November 10, 2024 | Rev. Loren McGrail
For Siam who allowed me into her world to share her pain so, I could accompany her through it
In January of 2011 I was a short term volunteer with the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Program for Palestine and Israel. I had many experiences that changed how I saw the world and myself in it. One of the most devasting was accompanying a young Muslim woman after the trauma of having her home demolished because she and her husband had added a kitchen without a permit. You see Israel rarely approves any home improvements, so everyone is forced to build without a permit and take their chances at having the addition or the home demolished.
When the kitchen Siam and Raed had added was found out, the Israeli soldiers came and demolished the entire house to force the family out. The Israeli settlers wanted the small hilltop of Nahalin village so if they demolished the house, then the family would leave thus making it easier to ‘take the land’ eventually.
When I arrived to be a protective presence in the village, I learned that the family was forced to live in an unheated Red Cross tent. Siam, who was a pharmacist and who spoke English, told me she and her family were freezing. She said her husband was going to try and convert the small barn into a home for them. She was depressed and pregnant again for how could they take care of another child?
When I visited, we would often warm ourselves over chai near the hot taboon oven. There she told me about her life before the demolition and her dreams of working again. She often complained about not feeling well in her belly.
One day, I got a call from her to come to the Holy Family hospital in nearby Bethlehem. She had been admitted there because she had a dead baby in her and was sepsis. The baby had been dead inside her for two weeks and needed to come out before the infection spread further. The doctor and I agreed that carrying up large bags of cement in the night to turn the barn into a house was probably the reason for the miscarriage and that her grief about losing her home was the reason she didn’t pay attention to the infection growing inside her. As a former Women’s Care chaplain, I managed to find money in the hospital system to help pay for an abortion to save her life.
When I visited Siam one last time before returning home. She thanked me as we both wept. She told me that I needed to return because one day she would have a house again with a kitchen and that I must come back to eat her bread and delicious food. I said, “For dinner?” She said, “No, Habiti to cook with me in my new kitchen.” Blessed it be the ties that bind us across languages and cultures that make us all kin to one another.
Dear Ones, I accompanied Siam through one of the most difficult times in any woman’s life, the loss of a child. When I returned to the US, I made my first collage called ‘Weeping Women’ as I connected my experience with Siam with Mother Mary and all mothers who knew suffering and loss.
Two years later in 2013 when I returned to Israel and Palestine to work for Global Ministries with the women of the YWCA of Palestine, I was aware that I was actively choosing to leave everything behind me---family and friends, a culture and language I knew in order to accompany Palestinian women in their quest for freedom from patriarchy and all political systems of power and domination. I acknowledged this new assignment by naming my Facebook page ‘Accompanying Naomi.’ I felt like Ruth---I was a woman who was choosing to walk with other women.
After a few years, Facebook closed my page down because I could not prove Accompanying Naomi really existed--- she had no driver’s license or passport. She and all my posts were wiped off the face of the internet. But she still lives in me, this call to walk in solidarity with my sisters in whatever pain they are in.
If you have read the story in this week’s enews you will see that this was what Judy and I were doing on Election Day in Germantown, Philadelphia. We were accompanying Black women in their struggle for freedom within our democratic system. They didn’t need our protective presence but did appreciate that two senior white women came all the way to Philadelphia to make sure they could vote safely.
Now that I have brought you into my story, let’s go back to review the details of our lectionary for today because the plot can be tricky to hold onto with all the names. The time period is during the Kings of Israel, during a famine that forced a man and his wife and two sons to flee to Moab (a region beyond the Jordan River). I must comment that they were climate refugees, were they not? Thank God there was no border guards or walls to keep them out.
The man, Elmilech, died and left his wife Naomi to raise their two sons alone. In time, both sons married Moabite women. One was named Orpah, and the other was named Ruth. In time, both of their husbands died. Naomi was left then with no sons and two widowed daughters-in-law. Naomi had heard that the famine was over, so she decided she should return to Judah, where Bethlehem is located where she might be able to find the relatives of her husband’s family to take care of her. She told her daughters-in-law to stay with their husband’s families.
In those days, the law was that if a woman’s husband died and she was childless, the husband’s brother would marry the woman so that the dead husband would have an heir, and the woman would have security. Orpah and Ruth could have been taken in by their families of origin and protected.
Naturally, Naomi felt bitter and bereft. The women cried and hugged when the day came for her to leave. Orpah followed Naomi’s advice and stayed, but Ruth chose to go with Naomi. She decided to go with Naomi to a land where she would be an eternal outcast and stranger, a place where people hated the Moabites. She made a choice to not only follow Naomi as a deep act of hesed or lovingkindness but to follow the God who worked through Miriam, Sara, Leah, as well as Moses, Jacob, and Abraham. Hear the words she spoke. Hear how they still resonate with such beautiful power:
Among the many things this story is about, it is profoundly about abiding friendship, about women walking each other through good and bad times, marriages, death of husbands and children, relocations, and poverty.
Dear Ones, we have all traveled this road, have we not? But did you have a companion? Have you ever had a friendship like the one between Ruth and Naomi? If so, were you more like Naomi or more like Ruth? Have you ever let love for a friend or a companion lead you into unknown places? I invite you to pause and reflect.
Dear Ones, we are all on a road now that is full of risks for many of us due to our gender or genders, our sexuality, our race, our ethnicity, our age, our politics, and even our faith. And so is our fragile planet if all the guardrails are off on climate change commitments. Many are fleeing wars and genocides, climate induced famines or communities that make people feel ‘unsafe’ or even threatened. Rights we took for granted are under new threats or have already been taken away. There is a palpable fear of what next now. Many are asking how did we get here? Casting blame to the left and the right. The truth is roads to freedom are always dangerous full of curves and potholes and yes thieves who will take all you’ve got.
Dear Ones, we are all potential Naomis now as we face or imagine threats from all sides. I know this is true because I have been having conversations with many people who are looking to vent, rage, or seek assurance. Some are feeling like they don’t know who we are now? Some are getting messages inviting them to move to Canada. Others are putting up signage on their Facebook page or church saying, “I’m a safe person.”
Where are you Dear Church? Are you feeling like Naomi and need some emotional accompaniment? We have many Ruths who will walk alongside you, make you some delicious soup or pie, visit, or walk you home. Hesed lives here but now we need to extend this lovingkindness to others beyond our church doors to include our vulnerable neighbors---the ones down the street at the Mosque, or our trans youth in our schools, or the refugee families at our border. As our country is set to protect itself from the ‘other’, we who profess to follow Jesus must claim the ‘other’ as kin.
I would like to end with this quote from Reverend Bishop William Barber:
"In this season, when some want to harden and stop the heart of our democracy, we are being called like our foremothers and fathers to be the moral defibrillators of our time We must shock this nation with the power of love. We must shock this nation with the power of mercy. We must shock this nation and fight for justice for all. We can’t give up on the heart of our democracy. Not now, not ever.”
Dear Ones, let us embrace our calling to become “moral defibrillators” and go in love and save some lives including our own.