Sunday Reflections: BlueGreen Meditations from St. John's, Cold Spring Harbor

On his first cast, my son scared an eagle out of the tree above us. We caught no fish. This week’s reflection looks at what hides in the branches and in the mud, from a drained pond in Smithtown where seeds no one knew about have come up, to our own pond, high and draining, as we wait on the cofferdam.

A nor'easter pushes nine more inches of water against the old weir at St. John's Pond, and the rector spends the weekend holding his breath. This week's reflection considers the hidden infrastructure of grace: the ancient, unseen things that hold us up long before we notice them. A Sunday Reflection from St. John's Episcopal Church, Cold Spring Harbor.

Walking home along the spillway one evening, I came face to face with a river otter, heaving itself across the bank toward the water. On land it was all hinge and hunch. In the water it was grace itself. This week's reflection takes up an old preacher's word for human beings, "amphibious": made of spirit and made of earth, and never quite at home in either. It asks what it might mean that every creature is clumsy somewhere.

This week, once the sky over Cold Spring Harbor goes properly dark, millions of birds will lift off and move south over this exact stretch of Long Island. Warblers, thrushes, nighthawks, among them. Most of them flying between dusk and dawn, most of them never seen by a single person below. They will be guided by the position of stars, read by instinct and not instruction, by the pull of the earth's own magnetism, by a memory none of them acquired through experience.

After a summer away from the mic, Sunday Reflections returns. A phone call from his son at college pulls Gideon outside just in time to watch something he'd walked past for years — egrets filling a tree not one at a time, but all at once. A reflection on what it means that our futures, human and otherwise, were bound together long before we agreed to it.

To support our work to restore St. John's Pond go to www.sjpwa.org.

Mary Oliver once asked whether the sunflowers blazing in summer heat might already know something about prayer that we're still trying to figure out. She had a name for the alternative — walking through the world in full self-attendance — and she said she couldn't really call it being alive. This week, before our summer pause, we're sitting with her question and the one the pond has been asking all along.

Something has been digging at the pond's edge in the night. This is the week of the longest light — and the most important thing happening at the pond is happening in the dark. This week's reflection is about turtles, fear, and trusting work we never get to watch.

Last year, we rebuilt the pond's edge. The bluegill used to nest there. I worried we had closed that bottom to them for good. This week I found out we had not. A reflection on the ground that holds us, even when we can't see it.

Behind the office, the serviceberry trees are ripening. What happens next is one of the most extraordinary things we witness all year. I shouldn't tell you. But I must.

A double-crested cormorant crash-landed in the Pachysandra outside St. John's Church this week. A rector, a Boy Scout, barbecue gloves, and lab goggles were not enough. This is a Pentecost story about the one who comes alongside — and what it looks like when help actually arrives.