Borders and Belonging

 I'm reading a slim book by Irish poet Padraig O Tuama (and Glenn Jordan) called "Borders and Belonging" .  It's a study on the Bible book of Ruth, but to call it a Bible study is maybe not quite what it is. The book started as a series of reflections and workshops on Brexit and how the Irish communities Padraig worked with could find some kind of Christian take on it, using the book of Ruth as a mediating lens to view it through.

Before, I've loved Ruth for the study of Naomi, a middle aged lady deep in loss and depression - the book read me well at one point in my life.  But this study asks deep, penetrating questions of the text and of us.  In a world of "others" - migrants, economic and assylum seekers, poverty and female vulnerability in a male dominated world.

They certainly aren't "conservative" scholars and they draw on Jewish texts and Bible scholarship - the book is just peppered with contemporary questions and I found it asked me some awkward questions too.

Particularly, it gave me an angle on the horrible passages in Nehemiah and Ezra, where the returning exiles who have married "the people of the land" are forced to divorce them.  Sitting in the rain, listening to the law.  And it always felt to me such a negation of love.

There is a suggestion that Ruth was written down, finally, as a counterpoint, a theology of grace and kindness through story to counter this thread, this stream in the return from exile.  Never thought of that.  Never even knew that it was a possibility.

I just know that if it had been me, sitting in that rain, knowing I was a forbidden person, someone who had wrongfully married a man from the land, I would not have thought much of Israel's God. 

I haven't finished the book yet, but when I do, I think I will go straight back to the beginning and read it again.