Borders and Belonging by Pádraig Ó Tuama & Glenn Jordan

Author:Pádraig Ó Tuama & Glenn Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hymns Ancient & Modern
Published: 2021-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

6. The Third Act of the Book of Ruth

PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA

What would you do in desperation?

The book of Ruth is not a template for what a strategic plan should look like. It is a story of what people do, in desperate circumstances, with limited options. The Hebrew Bible narratives, while being profoundly moral, do not create a false equivalency between the abstract pure and the embodied complicated. God is the wrestle that is found in the wrestle, not the imagination of the wrestle.

The story of Ruth is not alone in its depiction of people who have had to do desperate things in stretched times. Hagar and Sarah, it seems, did not find their relationship easy; at times Sarah sent Hagar away, and Hagar found herself praying prayers of the almost-dead to the God of those who thought they controlled her. Tamar, the daughter-in-law of Judah, could not have imagined herself pretending to work as a prostitute in order to trick her father-in-law into complying with his legal obligations. Rahab, too, turned against her city in the face of its impending doom and extracted a promise of safety for her and her family. And Bathsheba – she who is almost wordless – has survived the murder of her husband and the death of her son, all because of the actions of a king. Years later, she takes advantage of the decaying king to push her son into kingship, even though he was far from the firstborn.

None of these women were saved by divine intervention. They were saved by their own savvy, pluck, risk and fortitude. Had any of them, I imagine, been asked to design a perfect life for themselves, a life whose circumstances meant they could always depend on the perfectly pure option, they would not have designed the lives they had. Had any of them been asked to narrate the actions of a saving God, a saving religion or a saving community, they would not have narrated such a God, religion or community as we find in their stories. What we are left with is a series of stories of people whose circumstances reflected how foreigners, women and those whose bodies are considered irrelevant are often left to their own devices. And the Hebrew Bible is both brilliant and brutal in its description of how those people – often women – navigated their way through obstacles. These are not abstract stories of and for the pure. These are stories of survival.

Ruth, then, is in a line of narrative matriarchs whose company I imagine she would have both recognized and welcomed. For her, politics, law and religion are all carried in the body, enacted in the body and demonstrated in the body: her own and those of the people she adopted as her own. She belongs. Not because of blood, or even marriage, but because of behaviour.

One time, a man came to see me in deep distress. He was a stranger, and he turned up to a place of complete strangers to ask for help.

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