Your People Shall Be My People...

Friday of Week 20 in Ordinary Time

Saint Pius X, Pope (1835-1914)

Blessed Victoria Rasoamanarivo (1848-1894)

Ruth 1:1,3-6,14-16,22 

Do not ask me to abandon or forsake you!  For wherever you go, I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

Psalm 146 

Matthew 22:34-40 

You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself.

My habit has been to first peek at the Saints of the day.  And today I was happy to see a Blessed Catholic laywoman being remembered.  Then I read her story.  Much of it is certainly worth celebrating and remembering.  But it is hard to read that part of her blessedness comes from the “martyrdom” that was her marriage.  Victoria was “given” in marriage to an abusive and violent man.  Many tried to persuade her to leave the marriage.  I find myself wondering how “blessed” she might have been freed of that painful “martydom?”  Marriage and martyrdom don't belong in the same sentence. 

And then I took that mood to my reading of this first part of Ruth.  In its entirety, this short narrative is one of the most beautiful pieces of literature in the Bible.  Today’s portion is a testimony to the strength that comes from the intimate relationships that thrive within the community of women.  But the background of the story of Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah is the plight of women subject to the lordship of their male protectors.  Written between 950 and 700 BCE…I understand. 

Blessed Victoria is modern.  Canonized by John Paul II.  Wow.  That is a very slow pace of change.

The Love commandment is to ground everything else that comes as law, we hear in the gospel.  Choosing the loving way is never the easy way. 

It is a heavy Friday…