June 5, 2024
A Note from Pastor April & Mary Oliver
Dear Friends,
Yes, I know we aren’t “technically” fully into the season of summer until the 20th of June, but I can’t help but feel the shift in the season as soon as school lets out.
Amid busyness and vacations and summer rhythms, I invite you to take some space and enjoy this classic Mary Oliver poem.
May there be room for us to notice the small grasshoppers and the very real presence of God… right in our midst.
The Summer Day
By Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
[Credit: Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” in Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), p316.]
The Rev. April Blaine
Lead Pastor
