The bishop's catalogue names a sect of daily bathers, who held there was no life without washing every day. The historian himself spent three years of his youth with a desert hermit who bathed in cold water day and night. John washed Israel in the Jordan once, for the turning. The Ebionites washed daily and after every defilement. A church manual from the earliest generations of the Way, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, directs that baptism be in living water, and then, with great tenderness, makes room for those who have none: if you have no living water, baptize in other water; if you cannot in cold, then in warm; if you have neither, pour water three times on the head. And on the far rivers of Mesopotamia, as the page on the Nasoraeans of the Rivers describes, a baptizing people still go down into flowing water and call every river the Jordan.
Why Living Water
Living water, in the old Law, is water that moves: a spring, a stream, a river, rain. It is distinguished from water drawn and stored, which sits still in a cistern or a jar. The distinction mattered for purity, and it mattered for meaning. Still water reflects. Living water passes. It comes from somewhere the one who stands in it cannot see, and it goes somewhere she will never follow, and while it touches her it is carrying away whatever she gives it.
The prophets took the image up. Jeremiah calls God the fountain of living waters, forsaken for cisterns that hold no water. Ezekiel sees a river flowing from the threshold of the temple, deepening as it goes until it cannot be crossed, and making the Dead Sea itself fresh, so that fishermen stand on its shores from Ein Gedi onward. The gospel of John has Jesus promise living water to a woman at a well, water that becomes in the one who drinks it a spring welling up to eternal life. The fellowship reads the washing as the body's way of saying what those texts say: I am not the source, I am a channel, and I would like to be a clear one.
The Daily Washing
For the Morning Watch, the fellowship suggests the following. It adds about a minute to the watch and asks nothing that a bathroom sink cannot supply.
- The turning. Before the water, stand still for one breath and name, without explanation, one thing from yesterday you would like to leave behind. A sharp word. A neglect. A fear. This is the turned heart without which, the Rule says, no water cleanses.
- The water. Let the tap run cold, and let it run, so that it is moving water and not a filled basin. The fellowship is aware that a tap is not a spring. It is, however, connected to one, by a longer road than any aqueduct at Qumran. The Lection says the water you can draw from any tap is the same water that fell on the mountain.
- The washing. Wash the hands, then the face, three times each, slowly. With the hands, say inwardly: the work of my hands. With the face: the face I turn toward the Light. Do not hurry. Cold water is a teacher of attention, and the body will tell you very quickly whether you are present.
- The word. Say the Lection: wash the body in water and the mind in silence, and let the soul be washed in love. Then dry the face and go to your place. The silence of the watch begins.
On mornings when there is no time for anything else, the fellowship counts the washing alone, done with attention, as a kept watch. It is not the whole of it. It is not nothing.
The Seasonal Washing
Once in each season, at or near the solstice or the equinox, the fellowship suggests a washing in living water out of doors: a river, a stream, a lake fed by springs, the sea, or the rain. Go early, at the hour of the Morning Watch if you can. Stand at the edge in silence first. Make the turning, naming not one thing from yesterday but the season just ending: what it gave, what it cost, what you leave in the water. Then go in, as far as is safe and seemly, whether that is to the ankles or under the surface, and let the water pass. Come out. Give thanks. Dry off and go home without talking about it.
Where there is no living water near, or the season or the body forbids it, the fellowship follows the mercy of the old manual. Other water, then. Warm, if not cold. If nothing else, stand under the shower with the window open to the morning and let the water run over the head three times. The point was never the river. The point was the passing.
Cautions
- Cold water is a shock to the heart. A student who is unwell, pregnant, elderly, or unsure should begin with cool water on the hands and face and ask a physician before anything more. The ancients had no choice about cold. We do.
- Rivers and seas are not swimming pools. Know the current, go with a companion where you can, and never go in where you could not easily come out. A washing that ends in a rescue has missed the point.
- This is not baptism, and the fellowship baptizes no one. We have no clergy and no sacraments. A student who belongs to a church will know what her own tradition asks of her and should keep it. The washing on this page is a discipline of attention, done by each person alone, as the Essenes washed themselves.
- Do not borrow the rites of a living people. The Mandaeans' baptism is theirs. The fellowship's washing borrows nothing from it but the conviction that water which flows is alive.
What the Water Teaches
A student who keeps the daily washing for a year will notice something the fellowship cannot quite describe. The water does not change. The tap is the same tap. But the one who stands at it changes, slowly, from a person who splashes her face to wake up into a person who stops, for one breath, every morning, to leave something behind. That is the whole of the practice. The Essenes went down into the cold pools twice a day for a lifetime, and the historian, who had seen them, said they were cheerful. Water does that, if you let it pass.