On Saturday, our Vestry gathered for a half-day retreat in the St. Francis Garden at Old North. The sun was shining, the conversation was lively, and our focus was only occasionally broken by the combination of babbling tourists, falling acorns from the oak tree over our heads, and the hour-long bell-ringing practice taking place just next door. The Very Rev. Amy McCreath, Dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, led us in a reflection that opened with a line from a poem by farmer and poet Wendell Berry: “What we need is here.”

It comes from Berry’s poem, “Wild Geese”:

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

“What we need is here,” Berry writes. And it’s true for us as well. We begin a new growing season again this fall, after a few strange, fallow years. Something more like a normal church year has begun again, but we are not the same church we were. We’ve said goodbye to some members who’ve moved away and “gone west,” and some whose names now “rest on graves.” And we’re getting to know some new folks who’ve joined us this summer and fall. We’ve said goodbye to some old parts of our worship and community life, and begun new traditions, too.

It’s tempting to try to recapture what we’ve lost in these past few years. It’s tempting, too, to try to predict the future, to try to “find the tree that stands in promise” in the seeds of the present. But Berry calls us, again and again, to be like those wild geese passing overhead, whose “abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way.”

“What we need is here.” Here, at St. John’s. Here, in Charlestown and Somerville and Cambridge and the North End. Here, in the community gathered in the presence of God. Dean Amy invited us to look at our church and our community with new eyes, trying to imagine how the community could bless the church and how we could in turn be a blessing to the community.

Not in the past, before those names we name went west. Not in the future, when the seed has finally unfurled. But now, with our journey incomplete; halfway through our horseback ride, halfway through our wild-goose chase, in the “sharp sweet of summer’s end.”

We’ll be looking, this year, for ways to appreciate what God is doing here and now, in our lives and in Charlestown. May we pray for the grace to pay attention: “to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear.”

What we need is here.