A Palm Sunday donkey story
I’ve on a number of occasions, both with Allie and Chester (The long-time resident donkey at Heifer International’s Overlook Farm) been hired to provide a donkey to lead congregational promenades at Palm Sunday worship services. They usually consist of a priest or minister leading the donkey and congregation down the street a block or two to the front door of the church. As you can imagine, working with animals in new settings can easily have unpredictable results but we try to keep things safe and make the best of it.
A number of years ago I was invited to bring Chester to a church for a Palm Sunday procession in one of the affluent cities in the Greater Boston part of MA. If I remember correctly it was in Wellesley.
It was a cool spring morning and the organizers decided they didn’t want to have the congregation stand outside too long. Instead they’d have the priest lead the donkey and procession of liturgist, choir, and other participants down the center aisle at the start of the formal Episcopal service while the congregation watched and sang from their pews. Chester had done this sort of thing at previous Palm Sunday’s as well as Christmas services so I wasn’t surprised that he adeptly walked up the front steps and in the front door with only a little encouragement from me. I handed him off to the priest and stood in the back to watch.
The organist played, the congregation sang, the choir members turned off to their pew and all was going well as the procession worked their way at donkey-speed up the aisle. At the focal point, however, while the priest had paused to hand off the animal to the usher who had been designated to bring him back down the aisle, Chester excreted a pile of steaming donkey dung.
The singing stopped as jaws dropped and the congregation stared in shock. My assistant and I mobilized quickly but not necessarily efficiently as we scurried to get the donkey out of the church and ran back in with a shovel, a bucket with water, a broom and mop. All eyes were on us as we hurriedly cleaned up the smelly mess and sheepishly carried our cargo back down the center aisle. The choir, by this time, had regained their composure and continued leading the few members of the congregation who weren’t staring at us through the remaining verses of the opening song.
We were just about to the exit when the music ended and a woman from the congregation sitting front and center observing the entire scenario broke the tension and elicited a roar of laughter when she loudly proclaimed, “Now that’s what I call a gathering hymn!”
We walked the two mile hike at Harvard Forest in Petersham today. It’s a nice hike and there were very few others on it today. If you go when things are open they have some fascinating diaramas made many years ago of forest growth and succession there in the Fisher Museum. I’ve heard recently that forest succession is a little more complex than we’d previously understood but the miniature models are fascinating and are probably very accurate in their historical portrayal.
Hope you all had an uneventful Palm Sunday. Remember, the experts predict this will be a rough week but let’s be extra diligent with our social distancing and help reduce the virus count.
First photo: Best picture from the trail camera this past week.
Second photo: A picture of Allie, taken the first summer we adopted her, in a comfortable donkey setting.
