Always We Begin Again

“I said the donkey.” That was the first line of the children’s lesson this Sunday, Palm Sunday, a lovely story about the donkey who carried Jesus into Jerusalem. I did not hear another word of it. I was back in time with another donkey, the one who carried Jesus into Bethlehem to be born. In this memory, I was about 10, the year I had a solo in the Christmas pageant. Our song was “The Friendly Beasts” a carol that allows each animal in turn to share the story of how she or he aided the holy family on the night of the birth of Jesus. My verse went like this:

I, said the donkey shaggy and brown.

I carried his mother uphill and down,

I carried his mother to Bethlehem town,

I,  said the donkey, shaggy and brown.

I had practiced this song for weeks, picturing the friendly beast in my mind, a dependable sturdy animal with a soulful gaze. I was ready, but when the performance began, something went wrong. Maybe it was a bit of stage fright. I began the first line just fine but for some reason I repeated it again. I looked over at my director, my eyes wide with alarm, but she somehow signaled for me to keep going, and I did, finished it off pretty well, and then the next kid stood up and I sat down, mortified.

I cried in the car on the way home, and moped for days. “You’re being ridiculous,” my mother said, finally, impatient with my extended suffering. “No one even noticed.” She was probably right. I stumbled, but since I kept going, and the organist managed to keep up with me, it is probably the case that almost no one realized I had made an error. And even if they had, their response was most likely sympathetic. But I was abject. I have never been good, then or since, at making mistakes.

But yesterday it occurred to me for the first time that maybe if someone had noticed my mistake, they also noticed that I didn’t stop. Maybe a few people thought, good for her, sticking with it. Maybe I could be a tiny bit proud for that. Maybe instead of having been the symbol of ineptitude, I was, for the few that noticed, another kind of sign, of vulnerability and resilience.

It has been months since I have had the time or creativity to write this blog and I have considered just forgetting the whole thing a few times. But I was really inspired by a story a friend told me last week. She shared that she had tried many times to keep a journal, and she would buy a new journal and begin faithfully to make entries for a few weeks, and then the entries would dwindle and tail off. She said she had a stack of journals that each had only a few weeks worth of entries. I suppose she thinks of this as a failure of some kind, a mistake. But really, what a lovely sign of faithfulness, that she keeps returning to the practice of journaling with hope, she keeps buying new journals to represent her fresh start. That stack of journals is a testament of deep commitment, of vulnerability and hope, like a sturdy beast with a soulful gaze, in whose steps I will try to walk.

This photo of the Etowah River is the one with which I first launched this river-loving blog. Though I seem to have misplaced the source, thanks go to all the generous photographers who share their work.