Preacher: Julia Baker-Swann
Scripture: Ruth 1:1-18
Basket of Figs
by Ellen Bass
Bring me your pain, love. Spread
it out like fine rugs, silk sashes,
warm eggs, cinnamon
and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me
the detail, the intricate embroidery
on the collar, tiny shell buttons,
the hem stitched the way you were taught,
pricking just a thread, almost invisible.
Unclasp it like jewels, the gold
still hot from your body. Empty
your basket of figs. Spill your wine.
That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it,
cradling it on my tongue like the slick
seed of pomegranate. I would lift it
tenderly, as a great animal might
carry a small one in the private
cave of the mouth.
—-
When I read this poem
I heard the Holy One whispering it in my ears
and I felt how much I needed the invitation
“Bring me your pain, love.”
This has been a year, years of so much loss.
The number of COVID deaths is such a big numbing statistic.
Each of us here in some way knows someone
who makes those numbers not just a number.
I hear you as a community have lost and celebrated the life of a beloved recently.
And the loss we know is not just death, but ambiguous loss
changed plans, weddings and graduations not attended,
meals with friends not shared, hugs not given.
Maybe a lost sense of “normalcy” lost sense of ease in public.
Loss of peace.
On this All Hallow’s Eve. Eve of All Saint’s Day.
We remember the lives that have gone before us.
We pause to remember those we have lost, those we love.
And sometimes that remembering, that lament
is a really challenging path.
A path that can be hard to give ourselves
or each other the permission to walk,
or stumble along in our own way.
—
As I read the story we heard in Ruth 1 through the lens of this moment,
through my own body holding grief.
I saw the women’s tears in new ways.
I saw the story as a invitation to
“Bring me your pain, love”
Often this story opening the book of Ruth
is held up as an example of loyalty.
Ruth’s name means “Friend”
and she is just that to her mother-in-law Naomi.
We hear her striking words
“where you go I go, your people my people, your God my God.”
We praise Ruth, and yes what she does is beautiful,
and we seem to either forget about the other daughter-in-law Orpah,
whose name means “the one who walks away,”
and maybe we even judge her a bit, she did not cling to Naomi.
She kissed her mother-in-law and left.
But what if we look at each woman’s actions in a different way?
What if we see this story as one of permission to grieve as you need?
Each woman, in their desperate grief, was listening to what they
needed to do.
Naomi was clear she needed to leave her husband’s land and return
to the country of her people, Moab.
Within herself Ruth heard that she needed to go with Naomi
“where you go I go…”
For Orpah she listened within and heard a different call.
This is still a story of loyalty.
Loyalty to one’s own needs,
one’s journey and inner knowing,
loyalty to the process and mysterious unfolding of lament.
I love that for Ruth and Orpah their decisions were made
after a collective weeping, “They wept aloud again.”
Tears as clarifiers.
Could it be that the very act of grieving gave clarity to
what was needed in their grief?
—
A few years ago I was going through a season of acute grief.
I had left a relationship of six years, I had left a graduate program,
my chronic illness was flaring. I was twenty-eight and moved
home to my parents house and felt totally lost.
Each morning unprocessed grief
felt like an approaching thunderstorm charged and churning
in the distance, the air heavy and buzzing, brewing on the edge of myself.
It was hard to decide what to eat for breakfast, let alone
discern the bigger “what nexts.”
Each day I would move like molasses through the grief
forcing myself stay busy doing
until I was finally able to give into the tears,
to let the waters of pain rain from me.
Almost always after I was able to cry I had more clarity
even if it was just what I needed to do that day.
The skies parted a bit.
Most often the clarity was,
“oh right, I am grieving…just let yourself feel…”
“Bring me your pain, love.”
——
Isaiah 53:5 describes Jesus as, “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.”
To love is to lose
and Jesus loved deeply.
We are given accounts of his free flowing tears of love
and despair at suffering and injustice.
Jesus wept for his dear friend Lazuraus.
Wept for the city of Jerusalem.
His last words on the cross
“Father, why have you forsaken me?”
I feel these words as such a model in our anguish.
To rage if we need to rage.
To doubt if we need to doubt.
To yell the big why with hands raised or whispered
within the aching folds of our hearts.
I wonder if part of Jesus’s health was his freedom of tears.
If his clarity, his voice, his presence, his joy, his rage, his love
came from allowing his feelings, whatever they were in that moment,
to be expressed.
“Bring me your pain, love.”
I imagine Orpah walking back to her homeland,
embodying her name “the one who walks away”
to grieve is a walking away.
I see slow tears rolling down her cheeks
tears in their free flow
not suppressed or made to walk a path she did not choose.
I imagine Ruth and Naomi walking toward Moab
with slow tears rolling down their cheeks
tears in free flow
not suppressed or made to walk paths they did not choose.
What tears and emotions are you suppressing?
What does that feel like in your body?
What wants to flow free?
What is blocking that free expression of grief?
—
During my acute season of grief
I painted a series
that I called “Painted Tears Bloom”
Bloom is the effect in watercolor
when water and pigment meet.
It reminds me of when tears fall onto a page
blossoming with salt crystals.
I invite us to enter a few minutes of silence
while I show a slideshow of the paintings.
Allow colors, flow and bloom
take you wherever you need to be with whatever
is in your heart,
with what your body is speaking,
through sensation, tension, heaviness, calm.
We are held in a vast, unbounded Love…
there is permission…
“Bring me your pain, love.”







