Swimming in the Ocean of Love

A Sermon for Sunday, July 20, 2025 for Emmanuel Church, Dublin, NH.

The Reverend Gideon L. K. Pollach

I want to tell you about a moment that is changing how I see everything. It happened in Cold Spring Harbor on an October morning in 2023 after a storm. As I walked across the bridge that crosses over the spillway in the middle of our century old dam holding our lake back from the harbor I heard something unusual. As I looked, I immediately knew something was wrong. One wooden board from our wooden weir was missing—washed away in the night—and St. John's Pond had dropped ten inches of depth across its 14 acres.

My first instinct was purely practical. This was a maintenance problem, right? Call the insurance company. Hire a contractor. Replace the board. How complicated could one missing piece of wood be? Did I have to call someone about the water? Who would that be?

As the months unfolded, that missing board became my teacher.  I taught me about dam safety, about hydrology, and about limnology - or lake science. When it gradually became clear that I was in over my head, I finally brought in consultants who helped me see and our buildings and grounds team the bigger picture—literally from above—through drone photographs that revealed our pond wasn't an isolated water feature but part of a vast watershed connecting thousands of upstream properties to Cold Spring Harbor and ultimately to Long Island Sound. Turns out, I wasn't just maintaining a picturesque church amenity—I was stewarding a crucial link in a hydrological chain that connected untold numbers of people to the sea.

That missing board is teaching me the difference between focusing on structures and seeing systems. I had been looking at a broken dam when I should have been seeing a living watershed. Just like the little fish in Anthony de Mello's famous parable. Do you know it?

In that parable, a young fish swims up to an older fish and asks, "Excuse me, can you tell me where to find the thing they call the ocean?" The older fish replies gently, "The ocean is the thing you are in now." "Oh, this?" the young fish responds dismissively. "This, this is water. What I'm seeking is the ocean," and swims away, disappointedly, searching elsewhere.

Later in the same parable, DeMello continues, a seeker in saffron robes comes to a renowned teacher and says, "For years I have been seeking God. I have sought him everywhere—on mountain peaks, in the vastness of the desert, in the silence of the cloister, in the dwellings of the poor." The teacher asks, "Have you found him?" "No," comes the reply. "Have you?"

What could the teacher say? Wordlessly, he looked around them, the evening sun was sending shafts of golden light into the room. Hundreds of sparrows were twittering on a nearby banyan tree. In the distance, one could hear the sound of distant traffic between towns. A mosquito droned a warning that it was going to strike. And yet this man could sit there and say he had not found God.

After a while, he left, disappointed, to search elsewhere.

"Stop searching, little fish," the older fish had said. "There isn't anything to look for. All you have to do is open your eyes."

This morning in his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul offers us one of the most cosmic visions in all of scripture. He writes: Jesus "is the image of the invisible God." He is "the firstborn of all creation; for in [Christ] all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible…" Christ "himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

St. Paul is trying to help us see the ocean we're swimming in.

As theologian Richard Rohr teaches, Christ isn't just the historical Jesus who walked in Galilee—Christ is the divine reality through which all creation exists and is sustained.

Like that little fish, you and I keep looking for God "somewhere else"—in dramatic experiences, in perfect spiritual practices. But St. Paul is saying something more radical: the very medium we exist in, the invisible connections that sustain all life—this is where Christ is found.

We are swimming in an ocean of interconnection.  And that ocean is held together by divine love.

Here's where our Gospel reading meets that cosmic reality. Martha welcomes Jesus into her home and immediately gets busy: preparing, serving, and making perfect preparations for the presence that's already present. Meanwhile, Mary simply sits at Jesus's feet and listens. Martha, understandably frustrated, asks Jesus to tell Mary to help.

Jesus's response is gentle but clear: "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part."

Martha is like the little fish, swimming furiously around looking for the ocean while already swimming in it. Mary has discovered what the wise fish knows: the ocean is what you're swimming in now. She's chosen to stop rushing about and simply rest into the divine presence that surrounds them all.

"There is need of only one thing," Jesus says. Not more activity, not more preparation, not more searching. The one thing necessary is recognition—the shift from seeking to seeing, from working to prepare for divine revelation to resting into the revelation that is already on view to us in this moment.

As we near the end of July, these last weeks of summer together invite us into a different question. Not "What spiritual breakthrough might we find together?" but "How do we recognize the ocean of love we've been swimming in all along?"

A few weeks ago, I talked with you about BlueGreen spirituality and the rhythm of returning to places that restore us. All summer we've been exploring spiritual practices that restore us, about learning to see differently. If our earlier conversation was about finding our own Jordan, today's invitation goes deeper: recognizing that we're already swimming in an ocean of divine love.

What DeMello understood—what that spiritual guide surrounded by golden light and sparrows knew—is that divine presence isn't hidden from view. Our minds are just closed to it. We've trained ourselves to look past the very things that would reveal the sacred ocean we're swimming in.

This spring, I put into practice what we've been discovering together—that patient attention to the marriage of water and earth, and the way it teaches about generosity and abundance.

