In Memory of Ruth, Norah & Courageous Women Through Time

                                                Naomi and her daughters (Ruth & Orpah) Marc Chagall 

So [Naomi] said, “Look, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.”  But Ruth said,

“Do not press me to leave you, 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, and there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus 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.

                                                       Ruth 1:15-18 NRSVue

 Yesterday I realized that one of the Sunday lectionary readings was from the Hebrew scripture book of Ruth. It's about a Moabite woman who marries outside of her clan only to have her husband and the other men in his immediate family die. Rather than return to the shelter of her family she elects to travel with her mother-in-law, Naomi, back to Bethlehem, her hometown. It's a remarkable story of courage, of love, of creating new bonds of kinship. Although the book of Ruth is only a few chapters long it is a story with a happy ending,  and as Christians we are aware of Ruth in the genealogy of Jesus at the beginning of the gospel of Matthew.

As it happened Ruth, my partner in life, was working away at transcribing one of her late mother's diaries.This is a labour of love and curiosity she's sharing with a couple of her siblings as they have worked away to discipher their mother's tiny and quirky writing. Her mother grew up in Leamington Spa, Great Britain, and as a young woman experienced World War II in her village not far from Coventry, one of the cities extensively damaged by a German bombing raid and bombs fell in her town. Along the way she left her job in a shop and joined the Wrens, the nickname for the Women's Royal Naval Service. She left home as a 20-year-old to do so despite the disapproval of her fiance, who was in military service himself.  

                                                                             Norah (right) as a Wren

 

 This young man didn't become her husband and, instead, she fell in love with a Canadian serviceman who was seconded to a chaplain and would eventually become an ordained minister and moderator in the Presbyterian church. So far, no one has discovered how Norah decided that she wouldn't marry Jack and that Max was the man for her. There is a tantalizing gap in the diary entries during the war. 

Eventually Norah and Max married and she emigrated to Canada. She came on a warbride ship to Halifax and when we lived there we saw exactly where she arrived in this country. Then she travelled by train to Montreal where she was met by her husband and began a new life.She became a minister's wife at a time when there were conventions about that role "and Rev. Mrs Max Putnam poured..." The story of her diaries is of a free-spirited young woman who loved the movies and dances and seemed to have unlimited energy for cycling and walking outings with a gaggle of friends. She attended worship weekly and taught Sunday School in Britain, but did she have any real sense of what was ahead of her as a mother of five children with an endlessly busy clergy husband? Did she feel stifled by the expectations? The diary entries end abruptly the day she lands in Canada. 

I never met my mother-in-law because she died before I met Ruth but I hear and see her intrepid spirit in the person I've be with for 50 years. 

Even today there are so many stories of refugee and immigrant women from many cultures who summon the courage to start over, often with little prospect of being reunited with distant loved ones. We saw this with the Syrian refugee families sponsored by many Canadian faith groups and the Vietnamese "boat people" decades before. 

What did faith have to do with their decisions whether it was Christian, or Muslim, or Buddhist? Did they pray for the strength to go to a distant land? They deserve to be honoured and admired for who they were and will continue to be in the memory of those they love. 

Max and Norah