Ruth and Poetry: Celebrating the Complexity of Love
Christina Schmitt
Day 1 of 5: Naomi — Love, Loss, and Loneliness
Then Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home. May the Lord show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me. May the Lord grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.” Then she kissed them goodbye and they wept aloud…
Ruth 1:8-9 (NIV)
Loneliness is the country we return to
When no one is left.
Famine is an empty beehive
And all the fruit rots
Irony names its sons after diseases –
Spits them like peach pits –
And laughs when
All of them dieLoneliness finds the sons’ hairs
Leftover in combs
In the old moving boxes
She sobs at their softness –
Hope plants the hairs, one by one
And waters them every anniversary.
Loneliness is the bitter tree that
Grows in their place
The birds call it
The most beautiful country –
Love calls the country home and
Loneliness, an old old friend
Love has always known
It would be the two of them
In the endTogether they climb the branches
Hold the bitter bark in soft hands
And look out
At the countries they built.
The book of Ruth demonstrates love through all of its primary characters: Naomi, Orpah, Ruth, Boaz, and the unnamed kinsman. All of the women in this story have lost someone; Orpah and Ruth lost husbands, and Naomi—the mother-in-law—loses three loved ones in the first few lines of the story.
After all of Naomi’s male kin pass (her husband and her sons die from diseases), she is forced to return to her own country, Judah, which she left in time of famine. Naomi changes her name from Naomi (meaning ‘pleasant’) to Mara (meaning ‘bitter)’ as a sign to others of her hardship and distress; this is a woman who is no stranger to love, loss, and grief.
Naomi wishes her daughters-in-law to leave her in search of a better life while she goes back to Judah. She predicts this move will be difficult and does not want the young women to experience the tensions of being immigrants in a foreign land like she did. Despite the cries of the young women, Naomi makes it clear she does not expect them to endure more hardship for her sake; they will have a hard enough time without the burden of a mother-in-law to care for.
I think about the people I know and love who have lost loved ones—siblings, parents, friends… and how their relationships changed after that. Loss impacts the way you love people. Losing a loved one impacts how you are able to enter into a loving relationship again. You are familiar with the ache of absence when a loved one dies. It reverberates throughout your body, even long after they are gone and no one else can hear it.
Loving someone and losing them changes who you are; Naomi demonstrates this when she changes her name. It makes you more cautious about who you love and how you love them. Naomi’s decision to be alone is not a selfish or love-less one; rather, it is the best way she can choose to love her daughters-in-law in a time of mourning and difficulty. Only Naomi knows how she can heal from loss; only she knows her path to wholeness. The best way she can love others is by loving herself through these seasons of grief and by sharing with people how they can be present with her, or in this case, how they can let her be.
Grant us the courage to listen to our loved ones who have lost beloveds. Let us be open to hearing about their grief and sharing the silence with them. Let us listen to the ways their bodies ache and hold them lightly.
Christina Schmitt