Let me tell you about four very special trees that grow outside my office in Cold Spring Harbor. They are Amelanchiers—serviceberry trees. Trees that Robin Kimmerer writes about so beautifully in her little book "The Serviceberry."

Most of the year, these four trees simply grace the edge of our bluestone patio with elegant arms upstretched toward the heavens, providing shade and beauty before the doors to our parish hall.

But for one week each year, when their fruit ripens, these trees become a revelation.

This spring, I made time to really attend to that week. I don't usually make that time—I'm usually too busy rushing past those trees to meetings, checking my phone, probably composing sermons in my head about paying attention to creation while completely ignoring the creation right in front of me.

That irony hasn't been lost on Wood, who's been patiently trying to teach me about the gift of attending to birds for years. But this year, I gathered with Wood, an artist friend named Nick, who is creating a sculpture for our meditation garden just off that patio, and, together, we took a moment just to sit and watch. We sat on a bench together opposite the amalanchiers, as I asked them to help me witness what was happening.

What followed was hours of wonder that taught me something new about the spiritual gift that we've been exploring together.

Robins, orioles, scarlet tanagers, cedar waxwings—songbirds of every kind descended on those branches. Birds that had been invisible to us all year suddenly became our visible neighbors, filling the air with wings and song and an almost ecstatic joy.

I couldn’t name them all, but Wood could, sharing his knowledge with the delight that comes from having someone finally pay attention to what you've always loved. Nick watched with an artist's eye, seeing patterns and movements that would later inform his sculpture.

For that one week, I practiced what I’ve  been preaching: paying attention to how water and earth work together to create healing beauty. Watching those trees, placed by our pond, taught me about God's profligate generosity, about creation's orientation toward fruitfulness and abundance—abundance so overwhelming that when the berries overripen, the birds actually get drunk and have to sit on the ground until they sober up—a kind of holy intoxication with the goodness of creation.

I don't know if those same birds are there all year, or if something draws them to this particular place when the berries ripen—some ancient wisdom about timing and abundance that I'm only beginning to glimpse. What I do know is that the trees were always beautiful, always hospitable, always generous. I just hadn't taken the time, or gathered the right companions to help me notice.

This is the art of appreciating and attending that both Mary in the Gospel of Luke and the practice of BlueGreen Spirituality are teaching us: to see the invisible connections that hold everything together.

When we sit quietly and notice "the space between things"—the air that connects us all, the water cycle that links every living being, the way our breath mingles with what trees release—we're practicing the same devotion to the moment that Mary chose. We are making time and space holy by our Christ-soaked attention. We're learning to see the ocean of divine grace and love that we've been swimming in all along.

When we truly see this—when we stop looking for the ocean and recognize we're swimming in it—our attention to creation moves us toward reverence. We learn to appreciate differently—not just to the spectacular moments of revelation, but to the extraordinary ordinary connections that sustain all life.

Like those drone photographs whose new perspective revealed our watershed, the serviceberry week showed me that the sacred connections we've been talking about are always present—we just need to stop rushing past them long enough to notice.

This kind of spiritual appreciation changes how we move through the world. We begin to see our daily choices as opportunities to honor the sacred web we're part of. The cosmic coherence of our connected lives. Not because we have to save the planet, but because we finally recognized that this whole planet—this intricate community of water and earth and air—is constantly saving us.

Jesus says to Martha—and to all of us caught up in worried distraction—that there's another way. Not the exhausted collapse that comes from endless searching, but the profound rest that comes from finally recognizing we're already home.

This is the kind of rest that God modeled on the seventh day of creation. Scripture tells us that God rested—not from exhaustion, but to enjoy and delight in what had been created. God's rest was holy communion with the goodness of creation, a sacred pause to savor what was already complete and beautiful.

Mary chose this same kind of rest. She wasn't being lazy while Martha worked—she was participating in holy rest, the sacred pause that allows us to receive and delight in God's constant presence rather than frantically preparing or searching for it. Divine grace is providentially prepared for people propelled to pause.

There's something flowers and trees understand that we've forgotten. Watch a tree—rooted and unmoving, yet fully alive, receiving what it needs without striving. The oaks outside these windows don't anxiously search for sunlight; they simply open their leaves to receive what's already being offered. They rest in their being, fulfilling their purpose without hurry or worry.

This is the rest Jesus offers—not just relief from our busyness, but the deeper recognition that we can stop frantically trying to find God "somewhere else" and learn to receive the divine presence that surrounds us like air, like water, like the very ground that holds us up. And when we do, it restores us, heals us, and expands our capacity for loving attention.

This summer has been an invitation into this rhythm of sacred rest—not just vacation from our usual routines, but holy communion with the abundance that surrounds us in every moment, every breath, every connection between water and earth and life.

This week, I invite you to practice the older fish's wisdom: stop searching for the ocean you're already swimming in. Instead, simply look.

In our deepest moments of rest, we discover what was always true: we are held by an infinite love that permeates all creation. The little fish doesn't need to find the ocean—the little fish needs to realize they're already home.

The ocean of God's love surrounds us in every breath, every connection, every invisible thread that binds creation together. All we have to do is look, and rest, and know that we are already swimming in the heart of divine love. Amen