from the editor —
Woodside Church of Flint, I’m thrilled to report, will break the Covid monotony this weekend with a wedding! Pat & Carol, two long-time members and long-time partners, will avail themselves of the Supreme Court’s “Obergefell” decision and marry! By their request, in the wedding liturgy, I will read the story of Ruth & Naomi, two other women who made a life together out of the whole cloth of their love for one another.
The story of Ruth is a short book of the bible, but has several facets worth our pondering. Usually we think of weddings (even straight weddings) — wither thou goest I will go, et cetera. So there’s that.
In my decades of teaching social justice to tweens, teens and young adults, I have often leaned on the story of Ruth gleaning in Boaz’ fields, with the admonition that we leave something for those who would otherwise be hungry. (Still relevant, perhaps especially if we substitute “fields of Boaz” with “warehouses of Bezos.” What would it look like to leave something for the poor?)
The other part I’m thinking today is about how the story starts, why there was ever a question of “whither thou goest” and why Naomi would try to talk Ruth into not goest-ing.
Ruth is a Moabite; Naomi is an Israelite. They are living in Moab, where the worst economic thing possible has happened, and now they have to figure out how to make a life a new way. Naomi decides to go back to Israel; she advises Ruth to stay in Moab, her home country. Ruth won’t hear of it. Naomi is her family and she wants to be with her. So, off they go.
When they arrive in Israel, Ruth, the younger of the two women by a generation, sets out to find work — no easy task given her lack of documentation. But she finds a field where someone is practicing compassion, and somehow it works out. I’ll leave you to read the rest for yourself. But throughout the Hebrew bible, we read that Israel has a divine mandate to be kind and just to vulnerable people. This story is of special significance for Christians since Ruth is Jesus’ great grandmother 28 times removed.
Be kind to strangers, immigrants, people living in poverty. Do justice. Love mercy.
As I’m writing this, night is falling on the day we have all my life called Columbus Day.
Today, while lots of folks tried to shift the energy to Indigenous peoples, the president issued a proclamation, doubling down, as he so often does, on racism and xenophobia. While various folks published various things challenging the myth that Columbus was an explorer, a “discover” of anything, the President praised American pluck. But we know from records of the time that Columbus was a genocidal colonizer; it is not fantasy or revisionist history to say out loud that he was an opportunist who was ok exploiting people.
The stories we tell shape us. The stories we don’t tell also shape us.
America is at a turning point. Or a breaking point. Which way we go is anyone’s guess. Our issues are deeply rooted and poisonous — racism, oligarchy (no matter how much we insist that we are a democracy). We are addicted to poor people, the ones who make pharaoh’s economy hum. We seem content to land at or near the bottom in so many world measures: education, income equality, mental and physical health, housing, social mobility, willingness to welcome refugees and immigrants, (we are among the least welcoming in the world, in fact). In our commitment to human rights, we rank somewhere between 19th and 38th, depending on whom you ask. But we are near the top of so many other measures: child mortality, incarceration, Covid contraction and death.
Our national myth of “exceptionalism” is keeping us from being honest with ourselves; our “rugged individualism” is frankly killing us. And if you think we’re doing it all for “freedom,” realize that we fall 53rd among 84 countries described as “free,” sandwiched between Slovakia and Belize.
Columbus got us started with genocide and exploitation, but we’ve taken it from there; we’ve built a nation on stolen land and labor — and the theft continues in our own time.
Who are we? Why are we satisfied with this world we have made?
Writing for The Nation in 2017, Edward Burmila contended that “Columbus set off to find Asia, landed in the Caribbean, and, until his death, insisted in the face of overwhelming evidence that it really was Asia. Rather than celebrate what he did achieve, admit that fortune had something to do with his success, or recognize the horrors he wrought, he unapologetically defended himself and blamed any suggestion of failure or incompetence on others.”
Sound like anyone we know?
This may be the current state of things. Maybe even our true national story. We have gotten things wrong, and people have been hurt. Our fixation on militarism, over-policing and capitalism have caused damage in every aspect of our national life, yet we lack the imagination and political will to regroup. White supremacy has always divided us, yet we pretend it is a minor problem, imperceptible even, with our current VP insisting in last week’s debate that we don’t have a race problem.
If only it were that simple.
In “Divide,” Matt Taibbi documents the gap in American wealth, income and jurisprudence. The book, published in 2014 (so, before the Current Occupant), details the “fix” of the housing crisis of 2008 — the one in which an administration decided that some banks were simply too big to fail, and then, Taibbi notes, let them get even bigger.
This is not a side issue. In handing over the reins to the bankers, we handed over the well-being of our world to profit-mongers, who have no energy for following the lead of Israel in Ruth’s time to ensure the well-being of those living in poverty. We threw up our hands and let the corporations take over, the result of which we are seeing all around us in the power of corporations and by the very fact of 540 American billionaires.
In that single crisis, Taibbi documents, 40 percent of the world’s wealth was wiped out and no one went to jail for it. Forty percent of the wealth of the entire world. But the billionaires are doing fine, because we know who bears the brunt of economic loss first — the ones who can least afford to lose. (Hence our fading hope that any high-dollar cheater, even in the highest office in the land, will ever be jailed for blatant criminality.)
Hate me for saying so right before an election, but the administration that sped us down this road was not the one we are currently struggling to survive; it was the previous one, with Joe Biden riding shotgun.
My point is that this election isn’t automatic salvation from anything. Our disease and dysfunction didn’t start with the Current Occupant and won’t end with the next one.
It is vitally important that we vote, that we remove this autocratic grifter-in-chief; but even more important that we let an incoming administration know that we are done cowering in the shadows of Columbus statues. As far as founding stories go, 1492 is as shameful as 1619, as shameful as 1876, any of which easily trumps 2017 as “the year the wheels fell off.” Christopher Columbus isn’t worthy of national hero status; we have so much more to live up to than the Potemkin legacy we’ve built for him.
And we people of various faiths have a shared legacy to draw on, a rich, sacred heritage right in our hands: a vision from Moses to Muhammad to Jesus, (with my favorite emphasis on Isaiah), of a world where people have what they need, where pharaoh has no power, where immigrants are welcome, strangers are cared for, prisoners freed, where people have homes and food. A world where all the Ruths & Naomis have enough and can live together in peace, in families of whatever make-up, even without work visas.
It’s not about a national religion, though the Senate Judiciary Committee seems poised to endorse one. None of it necessarily has anything to do with being religious, in fact, but everything to do with seeing one another as human beings with worth and dignity.
So, maybe we would actually do well to keep Columbus Day — as a day of national repentance. Sort of a national Yom Kippur-Ramadan-Lent. A day, or multiple days, to tell the truth, to shed the old stories, painful as it may be, and then devote ourselves to a new year, a new story, a new approach.
Can this be the year we get honest?