> ## 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. # What looks back - URL: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/what-looks-back/ - Published: 2026-03-08T13:20:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-06T19:54:53.000Z - Description: I find myself standing at the edge more than usual this week, trying to read it. The heron is already back at its post, unbothered by the ambiguity. It simply stands in whatever the pond is, and waits. - Author: Gideon L. K. Pollach - Tags: ep-8, ep-08 The snow is mostly gone, but the pond hasn't quite decided what it wants to be. Not ice, not open water — something in between, gray and uncertain, the kind of landscape that makes you long for resolution in either direction. Colder, so it would commit. Warmer, so it would open. Instead it just sits there, neither one thing nor the other, waiting. I find myself standing at the edge more than usual this week, trying to read it. The heron is already back at its post, unbothered by the ambiguity. It simply stands in whatever the pond is, and waits. I've been carrying a story since a week away with my family — Cancun, just before the storms. A rector returning from a tropical vacation to preach about Lent requires some explaining. Bear with me. We spent time near the Gulf watching birds I didn't recognize. Magnificent frigatebirds riding thermals without a wingbeat. Brown pelicans folding into dives with improbable elegance. And then a dove landed near me and I thought: I know you. Mourning dove. Familiar, common, a bird I've watched my whole life. Except it wasn't. It was a Eurasian collared-dove — a cousin, nearly identical, carrying its own history across a different ocean. I had stopped looking because I thought I already knew what I was seeing. The pond has been teaching me this all winter, and apparently I needed a reminder from a bird in Mexico. The moment that stayed with me most, though, wasn't the frigatebirds. It was a grackle. Great-tailed, iridescent, bold — the grackles at that café had learned that tourists mean corn chips, and they worked the tables with cheerful confidence. All of them except one. This one kept approaching and stopping. Approaching, stopping. Coming back. Leaving again. I couldn't figure out what was different until I realized: we had made eye contact. The others were stealing from furniture. This one was stealing from a person, and apparently that changed everything. We watched each other for a long time. He kept leaving. He kept coming back. And then, eventually, he didn't come back. The wariness won. I've been thinking about that grackle ever since, because I think I know that feeling. The approach and the retreat. The longing to be close and the fear of being truly seen. Lent is the season that names this — the slow, sometimes painful process of allowing ourselves to be known. Not the version of ourselves we manage and present, but the actual creature at the table, caught in the act of being exactly who we are. What strikes me is the asymmetry. The grackle was wary of me. But I was not wary of the grackle. I wasn't there to take anything. I would have been glad if he'd stayed. I would have been happy to share the corn chips. He made the day more pleasant just by being there — approaching, retreating, working up his courage, all of it. He didn't need to perform or earn the chip. I just liked his company. The wilderness God — the one who travels with Israel through the desert, who accompanies Jesus through forty days of exposure and temptation — is not a wary God. The tradition keeps insisting on this, even when we find it hard to believe: this is a God who looks on us with something closer to adoration than judgment. Who sees us clearly, all the way down, and does not leave. Who watches us approach and retreat and approach again, and finds our company pleasant. Who would gladly share the table, if we'd stay. The heron is back at the pond's edge as I write this. The snow is gone but the water hasn't opened yet. And somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico, I imagine, a grackle is working a café table, approaching strangers, leaving, coming back. Learning, in his own way, that the gaze he fears might be the one that sets him free. Lent is the season of learning to stay. **A Prayer:** God of the wilderness and the watching, you see us more clearly than we see ourselves — and do not look away. You have traveled every desert we have crossed and you are not surprised by what you find there. Teach us to remain in your gaze without flinching; to be known without fleeing; to receive your patient, adoring attention as the gift it truly is. May we be less like the grackle who finally stops returning, and more like the one who discovers, one approach at a time, that the presence across the table is not a threat but a welcome. Through Christ, who looked at Peter in the courtyard and did not say a word, and whose look was not condemnation but the most unbearable tenderness. Amen.