Borders and Belonging - Lessons from Ruth

“Borders and Belonging: The Book of Ruth: A Story For Our Times” by Pάdraig Ó Tuama and Glenn Jordan offers a fascinating look at Ruth and many interesting links to contemporary times.

In particular, they emphasise lessons of kindness, so often missing from our experience – “the contrast between this biblical narrative of kindness and compassion couldn’t be starker when compared to the bear pit of politics and civic discourse in recent years on the issue of the EU. But maybe that is exactly why Ruth is important for us today when kindness and compassion seem to be in such short supply. This apparently simple book situates itself at the very places where the tectonic plates of conflicted communities threaten to crack and split apart whole nations and societies. Perhaps it offers us a way towards the healing of our fractures and the building of new and healthy relationships in the aftermath of trauma.”

There are a number of references to Brexit, very current when the book was written, but in a way that runs deep and fits numerous politically turbulent times. There is a strong push to remember the vulnerable and the marginalised. “The book of Ruth reminds us to look to the margins and to ask about who is being affected by these global eruptions. The bright and shiny baubles of Brexit, for instance, are overwhelmingly powerful, but they can also distract us from what is going on behind the loud exterior. Ruth reminds us that there will always be those driven back by the noise, pinned down by the tumult, who will be seeking mediating voices to speak to them words of comfort and inclusion and assure them they have not been forgotten.”

Another key point they raise is around the risks and damaging elements of stereotyping. “The book of Ruth is also a radical theological act. It recognizes that the national stereotype of Moabites is overcome by a new story; indeed, it is an acknowledgement that new stories are always possible. And these new stories are not told on the level of nation states or whole people groups but through personal and human encounter. In this way the book demonstrates the enduring and transforming power of incarnation.” We should always be looking for the contribution that different folk can make, and so the different stories that they are telling.

And, of course, there is a reference to migration, its challenges and contributions, and the blinkered approach that we often take. “The story of the world is a story of migrating peoples. For millennia, people have moved across seas and over mountain ranges. Empires seized lands and created borders. With borders and empires came the idea of policing the permission to move, and the era of Christianist empires introduced the imagination that you only have to be in a country a few hundred years before you become the ones with the right to be there, policing other people who are seeking to arrive as your recent forebears did, only a generation – or three or four – before. This book of Ruth is an intervention into the story.”