> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Between Sermons IV: - URL: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/between-sermons-iv/ - Published: 2026-07-07T15:09:37.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-02T19:53:52.000Z - Author: Gideon L. K. Pollach ## **Part Four: The Work That Remains** The snapping turtles come out of the pond in early summer. They come out with mud still caked on their backs. Prehistoric, unhurried, unbothered by the churchyard they are crossing. They have been crossing ground like this since before there were mammals to disturb them. The parish is recent. The churchyard is recent. The turtle does not know either. They move through the grass to lay eggs in the earth. The water's work deposited in the ground. The pond extending itself into the soil. The whole cycle continuing without our assistance or our blessing. I never get tired of watching them. There is a dam at the northern edge of St. John's Pond. It has been there long enough that most people who walk past it do not think of it as a choice. It is part of the landscape. But below it, pressing against the current, the American eel is trying to reach water it has been seeking for as long as eels have been eels. The alewife and the river herring are trying to make the same passage. They cannot. The dam is what we built. The exclusion is what we maintain, mostly by not thinking about it. One of the things BlueGreen Theology has clarified for me is that the dam is not only an engineering problem. Every theological framework that places the human at the center, every formation that trained people to look past the pond, to treat the eel's excluded passage as someone else's concern, is a dam. It blocks what would otherwise flow. Restoration is not building something new. It is removing what we have placed in the way, and installing what allows the passage that was always meant to happen. We have spent time and money removing walls that keep us from nature. From the woods behind us, from the pond beside us. But the dam remains. The work of installing a fish passage so the eel and the alewife and the river herring can reach the pond they have been trying to reach for centuries is not a different kind of work than what we do for one another. It is the same care, extended to its actual radius. The same wonder that draws us to a child at the font draws us to the water that will receive that child's baptism. The same reverence we bring to a graveside we bring to the soil that receives what we return to it. What we shape shapes us. The congregation we are learning to serve is the one we have always belonged to. Thomas Berry called this transition, from a period of human devastation of the earth to one of mutually enhancing human-earth relations, the Great Work. He was right about the urgency. The assembly is thinning. The silence where species were is a theological emergency as well as an ecological one. But the work looks different when God is understood as the central actor. This is resurrection faith applied to the watershed. We are not initiating something. We are joining something already underway. The skunk cabbage pushes through frozen ground in February, generating its own heat, before anything else has decided that spring is possible. The fish return to the surface in late May, visible again after their winter depth. The turtles cross the churchyard in June, mud on their backs, certain of where they are going. The pond does not wait for our theology to catch up with what it is doing. It continues. This is what I have been working on between sermons. Not a program. Not a campaign. A way of seeing: one that the tradition has always had the resources to offer, and has not always offered. A lens that makes visible what has been there all along. The congregation at the water's edge. The assembly that was praising before we arrived. The Great Work already underway in the shallows and the marsh and the slow movement of water toward the sea. The question BlueGreen Theology puts to this parish is not whether we care about the environment. It is simpler and harder than that. What would it mean to mean what we do at the font, the altar, the imposition of ashes, the graveside? What would it mean to learn the names of our neighbors, the wood duck, the snapper crossing the churchyard in June, the eel pressing against the dam from below, and to greet them as the assembly they are? The pond is doing what it does. It has never stopped. Our work: to join it. --- ## **Coda: Not Only Ours** Over the years, my parishioners have said some version of the same thing to me. They say it a little shyly, as if it might be theologically suspect. I feel closer to God outside. In the garden. On the water. Walking in the woods. Something happens there that doesn't always happen in the building. I heard it often enough that I stopped treating it as a footnote and started treating it as data. I was not the first to notice. Francis of Assisi knew this in the thirteenth century. Sun: brother. Moon: sister. Wind: brother. Water: sister. The church calls this poetry. Francis called it accuracy. Eight centuries of garden ornaments have buried the taxonomy. But the wolf came down from the mountains to Gubbio, and Francis walked out to meet it. No sword. Just a man approaching the thing that could tear his throat. They stood together in the space between village and wilderness. The assembly formed. It was not a metaphor. The creatures are kin. The human is not the center. The wolf did not teach him this through safety. It taught him through the terrible honesty of standing close enough to die. Morning light finds the sparrow at its feeding, the oak leaf turning toward sun. No prayer book required. The creatures assemble without announcement, without explanation. Beetle and wren. The slow unfurling of bracken fronds, water pooling in muddy hollows. We step outside and see it: the vast liturgy already in progress. Here is worship as fact, not concept. Here is the thing itself. The building draws our attention inward to word and symbol. The watershed draws it outward to the ten thousand moving parts of praise. Stone, root, wing. The assembly that has no walls. That is what this series has been trying to say. Look at what we have built between ourselves and it. Walls. Parking lots sealed against rain. Lights that have erased the stars so thoroughly that most of our children have never seen the Milky Way. We did not intend to wall ourselves off from the liturgy. But we did. St. John's Pond is where I learned it. The specific creatures, the particular water, the otter signing its name in the mud: none of that is illustration. It is the theology itself, learned from this place over nearly ten years. You cannot do this work in general. You have to begin somewhere. But you can begin anywhere. Any parish with a tree older than the building has a teacher. Any congregation near a creek, a marsh, a harbor, a vacant lot where something is growing through the concrete: the assembly is already gathered there. The grammar of animacy is not a Long Island theology. It is available wherever a wren is building, a beetle is turning dung, a root is finding water in the dark. Which is everywhere. Which is always. Unselfconscious participation is not an abstraction. Step outside any door and find it: the wren building, the beetle turning, the root finding water in the dark. Watch until the background becomes a congregation. Then take your place in it. The pond taught me to ask that question. Whatever is outside your door can teach you the same thing. Go and look. Listen first. The liturgy has already begun. *This is the third in a series of four pieces.* [The first is here.](https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/between-sermons/) [The second is here.](https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/between-sermons-ii/) [The third](https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/between-sermons-iii/)[ is here.](https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/between-sermons-iii/)