> ## 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. # Wild Geese - URL: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/wild-geese/ - Published: 2026-04-26T13:31:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-06T19:52:30.000Z - Description: The matter at hand, specifically, is one goose. He appeared about ten days ago and claimed the path between the rectory and the church. Not the pond. Not the grass. The pathway. He is large, he is certain, and he has made his position on foot traffic abundantly clear - Author: Gideon L. K. Pollach - Tags: ep-15 Last week the temperatures pushed into the eighties. This Sunday it will be forty-two degrees with 100% chance or rain. Cold Spring Harbor in late April does not ease you into anything. The pond edge garden is coming up despite everything. Despite the deer. Despite, and I want to be precise here, the geese. Something in the ground is determined to grow, and it has been making its case quietly while the rest of us have been distracted by other matters. The matter at hand, specifically, is one goose. He appeared about ten days ago and claimed the path between the rectory and the church. Not the pond. Not the grass. The pathway. The narrow strip of ground we walk on each morning to get to my own church. He is large, he is certain, and he has made his position on foot traffic abundantly clear. I have learned to make myself large when I approach. To wave my arms. To make sounds that I hope convey authority. This week I started carrying a stick. The rector of a church, armed with a stick, making himself as large as possible, attempting to project confidence he does not entirely feel, just trying to get to the office for morning prayer. I will admit this is not the pastoral image I had in mind when I took this call. And then he charged Peyton. She and Byrd were moving through the path, and he came at her, wings out, neck low, the full display, hissing. She ran, she fell. She came home crying, with bleeding legs and band-aids and a sister who had somehow made it through unscathed, which I'm sure was very comforting. Then she dried her eyes and went to choir practice. That's the whole story. That's my couragueous and wonderful daughter. All of this made me think of Mary Oliver. She is never far from mind, but particularly if her poem “ Wild Geese.” It has this memorable opening: you do not have to be good.” Truth. The poem goes on to become one of the most generous poems in the English language — about how you don’t have to spend your life repenting, but only have to let yourself love what you love. That’s a very generous idea. Maybe too generous for our pathway terrorist and garden ripper. Anyway, I'd encourage you to hear her read it herself — I've linked to a recording below. Back to the Goose. This goose has taken that first part quite literally. Apparently, he has chosen not to be good. At least not to us, and particularly not to Peyton. And yet, I suspect from where he is standing — from the perspective of whatever is waiting in a nest nearby — he is being nothing but good. We simply tread on someone else's sacred ground. In our tradition, we speak of Jesus not only as the Christ, but as the Good Shepherd. A shepherd is called to do many hard things. To keep the sheep together. To move them along. To stand up for them in the night. It is not a soft image, whatever the stained glass suggests. The Good Shepherd knows the sheep by name and may lay down his life for them. That's a love that is not soft but total. Where the path is held not to keep you out, but because something irreplaceable is being held there. And, in our tradition, Jesus gave his life for ours. Not out of pity, or as a debt, but to show us the depths of God's love for us. That goose has not moderated his position because I started carrying a stick. He has not reconsidered his approach because the neighbors are inconvenienced. He knows what he is guarding, and he has not drifted from it by a single inch. There is something very clarifying about a creature who, facing a regular barrage of outrage from forces far bigger than anything he can muster, armed with weapons designed to frighten, simply does not become something else. On Thursday night, Peyton picked herself up from teh ground, dried her eyes and went to choir practice. Same direction. Same person. Same song. Mary Oliver ends her poem with the wild geese calling to us "harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things." The geese of her poem are gentle heralds. The one on my path is not gentle. But he is, in his way, announcing the same thing. The Good Shepherd, as best I understand him, is not primarily a figure of gentleness. He is a figure of fierce, complete, and unsentimental devotion. The door is open. The path is held. You do not have to be good to walk it. But you may have to get up from the ground. **A Prayer:** God of the guarded path and the open gate — fierce in what you tend, gentle in how you hold — teach us to receive your protection without mistaking your ferocity for rejection. Give us the grace to see, in whatever blocks our path, the love that will not stand aside because it cannot afford to lose what it holds. With Christ, who stands at the door and knows us each by name — and who, when we fall on the way, is already there before we arrive. Amen.