XLII

CAN YOU BE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE at the same time?

 

I think this is where I live.

 

I think this is where most women live.

 

I know this is where writers live.

 

Inside to write. Outside to glean.

I want to revisit the book of Ruth. Ruth, the Moabite, who has lost her husband to death, chooses to leave her place of origin and accompany her widowed mother-in-law, Naomi, an Israelite, back to her homeland in Bethlehem.

“For wherever you go, I will go,” Ruth says. “And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die; and there will I be buried…”

Ruth’s voice and vow embodies faithful love in action, what the Hebrew word hesed celebrates as loving-kindness, a central virtue within the Jewish faith. Now in Israel, Ruth, as an outsider, says to Naomi, “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.”

Ruth becomes a gleaner, finding in the furrows what remains from the harvest of barley to nourish the two women. The owner of the fields, whose name is Boaz, is a relative of Naomi’s. He notices the humble beauty of Ruth and instructs the reapers to leave more grain for her to gather. In time, they meet; they marry. Ruth gives birth to a baby boy named Obed, whom both women mother. Obed becomes the grandfather of King David of Israel.

The book of Ruth honors the loyal bonds between women. To care for one another reaps the harvest of love. Ruth’s empathy and toil gives birth to authentic power. An outsider who brings compassion to her bereaved mother-in-law becomes the ancestress of Israel’s most benevolent king, who becomes an ancestor to the Divine Child and Savior Jesus Christ.

 

What do we glean from the stories of other women?

 

What am I gleaning in the furrows of my mother’s journals?

 

I forage for the details left, overlooked, discarded. I will use everything in this story she has given me before her death and afterward to find out what is there and what is not there, and then begin culling the grain from the chaff, savoring what is essential.

 

Mother gave me my voice by withholding hers, both in life and in death. Her creativity presided in her home. She spoke through gestures, largely quiet and graceful. A letter. A meal. A walk together. Her touch. She lived on a private, elegant plain.

 

Mimi gave me my voice by proclaiming hers: directly, honestly, and, at times, shockingly. When Brooke and I went to tell her we were getting married, she said, “How wonderful! And if it doesn’t work out, you can always get a divorce.”

But I believe my own voice continues to be found wherever I am being present and responding from my heart, moment by moment. My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.