The Man with the Donkey
Write an article on St Joseph!
More than two thousand years into Christianity, what can one still write on Saint Joseph? When
numerous mystics, scholars and saintly writers have plumbed the depths of the Gospel silence to
present the husband of Mary and earthly father of Jesus to the world.
When the likes of Bernardine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Francis de Sales, Br. Andre of Mt Royal, Pope Leo
XIII, Mary MacKillop have so beautifully championed his cause over the years, what can possibly be
written now by one who is neither mystic, scholar nor saintly writer? I was finding myself at an
impasse, until, like the proverbial bolt out of the blue, I found a voice from within reproaching me:
"For almost twenty seven years of your life you have been a religious of St Joseph,
presumably steeping your life in your Josephite tradition ...“
Have you nothing to write about the man whose life and love are the inspiration of your
Congregation?" Fighting words those - what could I do but respond! However, I have done so by
simply reflecting upon the influence I see Joseph having in my own life, and upon a message I think he
bears across two thousand years to our contemporary world.
The earliest and most persistent image I have of Joseph, depicts him walking beside a donkey.
Sometimes a woman keeps him company; sometimes a woman and a tiny child fill
out the picture, for I suppose at one time the image is inspired by the Christmas
story, at another by the account of the flight into Egypt. As an adult reflecting on
these images that first took shape in my child's mind, I realize that, for a long
time now, these mental pictures have been accompanied by deepening
feelings and growing convictions that I have scarcely been conscious of. In
fact my experience of Joseph, the man, is of that man, walking quietly,
determinedly beside the woman and child whom God had entrusted to his love
and care.
And what woman over the years has not longed for the presence of such a man in her life - one whose
supportive arm would always be there, whose willingness to shoulder the responsibility of protecting
and providing for her and her children, would never falter; who would gradually nourish and deepen his
love by pondering and praying about the mysteries of each day; one who would be faithful; who,
believing in his God, would walk beside her to the ends of the earth!
It is surely significant that so many wives and mothers have walked in the company of such a man.
There was nothing seemingly extraordinary about Joseph. Might not God's special revelation through
him then, be in His actual choice of this ordinary, true-blue human being to provide the example of
manhood for His Son as though He, God, were saying, "Joseph, you're my kind of person. I would like my
Son to be the sort of human being you are." A great blow struck for the working classes here! What a
pity we so often presume that Jesus knew intuitively the best way of relating and acting; that, because
He was divine, the human tendency for a child to learn from, and model himself on his parents was
somehow suspended in His case. Yet to follow through our belief that Jesus was a genuine human
person who "became as men are" 1 is to realize a new perspective on His father, Joseph.
Where did Jesus learn the value of being compassionate, of being single-minded in living out the
commitment to His mission, of being fearless in defending the truth, of being gentle and kind, of being
silent and patient under provocation, of turning naturally to God in prayer? Does it seem unreasonable
to assume that, like so many boys before and after Him, Jesus observed admired and copied the
behaviour of His father and mother, and gradually absorbed into His own personal life, the values that
He saw mirrored in the lives of those two people who walked life with Him for so many years, and into
whose hands He must often have put His own, in a gesture of trust?
In his book "Clowning in Rome", Henri Nouwen writes:
"During these five months in Rome, it wasn't the red cardinals or the Red Brigade who
had the most impact on me, but the little things that took place between the great
scenes. I met a few students of the San Egidio community ‘wasting’ their time with
grade—school drop—outs and the elderly ... I met young men and women picking up the
drunks from the streets during the night and giving them a bed and some food ... I met
holy men and women offering their lives to others with disarming generosity. And slowly
I started to realize that in the great circus of Rome, full of lion tamers and trapeze artists
whose dazzling feats claim our attention, the real and true story was told by the clowns
Of the virtuosi we say, "How do you do it?" of the clowns we say, "They are like us." 2
And it seems it is the "little people" those who laugh and cry with one another as they grope
uncertainly from one day to the next in their uneventful lives, who can take such heart from God's
missioning of Joseph for one of the most important tasks He had asked anyone to take on.
Like a much later figure, another man with a donkey, a simple soldier who brought comfort, cheer and
new hope to his mates, suffering and dying in their pain and fear and bearing them to safety, the now
timeless figure of Joseph, faithfully, patiently selflessly bearing his wife and child to safety, keeps
echoing the message:
God does care about us ordinary folk (and which of us is not 'ordinary' when the chips are really down!)
He loves us in our ordinariness, in our struggle to keep believing in Him without seeing Him, in our daily
efforts to provide for ourselves and our families, in our poverty, in our simple service of one another ...
His kingdom is not for those who have “made it of society, those who have a two-storeyed home, two
T.V.'s, a video set and a boat, unless these too have learnt what it is to reach out to all persons as
equals, to give themselves and their gifts in faithful, generous service to those who need them, to love
and serve and walk compassionately alongside the people entrusted to them, to seek always the True
and the Good - for these are the values that God endorsed in His choice of Joseph, and that Jesus
subsequently mirrored in His life.
As a Religious of St Joseph, I have benefitted like so many of my sisters, from recent exploration into
the past, to recapture something of the spirit of the early years of our congregation. And what has
come to me out of the past, fills me with a thrilling sense of the appropriateness of the name we bear.
We read for example, that in initiating, in the 1860's a teaching apostolate to poor children scattered
throughout the South Australian colony, Mary MacKillop and Fr Tenison Woods’ earliest enterprise
found the Sisters teaching in a stable.
