Sunday Reflections & BlueGreen Theology

Dear friends at Emmanuel,

You know me from the pulpit. This is something a little different.

For the past several months, I've been producing a weekly series called Sunday Reflections: What the Pond Can Teach Us — short meditations that use the natural world as a lens for the things that matter most. Each piece runs about four or five minutes to read, closes with a prayer, and tries to say something true about what it means to pay attention.

This week I'm writing to you from Dublin Lake, where I've been watching a bald eagle that has lived in the pines on Loon Point for the better part of two years now. The reflection below is about that eagle — and about what happens to wonder when the remarkable becomes ordinary.

I'll be sending occasional pieces like this one. If they're useful to you, I'm glad. If they're not what you're looking for, there's no obligation at all — you can unsubscribe at any time using the link below.

Either way: thank you for the privilege of your pulpit, and for the welcome you've given me every summer.

With gratitude,

Gideon

Dublin Lake: The Eagle's Ordinary Majesty

I stood on the beach yesterday at Dublin Lake with the kind of perfect summer light you don't get to keep for long. The breeze was coming off the water, warm and steady, the sky that particular shade of blue that only New England seems to know how to make, and the clouds, actual marshmallow clouds, the kind my Byrd would point at and name: cumulonimbus. 

We're bracing for a heat wave later in the week, so everyone understands, without saying it, that this is the moment. This is why we came.

And there, in the top of one of the pines on Loon Point, was the bald eagle.

I've watched this eagle now for a couple of years. It arrived as an event, a sighting, a rarity, the kind of thing you tell people about at dinner. People drove to the lake to see it. But somewhere in the last eighteen months, it stopped being an event. It became a companion. It's there most days now, in that same pine, doing eagle things, sitting, watching, occasionally spreading those massive wings. And something shifted in me without my noticing it shift.

I turned to someone else on the beach and asked, "Do you think the eagle is still majestic, or are we over it?"

I couldn't hear their answer. A pair of Harleys was making their way around the lake, loud enough to swallow conversation, loud enough to swallow thought. The person I'd asked looked at me, smiled, and said something back. What I heard was: "We're over it."

Maybe they meant the motorcycles. Maybe they meant the eagle. Maybe they meant something else entirely. The noise had already made the distinction impossible.

I don't know if the eagle is still majestic. I know that I see it now the way I see the water or the trees, with love, with attention, but without the voltage of surprise. The sacred has become ordinary. Habituation is a kind of loss. But it might also be a kind of homecoming. The eagle doesn't perform majesty for my benefit. It simply is. And for two years now, I've been learning to see what simply is without needing it to be rare to matter.

But I still wanted to ask the question. I still wanted someone to hear me. I wanted the answer to mean something.

The Harleys made that impossible. They made it impossible to ask. And maybe that's the real question, not whether the eagle is still majestic, but whether we still have ears to hear the question at all. Whether the noise of the world hasn't already swallowed the very possibility of majesty, ordinary or otherwise.

I stood there in the perfect light, watching the eagle in the pine, listening to the Harleys fade around the bend. The eagle didn't move. The clouds still looked like marshmallows. The breeze was still warm. And I was still standing there, asking a question no one could hear.

A Prayer:

Almighty God, you have given us creatures whose beauty does not diminish with knowing, whose majesty rests not on our surprise but on their simply being: Grant us the grace to see what is before us, the eagle in the pine, the water at our feet, the ordinary light of an ordinary day, and to recognize in them your presence, whether we are moved to wonder or moved to nothing at all. And teach us, even when the noise of the world makes the question impossible to ask, to ask it anyway. Through Christ, who dwelt among us in flesh, became knowable, and yet remains, even after all this time, a deep mystery that no familiarity can exhaust. Amen.