“Do not press me to leave you
or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die—
there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!”
When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.
So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them; and the women said, “Is this Naomi?” She said to them,
“Call me no longer Naomi,
call me Mara,
for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.
I went away full,
but the LORD has brought me back empty;
why call me Naomi
when the LORD has dealt harshly with me,
and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?”
So Naomi returned together with Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, who came back with her from the country of Moab. They came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.
-Ruth 1:16-22
I don't think that God sends calamity. I'm not always sure where the blame lies or if we can even talk about blame when disaster and disease and death strike, but I know I don't blame God. God wants life for us, life abundant, and God opposes those things that bring pain and illness and death. I don't know that that brings me all that much comfort, but I do know that it calls me to action. If I can oppose those things that bring pain and illness and death, I know that I'm doing something right and I want so deeply to be doing something right. A little shift in responsibility, a little bit of pneumatology, a dash of a revealed-but-not-yet-realized eschatology, and I've got the closest thing to an answer that I think I'm going to get about what to do about evil.
None of that is Naomi's concern, though. She is hurting and a debate about the origin of her hurt is not what she's here for. She's lost her husband and both of her sons in a famine. Her whole world was taken from her and now she's left wandering back home with this lost puppy of a daughter-in-law. Even better, they're headed from this place of famine and disaster to a town whose name literally means "House of Bread". It's בֵּית לֶחֶם or Bet Lehem, which we know as Bethlehem. So yeah, if I had just suffered some terrible losses because of a famine and came back home to the House of Bread, just at the time of the harvest, and got greeted with "Oh, hey, Naomi, is that you?" I'd sass off too. Naomi means pleasant and Mara means bitter, so her response to these people who are greeting her is, "I am so far from Pleasant, you may as well call me Bitter. And you know why? Because God is a vindictive fuck."
And I think that's great.
Like I said before, I don't think God causes calamity. I think that humans do enough of that on our own and so we have some power, in some, maybe many, situations, to mitigate that calamity, but Naomi isn't in a place the challenge systemic injustice that leads to man-made famines. She's hurting and she's angry and she feels zero need to hide it. I love it.
I love it because it's honest, but I also love it because that's where I'm at right now. I am bitter and I don't want anyone telling me to be pleasant. I have, over the course of my life, spent copious amounts of time pretending to be Naomi when my real name was Mara and I am over that. I will feel how I feel, thank you very much, and you don't get a say in it. I will not smile when you tell me to smile. I will not dance if I don't feel like dancing. I will mourn when I need to mourn and you do not get to take this away from me.
But bless your heart for trying.
I think that, as a good southern woman who's also an overachieving people-pleasing middle child who found herself on the road to pastoral ministry, I'm not really allowed to be bitter. I should end any bout of mourning or even complaining with a "But I know it'll all be alright!" because anything less is displaying distrust. Distrust of the system, distrust of "the way things are," or distrust of God, they're all the same thing in some circles, and they're dangerous.
But see, I've always thought the system was a little wonky, from the moment that my pastor told me to be quiet and stop talking about things I didn't understand when I challenged unfair dress codes at youth group, and probably before then too. I've always had that idea needling at the back of my brain that things aren't the way they should be and that we should be trying to fix it, not cover it up. Sadness unmourned is sadness perpetuated. Pain demands to be felt. And so when Mara comes to town and demands to be seen as herself, I want to stand up and applaud. At least we've named what's happened.
I never imagined that this is where I would be as I went into my last month of seminary. I never in a thousand years would have thought that I would allow myself to feel this much pain, to acknowledge this much pain in my life. My names mean happiness in two different languages and my blood type is B+. Naming pain is not something that's in my nature. And yet, I've found it to be the most important thing I could have learned over these past three years. Let Naomi be Mara because Mara is what life has made her. Pain demands to be felt and it will be, whether we name it now or ten years from now. The important thing is to be where you are and not where someone else thinks you should be.
But, what I'm seeing, as I go on with life, is that while pain is real and shouldn't be ignored or set aside, pain is also not the whole story. And maybe that's what people have saying all along and I just missed the message, but there's something much more profound about having lived with your monsters and deciding that yes, in fact, there is something more than that. The Gospel, in the full light of our electric suns, turns into so many platitudes, but when you've been plunged into darkness, you realize it was the light you needed all along.
