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"The Story of Ruth: Moments of Loss and Faith" The Book of Ruth begins, in other words, in tragedy. Three women are left with three dead husbands and no means of support. It is a crossover moment in time. It is the kind of moment that leads these women—leads everyone, perhaps—to God’s new time. Moments of great loss throw a person back on internal resources, with little in the way of external resources to barter—money, social connections, education. At that point it is what we have inside ourselves at times of loss that will have to count. It is faith in the ultimate logic of God in life that is the only real resource we have to draw from at times like this. And it is what these women, then, are teaching all of us yet today. Like everyone ever born who goes through sudden, defining loss of any kind, these women find themselves faced with the question: Who am I when I am no longer who and what I was? Like the rest of us for whom the very foundations of our lives are given to shifting from day to day, there are no miracles in sight to save them, no angels on the road to point the way. Nothing. Everything they had, everything they ever thought they wanted, is gone. Now they have only themselves on which to depend, only the spirit of God to lead them on through a world that has little place for them at all once motherhood ends, or there is no man to support them, or there is no institution to define them, or there is no one and nothing whose need legitimates their existence. Loss, any kind of loss—rejection, abandonment, divorce, death—is a shocking, numbing, grey thing that at the outset, at least, freezes the heart and slows the mind. Loss changes life at the root. Irrevocably. What was once the center of life—the person, the position, the plan, the title, the lifestyle—is no more. Life is never the same again. What we have known, almost unconsciously, often for years, to be good—to be familiar, to be sure, to be certain—is gone, snatched away without warning. What we took for granted shifts and tilts and weakens. Emptiness becomes our new companion, God more a rumor than a fact. Even our spiritual certainties can fade a little: Where is God now when we are left in a sea of disorientation? Where is the will of God for us in loss? Yet loss, once reckoned, once absorbed, is a precious gift. No, I cannot be what I was before but I can be—in fact I must be—something new. There is more of God in me, I discover in emptiness, than I have ever known in what I once took to be fullness. There are spiritual lessons to be learned from loss that can barely be divined by any other means. We learn, just when we think we have nothing, that what we do still have is ourselves. We have, deep down inside us what no one can take away, what can never be lost either to time or to chance: we have the self that brought us to this point—and more. We have gifts of God in abundance, never before noticed, never touched, perhaps; but a breath in us nevertheless and waiting to be tapped. We have within us the raw material of life, and we have it for the taking. Sometimes only loss releases the wealth of the accumulated self. Sometimes only loss requires the concentration of spirit that brings us to our best. Often it is only loss that reduces us to our most meaningful resource, ourselves. Left without the security of the past, we are forced to stand alone, to find inside ourselves the steel of spirit it takes to survive the unbearable, to trust that the God who made us for life stands by, even at what feels like the boundaries of death. Loss, ironically enough, is the catalyst of newness, a doorway to other parts of the soul, where what lies dormant in us comes alive because without a capacity for the unexplored, life dies. You see, life is not one path; life is many paths, most of them unexplored in favor of closer, clearer ones. But when loss comes, our creating God comes again to us in new and demanding ways so that we can finish the creation that has been begun in us. One aspect of the grace of loss is grief; the other, reassessment of the past. Both are essential dimensions of the project. Unless we allow ourselves to grieve the loss, to admit its effects on our own lives, our own souls, we cannot make good decisions in the future. And unless we begin to reassess the past, we cannot know who we were in whole before we became the thing we’ve lost. We will never know the full measure of what we have to bring to the rest of life. Grief alone can paralyze, true. But too soon a rush to reassessment can abort the process of readiness for the future. Only grieving can release us from grief. There is no moving on to new life until we have faced the loss of the past one. And that takes time. It takes time to deal with the anger that comes from loss. It takes time to regain perspective, and to see ourselves as separate from what we’ve lost. It takes time to see the hand of God in the depths of darkness. It is only when we have celebrated the gift of what we’ve lost that we are really ready to move on with life, to move beyond what has been to what can be, to let go. Grief has a place in life. It consecrates the past to its place in memory. What we do not grieve was surely not worth having to begin with. The measure of the pain it gives us is the measure of the love we’ve had. But grief does more: it also frees us for the future by giving closure to the past. It is a launching pad for possibility that legitimates questions we never thought we’d ask. We can ask ourselves now what were the implications of what we did before this. We can ask what it is in us that lies unfinished and begging to be done if the will of God is ever to be completed in us. Naomi did what we all must do, one way or another, at a time of loss. Naomi simply picked up and went back to Bethlehem, not so much to find refuge in a family that was not there, but to be what she herself needed to be at that time: a Hebrew, a Judean, an independent woman in the bosom of a culture she had lost years ago before its time. Naomi went back to become what else she was besides the wife of Elimelech, the mother of Mahlon and Chilion, the leftover piece as the Hebrew says, of someone else’s life. She went back to become herself again. In Naomi we see clearly that, if creation goes on creating in us all our lives, then the function of loss is to bring us all back to the completion of ourselves just when it seems that there is nothing left in us to develop. No one is one thing only. We are all a medley of possible beginnings, all of them straining toward fulfillment. The pain of loss lies in the fact that we so seldom realize the fullness of ourselves until the rest of life lies open in the ashes of the past. When loss finally happens as loss inevitably will, then we get the opportunity to say either yes or no to the other parts of creation in ourselves. The truth of loss is a freeing one: it is the grave of something we loved—this person, this place—that calls forth the resurrection of the self. Then the past has done its doing. Then the word of God becomes new life to us. Then life becomes a series of possibilities which, when taken seriously, make us whole. Then, with Naomi, we take another road, not because we know what will happen at the end of it but because we cannot be whole without walking it. There is no doubt about it: to live the rest of life, like Naomi, bury Elimelech we must. Lydia Talbot: Joan, you describe the intense loss in the book of Ruth as a crossover moment in time. Loss once reckoned with, absorbed, though, becomes a precious gift. How was that first revealed to you personally? Joan Chittister: Oh, it's very interesting. I am one of these people, believe it or not, who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into every next stage of life. And I remember, ironically enough, it might seem strange to very many people, but I was a young nun teaching in a high school in which I was very, very happy. Life had finally become complete for me and then all of a sudden through a series of circumstances I found myself taken out of the high school, literally beyond my real will. As much as I loved study, I didn't want to leave to go to graduate school. Now that seems so minor. There are people out there who are going through retirement, going through change, going through rejection, young people who applied to a college for which they were not accepted, for instance. In my case, I didn't apply and was accepted and taken out of where I was most comfortable being. A whole new life opened, not because I chose it, but because I had to make it. Talbot: What do you say, Joan, to people who are experiencing intense suffering and pain—a loss of a spouse, a child, a loved one—who feel like Christ on the cross: "Oh, God, hast thou forsaken me?" What do you say to people who need to understand that one can triumph over loss? Chittister: Celebrate the moments that you had the thing you love. Something else is coming. God has prepared for you a holy place. Be ready to move into that once you have completed the marvelous celebration of what you've been given to this point. And then trust the next step. It's coming. It's yours. It is already created for you. All you have to do is say thank you for where you've been and thank you for where you're going. Talbot: We have thirty seconds, but when you were sixteen you had polio and didn't walk for four years. Was that a moment when you discovered something about your new self? Chittister: A phenomenal new person emerged walking four years later. Talbot: Your new book, Friendship of Women. I have to get that in and we are looking forward to that. Chittister: And The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Woman's Life. Talbot: That's wonderful. Thank you, Joan Chittister. |
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