Seven Times in the Jordan
The Reverend Gideon L. K. Pollach, Sunday, July 6, 2025
This is a double-digit summer coming to Dublin. Maybe tenth, maybe eleventh - I've lost count.
Each time I've returned here, I've been carrying something heavy: Two bishop elections that left me wondering not just about my calling, but about my worth. Sarah's cancer fight that taught us how quickly everything we think we control can slip away. Years when I felt spiritually and professionally stuck, when prayer felt like shouting into an empty sky, when I wondered if God had simply... moved on without me.
And each time I've returned to Dublin lake - sometimes angry, sometimes broken, always overpacked, always carrying more than I thought I could bear - something about this place has slowly, patiently, restored what felt irretrievably lost. Not dramatically, not all at once. More like... well, more like Naaman's seven trips into the muddy Jordan.
Maybe you know this feeling. Maybe you've driven up 101 carrying your own heavy things - job loss, relationship struggles, the particular loneliness that comes from feeling like everyone else has figured out how to be happy and you're still learning.
Maybe it's the exhaustion of living in a country where politics has become our primary identity, where we've forgotten how to be neighbors before we're partisans.
Maybe it's the weight of watching our nation struggle with the same brokenness we carry in our own hearts - the quick anger, the failure to listen, the impulse to choose sides rather than seek understanding.
We arrive here this 4th of July weekend carrying not just our personal burdens, but a kind of collective worry about what we've become as a people.
We come seeking something. Maybe a way forward that doesn't require us to carry the weight of healing an entire nation and through it the world.
Maybe you've felt that same restoration, that sense of coming home to yourself, as you see this church, or that lake or Monadnock appear through the trees. A moment when your shoulders drop and something tight in your chest starts to loosen.
What are we looking for? A dramatic spiritual intervention? A clear voice from heaven telling us what to do next?
Naaman's story reminds us of something we already know: healing rarely looks like the way we expect.
Naaman was a powerful man - commander of the Syrian army, used to getting what he wanted through force and spectacle. When leprosy threatened everything he'd built, he came to the prophet Elisha expecting VIP treatment, dramatic gestures, and immediate results.
Instead, Elisha doesn't even come to the door. He sends a servant with the most ordinary prescription imaginable: "Go wash in the Jordan seven times."
Naaman's rage is understandable: "Are not the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel?" The Jordan wasn't impressive - just muddy, ordinary water flowing through contested territory.
But his servants asked the question that cuts through our resistance: "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, 'Wash, and be clean'?"
Like Naaman many of us resist simple practices because they feel too ordinary to be transformative.
This weekend, we arrive here carrying the accumulated weight of another exhausting year - whether personal struggles or the general anxiety that seems to permeate everything, including our political discourse. We're looking for healing, for restoration, for some sense that God is still present and active in our lives.
And like Naaman, we expect it to look impressive. Dramatic. Worthy of the magnitude of our need.
But notice something crucial about Naaman's healing: it wasn’t that dramatic. All it required was several holy elements working together.
The water of the Jordan AND the specific earth of that place. Not just any water would do. It had to be that water, flowing through that earth, in that particular watershed. The healing happened in the relationship between water and earth - the blue flowing through the green, the green channeling the blue.
This echoes something profound in today's Gospel. Jesus sent his disciples out with nothing - "Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals" - telling them to rely on what was already present: the hospitality around them, the peace that would return to them, the healing that would flow through them. Everything we need for healing is already present - around us, beneath us, beside us, falling down upon us like the rains that water the earth.
Seven times in the Jordan. Not once for dramatic effect, but seven times for transformation through sustained relationship with place.
Let me offer you a spiritual lens I call BlueGreen spirituality - it’s a recognition that our spiritual lives are intimately connected to water and earth, the fundamental sources of all life and healing.
Water and earth need each other. Earth without water becomes dust. Water without earth becomes f lood. Together - water soaking into soil, earth channeling water - they create the conditions for all life.
This is instructive for our souls. We need both the flowing movement of spirit (the blue) AND the grounding foundation of practice and place (the green). Too much flow without grounding and we become scattered, anxious. Too much grounding without flow and we become rigid, stagnant. Fullness of life requires a sacred balance of supple flexibility and spiritual grounding.
What’s more- Our spiritual health is linked to creation's health. When we pay spiritual attention to how water and earth work together in our own lives, we discover how healing happens - not through spiritual spectacle, but through faithful attention to the blue-green foundation that sustains all life.
This is exactly what Naaman discovered: healing through the marriage of water and earth, through sustained relationship with the actual place where he found himself.
Fullness of life requires a sacred balance of supple flexibility, and spiritual grounding.
Here's what I've learned in my ten plus summers returning to Dublin: We create rituals without knowing it because our spirits are drawn to pattern, to healing, to transformation, and to our God.
