Lessons from Ruth and Naomi

The Women’s Spirituality Group I facilitate in my parish has been reflecting on Joan Chittister’s book, The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Woman’s Life. Our discussion this week was particularly rich, as we considered the portions of the story of Ruth and Naomi that Chittister puts under the labels of Insight, Empowerment and Self-Definition.

A number of passages in those chapters struck various individuals and the sharing of their own experience in light of what we read was powerful. One of the passages that struck many of us was Chittister’s statement that

We cannot be saved by waiting for God to turn life upside down. God does not intervene with trumpet and chariot in the life we create for ourselves. In fact, God is not ever really a character in the Book of Ruth. God is a reality upon whose essence, whose love, the women rely, but God is not a magic act. They do not wait for God to perform some kind of miraculous legerdemain. If God is demonstrating anything at all in Ruth, it has got to be that we all have in ourselves everything we need to reconfigure the pieces of our soul. It is simply a matter of having the courage to be everything that God has given us the gifts to be.

This is something important for all of us – women and men – to remember. Faith and hope and trust in God do not mean we get to sit back complacently waiting for God to make everything all better. Instead, we are invited to labor with God, to be active instruments of God. While it is true that we can do nothing without God, it is equally true, that God (in Chittister’s words) “relies on humans, on us, on the apparently weakest of us, to make happen what the human heart knows deep within itself are really God’s designs for the world.”