St. John’s, Cold Spring Harbor, introduces 3 digital prayer tools for the Season of Creation
St. John’s Pond with a view of Cold Spring Harbor behind.
St. John’s Episcopal Church has released three new digital prayer tools for the Season of Creation (Sept. 1 to Oct. 4), the product of a decade-long theological project developed at the edge of the parish’s own mill pond.
The tools, Praying with St. Francis, Praying with Hildegard, and A Canticle of the Birds, are free, mobile-friendly guided prayer experiences available now at bluegreentheology.org. Each invites the person praying to encounter a companion, a saint, a species, and a place, rather than to read an argument about the environment.
“For the last ten years, we have been working on something we call our BlueGreen Theology Project,” said the Rev. Gideon L. K. Pollach, rector of St. John’s. “It began with a growing unease about the language of environmental stewardship itself. Stewardship still names us as managers, however careful. What we found at the edge of our pond was something else: a posture of prayer and praise.”
The project holds that creation is not an object of wonder to be managed on God’s behalf, but a community of life already engaged in praise of its Creator. Its animating claim, developed through years of watching the watershed around St. John’s Pond, is that the church gathers inside a much larger and older company of worship, one that has continued since the creation of the universe, and that human prayer is a matter of joining a chorus already underway rather than speaking for creation or standing apart from it.
Praying with St. Francis prays the Canticle of the Sun as an encounter with Brother Sun, Sister Water, and the wider company of creation. Praying with Hildegard draws on the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s concept of viriditas, the green vigor she saw moving through the living world, moving the one praying from dryness toward greening. A Canticle of the Birds extends St. Francis’s own sermon to the birds near Bevagna into a twelve-part prayer through the birds of the parish’s own watershed, from swan and heron to osprey and eagle.
The tools grew out of the BlueGreen Theology Project, which Pollach founded and has developed for nearly a decade alongside the St. John’s Pond Watershed Alliance, a related nonprofit working to preserve and restore the historic mill pond at Cold Spring Harbor. The project’s writing, a growing archive of essays, Sunday reflections, and devotional tools, is available at bluegreentheology.org alongside a companion podcast and the site’s own catalog of prayer tools tied to the church year.
Pollach acknowledged the tools come from a particular place. “These tools come from a particular place and a particular pond, and I offer them humbly, aware that our context is not every parish’s context,” he said. “But I suspect any part of our diocese, or any parish anywhere, that has trees, birds, sun, moon, and stars may find something here worth praying with.”
St. John’s is inviting clergy and lay leaders across the Diocese of Long Island and beyond to use the tools with their own congregations this Season of Creation, and welcomes feedback on how they might be adapted for other watersheds and communities.
The tools are available now, at no cost, at:
Praying with St. Francis: https://bluegreentheology.org/Francis.html
Praying with Hildegard: https://bluegreentheology.org/Hildegard.html
A Canticle of the Birds: https://bluegreentheology.org/Birds.html
More on the BlueGreen Theology Project is available at bluegreentheology.org.
About St. John’s Episcopal Church
St. John’s Episcopal Church is located at 1670 Route 25A, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in the Diocese of Long Island.
Media Contact
The Very Rev. Gideon L. K. Pollach
Rector, St. John’s Episcopal Church
gideon@stjcsh.org
516-253-4434