“What’s your plan?” Lessons of love and resilience from Ruth & Naomi and the U.S. Equal Credit Opportunity Act.
A homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Ruth 3:1–12a, 4:9–17; Proverbs 31:10, 15ab, 16–17, 20, 25a, 26, 29a, 30b-31; Hebrews 13:1–3, 5–6; Mark 12:38–44 (CCL)
50 years ago, in 1974, Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), making it illegal to discriminate against women and minorities on credit applications. For 50 years, women have had the right to access credit lines, mortgages, and start businesses without a male cosigner.
For the entirety of my life as a white cis-gender woman in the United States, I have known few limits on what I might accomplish, Roman Catholic patriarchy aside. As a divorced, single mom in the late 2000s, I purchased a home, a vehicle, and obtained credit lines in my own name. I have advanced in professions that are meaningful to me, and when I remarried in July of 2015, it was out of love and companionship. That possibility would have been true whether I married a woman, man, or a non-binary beloved because the U.S. passed the marriage equality act that June.
Of course, a two-income household is much easier to manage than a single income; I can’t say I never struggled. I certainly did. But not like Ruth and Naomi.
The women of our readings today probably never had the social imagination to dream up a world like ours. With far fewer rights, they survived hardship after hardship with strength and dignity. Faced with the deaths of their husbands and economic collapse, having no rights of inheritance or ability to pursue their own livelihoods, they put one foot before the other, and moved into an uncertain future with nothing to give but love for one another.
In their lifetimes, fathers gave dowries to marry off their daughters. Daughters became wives tasked with domestic work and motherhood in exchange for some sort of economic stability. It wasn’t about love or companionship. Women might have been lucky to find those qualities, but they were not promised. In fact, the Bible reveals several stories of violence against women by their fathers and husbands. We never seem to talk about that, and today’s not the day. But let’s not forget the realities of those who have gone before us.
Many of you remember life before 1974. You have known economic independence in adulthood, but you also know the stories of your mothers, aunts, and elders who labored in the home or in convents —some knowing religious life as their only path to advanced education and/or to escape undesirable marriage. Many of these women followed true loves and callings and may have been very happy with their arrangements; others suffered greatly — including women in abusive relationships (not excluding those in convents!), and lesbians who entered into heteronormative contracts out of need for economic stability and relief from societal pressures. Women (especially white women) have had more possibilities of independence and self-direction for the past 50 years than we have in all of human history.
50 years! I’m just going on 46.
This is heavy on my heart and my mind as the fangs of racism and misogyny are taking brazen leaps in popular support. In the days since the election, white male supremacists have been jeering awful slurs across the internet and in public spaces, with men threatening women with ugly phrases like: “Your body, MY choice,” “get back to the kitchen,” and “repeal the 19th” amendment.
These sentiments are cruel, harmful, and they directly relate to Catholic dogma and the Christian right’s influence on the new administration’s guidebook: Project 2025. This guidebook threatens to take away securities from my daughter that I have always known, from reproductive health to employment protections and beyond. It celebrates the same heteronormative “traditional family values” as the Roman Catholic Church.
In the past year, the Pope that so many people adore has doubled down on his misogyny. He does active harm each time he insists that the dignity of women rests in our femininity, in the bridelike metaphor of a feminine church with a male Christ to lead us, in the sexist idea that “…a woman within the People of God is a daughter, a sister, a mother;” and that “to masculinize women, is not human, it’s not Christian.”
This is what’s been on my mind as I read Ruth and Naomi’s survival story. Ruth’s love for Naomi was so great that she would follow her to the ends of the earth, and would do whatever she needed to for their shared security. So much, that she would lay at the feet of an old man to be ‘redeemed’ and bear him a child. The real love story here is between two women trapped in a world that saw them as little more than objects of male affection and possession. In the greater context of the Bible, Ruth is elevated as the woman who gave birth to a line of kings leading to Jesus. The men who wrote the story saw her as a utilitarian plot device. But we can see her as a woman, a whole human, who lived and loved. Their wisdom is perennial.
Ruth and Naomi’s values and choices defined them more than their given conditions. They girded themselves with strength, opened their mouths in wisdom, and challenged the status quo. Ruth could have gone back to her family in Moab, but she journeyed to a foreign land and gave her all to become a source of redemption for Naomi. She is like the woman of the gospel whose offering is of infinite worth because in faith, she gives from her poverty. Like many women throughout history, all she had was her body, her labor, her womb.
There are still women today who are treated as little more than men’s property and means of child production; this is a tragedy. I deeply love the story of Naomi and Ruth, but I hate their situation. I find myself praying more and more each day that we never go back; that the spirit of liberation strengthens and stretches around the globe until every woman and girl is free, knowing herself clothed with strength and dignity, not in the chokehold of misogyny.
Our nation is entering a new stage of instability for women and marginalized peoples; we don’t have to look far to notice acts of cruelty and feelings of fear. There will be times we feel like we have little to give. And rest is an important part of resistance. It is part of being hospitable to ourselves.
My son asked me last Wednesday: mom, what is your plan?
I wasn’t sure what he meant at first. I said, “you mean, tonight? Or this week?”
And he said, “no… like your plan, for all of this.”
Leave it to our kids to ask the hard questions.
I told him my plan is to rise each morning and orient myself to love, kindness, and community care. I’m going to create reminders for myself to lean into joy and spend time with my favorite people. Beyond that, I don’t know. The details will come. None of us can decide the world we live in, but we can decide how we will be in it.
We aren’t the first people to live through scary and uncertain times. Hardship, conflict, and war have plagued human history. Our own nation has yet to reckon with its deep roots in white Christian male supremacy, and the ugliness we see and feel right now is not new; it is an ugliness Black, Indigenous, immigrants, communities of color, and LGBTQ+ folks have experienced over decades and centuries. So we’re going to do what loving, resilient, hopeful people have always done when everything gets harder.
We’re going to keep loving one another.
And I’m going to be praying, each step of the way, for the company of angels.