The book of Ruth isn't really about Ruth's story. Sure, Ruth makes this promise, and Ruth travels to a land that is foreign to her, and Ruth does the work of gathering food and gathering a husband, but the person who's redeemed at the end of the story is Naomi. She's the one who holds the baby Obed, whose life has been restored to her at the end of all this struggle. And I find it beautiful that this story that we've wrapped up in romantic love, that we read at weddings and quote to each other in moments of devotion, has nothing really to do with romance. It has to do with restoration. It has to do with naming the bitterness we feel and, at the end of the ordeal, naming the new life that has come out of our struggles.
Now, I'm not there yet. I'm still bitter and any restoration in my spirit is a work in progress. But I have to tell myself that that's okay, because it is. It's not a moral failing and it's not something to hide. I might not be pleasant, but at least I'm me.
And that's something beautiful, and something worth sticking around for.
And I think that's great.
Like I said before, I don't think God causes calamity. I think that humans do enough of that on our own and so we have some power, in some, maybe many, situations, to mitigate that calamity, but Naomi isn't in a place the challenge systemic injustice that leads to man-made famines. She's hurting and she's angry and she feels zero need to hide it. I love it.
I love it because it's honest, but I also love it because that's where I'm at right now. I am bitter and I don't want anyone telling me to be pleasant. I have, over the course of my life, spent copious amounts of time pretending to be Naomi when my real name was Mara and I am over that. I will feel how I feel, thank you very much, and you don't get a say in it. I will not smile when you tell me to smile. I will not dance if I don't feel like dancing. I will mourn when I need to mourn and you do not get to take this away from me.
But bless your heart for trying.
I think that, as a good southern woman who's also an overachieving people-pleasing middle child who found herself on the road to pastoral ministry, I'm not really allowed to be bitter. I should end any bout of mourning or even complaining with a "But I know it'll all be alright!" because anything less is displaying distrust. Distrust of the system, distrust of "the way things are," or distrust of God, they're all the same thing in some circles, and they're dangerous.
But see, I've always thought the system was a little wonky, from the moment that my pastor told me to be quiet and stop talking about things I didn't understand when I challenged unfair dress codes at youth group, and probably before then too. I've always had that idea needling at the back of my brain that things aren't the way they should be and that we should be trying to fix it, not cover it up. Sadness unmourned is sadness perpetuated. Pain demands to be felt. And so when Mara comes to town and demands to be seen as herself, I want to stand up and applaud. At least we've named what's happened.
I never imagined that this is where I would be as I went into my last month of seminary. I never in a thousand years would have thought that I would allow myself to feel this much pain, to acknowledge this much pain in my life. My names mean happiness in two different languages and my blood type is B+. Naming pain is not something that's in my nature. And yet, I've found it to be the most important thing I could have learned over these past three years. Let Naomi be Mara because Mara is what life has made her. Pain demands to be felt and it will be, whether we name it now or ten years from now. The important thing is to be where you are and not where someone else thinks you should be.
But, what I'm seeing, as I go on with life, is that while pain is real and shouldn't be ignored or set aside, pain is also not the whole story. And maybe that's what people have saying all along and I just missed the message, but there's something much more profound about having lived with your monsters and deciding that yes, in fact, there is something more than that. The Gospel, in the full light of our electric suns, turns into so many platitudes, but when you've been plunged into darkness, you realize it was the light you needed all along.
The book of Ruth isn't really about Ruth's story. Sure, Ruth makes this promise, and Ruth travels to a land that is foreign to her, and Ruth does the work of gathering food and gathering a husband, but the person who's redeemed at the end of the story is Naomi. She's the one who holds the baby Obed, whose life has been restored to her at the end of all this struggle. And I find it beautiful that this story that we've wrapped up in romantic love, that we read at weddings and quote to each other in moments of devotion, has nothing really to do with romance. It has to do with restoration. It has to do with naming the bitterness we feel and, at the end of the ordeal, naming the new life that has come out of our struggles.
Now, I'm not there yet. I'm still bitter and any restoration in my spirit is a work in progress. But I have to tell myself that that's okay, because it is. It's not a moral failing and it's not something to hide. I might not be pleasant, but at least I'm me.
And that's something beautiful, and something worth sticking around for.
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