Nearly ten years later, with a group of South Australian sisters teaching in Bathurst in N.S.W., we note
again that "they moved into a stable-school, with one room to live in." 3 Fr Woods, in his writings to the
Sisters urged them to regard themselves as the least among all religious orders ...4 The "stable"
beginnings would have helped!5
It appears that some of the suspicion and opposition directed towards the early sisters by both clergy
and people, emanated from a radical difference in their life-style from that of the stereotyped image of
the Religious Woman in the minds of the people of the day. Instead of the Sisters living in "large, quiet,
enclosed convents, sometimes offering a traditional convent training to daughters of gentle folk. Fr
Woods‘ and Mother Mary's Sisters were flexible, mobile, frugal, hard-working women "renting small
houses in ordinary streets, not pacing the grounds and gardens of their convents but to be seen in the
streets escorting groups of children, carrying baskets of provisions, which they had begged from
shopkeepers, for the orphans or old people or ‘women of intemperate habits” for whom they cared
with devotion." These early sisters, according to the desires of their founders, thus became part of the
ordinary life of the parish and village, walking beside them in their poverty and need, bringing new
hope and cheer ... The spirit of The Man With the Donkey was surely and obviously among them in
those days!
And, naturally enough, I find myself asking: What about us, a hundred or so years later? Is the name we
bear still appropriate to our lifestyle and apostolate?
If it is true that devotion and imitation of him have flourished according to the need of the time, then
the witness of his life and love has scarcely been more needed than in these 1980's. In an historical
moment when the experience of insecurity is central to our civilization, when man lives daily on the
brink of nuclear war, when "refugee" heads the list of words recurring in news items, when stable
relationships have become exceptional treasures, when love of the dollar has widely replaced love of
God and when the value of life itself, is being attacked and denigrated on all sides, we cannot doubt the
need our world has for people who will remind it constantly of the "good life", the life that Joseph and
Mary shared with their Son, and that can, in essence, be lived in any age. To be true today to the
mission given us by our founders, we have to be such people, walking with contemporaries, sharing
their daily lives and experiences, so that we become credible witnesses to the fact that the "good life" is
possible, even today: that insecurity can be replaced by a firm faith and trust in a God Who is our Rock.
By building a Nazareth about us, and by constantly seeking a Nazareth place within us, a seed-bed of
God’s Word,6 we can offer to our world a reflection of the life of the man who knew insecurity, knew
what it was to be a refugee, felt the struggle to make ends meet, understood what it was to have
danger threaten his family, but who nevertheless stood firm in his commitment to God. and remained
faithful to the mission given him. Only in as far as we struggle to bear this message of hope, and to
make visible in our lives the qualities his Son must have admired so much in Joseph, are we true bearers
of the name of either the Son or the father. Indeed, is this not the commission laid upon all the
baptized? To return again for a moment to Henri Nouwen and his "clowns". He writes: “The longer l
was in Rome, the more I enjoyed the clowns, those peripheral people who, by their humble, saintly lives,
evoke a smile and awaken hope, even in a city terrorized by kidnapping and street violence." 7
On the day of Resurrection, Jesus walked with two downcast men, and in His company they felt the
gloom of despondency lift from their hearts, and discovered a new hope and vitality leaping to life
within them. At the breaking of the bread with Him, He spoke directly to their hearts: "It is I, Jesus, who
have been walking with you. This breaking of bread is a pledge that I will always walk with you." ... and
the travellers’ joy was full.
Joseph's message, like that of his Son is twofold - firstly, what God asks of us is essentially simple ... the
Clowns, The Man With The Donkey have it - that we walk compassionately, faithfully, trustingly,
prayerfully is with one another, evoking a smile, awakening a hope, even in a world where smiling and
hoping are not easy and where clowns and men with donkeys do not top gallup polls; secondly, what
we are asked to do has been done successfully by so many ordinary, everyday people before us,
because they have remembered, and have had faith to recognize, that we walk, not only with our
contemporaries, but with the risen Jesus and with the two people, who more than any other human
beings most share His concern about us - with Joseph and His wife Mary.
I would like to conclude my reflection with an extract from a letter written by Mary MacKillop to her sisters
in March 1908. On the occasion of the feast of St Joseph she takes the opportunity to write of him:
"His noble heart never faltered, ' never was deterred by the most trying obstacles from
proceeding at once to the accomplishment of the Divine Command. It was enough for him
that a certain path or line of duty was pointed out to him, and if difficulties seemed to
beset his path, if want and privations of the most trying kind threatened all that he held
most dear, nothing daunted him, but humbly and firmly relying upon Providence, he
courageously, and without a moment's delay, embraced the Will of God, and his humble
heart rejoiced as he saw each of these glaring difficulties silently dwindling into nothing
and leaving behind them lasting memorials of the mysterious ways of God."
Is not the apparent anomaly of The Man With The Donkey being chosen by God, from among all men,
to be father on earth of the King of Kings, in itself a "lasting memorial of the mysterious ways of God"?
Sister Mary Dunn R.S.J.
References
1. St Paul to the Philippians Ch. 2 Vs. 7
2. Henri J.M. Nouwen: Clowning in Rome, Intro. pp. 1,2 Image Books, 1979.
3. Margaret M. Press R.S.J. Sisters of St Joseph — compiled from articles first appearing in
Australasian Catholic Record.
4. lbid.
5. Explanation of the Rule and Constitution of the Sisters of St Joseph 1901 p. 1
6. Vocations Brochure of the Sisters of St Joseph of Nazareth l982.
7. Henri J.M. Nouwen: Clowning in Rome Intro. p. 3 1
8. Thorpe Osmund CP: Mary MacKillop Burns & Oates London 1957.