As we continue in the season of Easter, Madeleine George reflects on a poem by Mary Oliver:
The Poet thinks about the Donkey
On the outskirts of Jerusalem
the donkey waited.
Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,
he stood and waited.
How horses, turned out into the meadow,
leap with delight!
How doves, released from their cages,
clatter away, splashed with sunlight.
But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.
Then he let himself be led away.
Then he let the stranger mount.
Never had he seen such crowds!
And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.
Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.
I hope, finally, he felt brave.
I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,
as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.
—————————————————————————————————————————
Mary Oliver’s “The Poet Thinks About the Donkey” is a Holy Week staple where I come from. Preceding the joy of Easter, but also the somberness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, Jesus’ final journey into Jerusalem is as bittersweet as it is storied. The people gather, in celebration, wave their palm fronds, relish that their eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. Jesus, of course, knows he’s riding in on a one-way ticket.
Holy Week and Easter alike tend to have this effect, I have found: it reminds us, in the annual machinations of the church calendar– the images and rituals and traditions– that we are but a very small part of a very big story, indeed. Background actors in the Greatest Story Ever Told, part of the mass, anonymous recipients of the Greatest Gift Ever Given. It can be difficult, sometimes, to remember the perfect and absolute humanity of Jesus in these first weeks of spring as the long night of winter ends and the Earth shudders off her final sheets of ice and darkness. It can be hard to remember that His sacrifice, painful and bloody, was made for us, for all of us, and not just in the form of a crowd or the behemoth idea of ‘humankind’. Jesus’ message, His teaching, His offering, are as individual and singular and intimate as He Himself was– as each of us are.
Oliver doesn’t let us forget that in her unassuming, delicately powerful poem. We are invited to walk with the two of them, the donkey and the Son of Man, not just through the triumphant and jubilant city, but through the motions of preparation, of anticipation. Was Jesus nervous, to be at the center of such a massive celebration? The donkey certainly was. The analogy of man: God :: horse: man, a parallel drawn by theologians and equestrians alike for centuries, certainly excludes our faithful and steadfast friend. What the donkey might lack in pomp or grace is made up for by an enduring patience and a steady faith: perhaps lacking the details, he nevertheless has ‘kept awake’, has listened intently, is prepared to answer the call. I have no doubt that while the disciples, utterly, devastatingly human, slept in the garden, the donkey, across town, lifted his eyes to the night sky, perhaps unaware of the reason behind his own wakefulness, but amazed at so many stars all the same.
Where Oliver is world-renowned for the power and poignance and overwhelming beauty of her poetry, it has never once been at the expense of clarity or simplicity: Oliver aligns us with the donkey, bolstering us for the times of our own asinine doubts. There are days, surely, when we feel like the horse, delightful and elegant and full of proud, important grace. Or like the dove– filled with purpose and poise, paragons of virtue and symbolism. But there are times, she knows, perhaps more often, when we will feel like the donkey: small, unimportant, not particularly well informed or well made. Moments when we feel like we are being asked to walk the divine path laid out for us without understanding its significance, without being prepared for the Holy tasks set before us for this life, without understanding the magnitude, the glory, the divine sorrow of the world we’re asked to know, to live in. Oliver urges us: journey anyway. Take the step forward anyway. Take the step scared, take the step angry, take the step unsure of who you are or whom you are carrying or towards what or why. There is courage in such tenacity, Oliver argues. There is some of the divine in those who would walk forward on the Way ignorant of the skill or grace or importance of such a walk. It is the only way. Because the donkey is as essential as Jesus in this walk: as essential as the many palm leaves waving around them, as important as the gate that opened to admit them and the stones they turned over in their journey, essential as the dust kicked up by their heels, the goblet Jesus offered a drink from, and the trunk of the tree he leaned against on his last night with us on Earth. All these things, too: indispensable players on the divine stage.
As we all are. The donkey, assured of this without the many self-doubts and self-sabotages man is prone to, continues forward on his God-given march. He marches through overwhelm and confusion, with patience and steady pace, loving, indeed, the man who rides lightly upon him, and the many people whose joyous faces turn to greet him as he walks past. He lets himself be led through a moment much bigger than he is, alongside a grace he could never fully grasp, knowing full well and resting soundly in the fact that he, too, is a part of this Story; and he keeps walking on his way.
Madeleine George
For some light relief read some genuine exam howlers here
Column Inches 