The artists who founded the Dublin Art Colony understood this instinctively. Abbott Thayer arrived in 1888 and spent the rest of his life painting Mount Monadnock - not once or twice, but hundreds of times. He saw something in this particular marriage of water and earth that demanded his sustained attention. George de Forest Brush, Frank Benson, Barry Faulkner - they all returned, summer after summer, to paint the same mountain reflected in the same lake.
And then there was Joseph Lindon Smith, who made fifty trips to Egypt to paint the walls of ancient tombs, but kept returning here to Dublin Lake for fifty summers. He was president of the Dublin Lake Club for almost half a century. You can still see his paintings when you pick up your mail at the post office - "Zephyrus" and "Flora," painted for a Garden Club flower show in 1930, still greeting visitors nearly a century later.
Smith understood something profound about the rhythm of return.
He would spend months in the Valley of the Kings - ironically, near the very Jordan River where Naaman found healing - carefully copying the art of ancient civilizations. But for his own restoration, he needed to return here, to Dublin Lake, to this mountain, to his particular watershed where healing and beauty intersect. Even working beside the biblical Jordan wasn't enough - he needed THIS water, THIS place where his soul could be restored.
He knew that even those called to work in far places need their own Jordan to return to - a specific sanctuary of water and earth that refreshes their soul.
These artists drew our attention to this place by founding an artists' colony and painting Monadnock again and again. The Dublin artists knew what our souls forget: beauty multiplies by returning again, not by moving on.
They weren't repeating themselves. They were doing what Naaman did - returning seven times, and seven times seven, to the place where healing and beauty intersected. Each return revealed something new about the light, the water, the way earth holds sky.
They knew what our souls know: that sustained relationship with a particular place - this lake, this mountain, this specific watershed - becomes a gateway to transformation.
Think about your own life. What are the practices you return to when you're depleted? Maybe it's a particular chair where you drink your morning coffee. Maybe it's a walk you take when you need to think. Maybe it's this lake, this church, this weekend ritual of coming to this church and thus community that the artists' legacy helped create.
These practices aren't accidents. They are your soul's wisdom showing you where your Jordan is - where the marriage of water and earth creates the conditions for your particular healing.
The rhythm of our lives reveals the needs of our souls. We are drawn, again and again, to the places and practices that restore us because something in us knows what we need, even when our conscious minds are looking for more dramatic solutions.
Naaman's servants understood this: "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?" But healing rarely requires us to do something heroic and unfamiliar. It requires us to pay spiritual attention to what we're already drawn to do.
So here's the invitation as we enter another summer, another season of returning to the places that restore us:
Stop looking for impressive spiritual rivers in Damascus. Start attending to your own Jordan - the ordinary places that refresh your soul.
What if the practices you already return to became conscious spiritual practices? What if the ordinary rhythms that already sustain you became pathways to paying attention to the water-earth foundation of your life?
You don't need to add more to your life. You need to see what's already there with Blue Green eyes - to recognize that your ordinary life is already overflowing with opportunities to attend to your soul with deep appreciation of where you already are.
Your soul is a master cartographer - it's been mapping your way home for years. Your soul, this place, and our God provide all that you need for healing, renewal and restoration.
And as each of us finds healing in our own Jordan - as we learn to pay attention to the watershed where we already are, as we practice the patient return to what restores us - something larger begins to shift. Not through grand political gestures or dramatic interventions, but through the quiet accumulation of healed souls learning again how to be neighbors, how to listen, how to see each other as fellow travelers rather than enemies.
This is how nations heal - not all at once, but seven times seven, one soul at a time, as people discover they don't need to carry the weight of fixing everything and can instead tend faithfully to the particular place where God has planted them.
The question is: Will you go there seven times? Will you return with the kind of sustained, patient attention that allows transformation to happen? Will you let the rhythm of your life become a conscious spiritual practice?
This summer, as you return to whatever restores you - whether it's this lake, this church, this mountain shaped by millennia of rains, or some other place where water and earth meet in your life - pay attention. Notice. Return again. Let the blue-green foundation of all life teach you how healing actually happens.
Not through drama, but through devotion to the everyday.
Because the truth Naaman discovered in the Jordan is the same truth we discover here in Dublin, and the same truth you can discover wherever your particular watershed calls you home: Healing comes not from the perfect place we're seeking, but from the ordinary place where we're standing.
Seven times in the Jordan. Again and again and again, until the ordinary becomes extraordinary, until paying attention becomes prayer, until the rhythm of our lives becomes the pathway to God.
May you listen to your soul's invitation to bathe in God’s presence then return home to yourself, restored, renewed, refreshed, and healed through Gods abundant grace. Amen
