What Can We Learn From Ruth? — Tileston on Ruth’s Loyalty
⏱ 13 min read
You have lost something. Not in the abstract way the phrase is sometimes used, but in the actual way — a person, a season of life, a marriage, a home, a future you had quietly been counting on. The loss has not been clean. It has trailed practical consequences — a household to rearrange, a budget to redo, a circle of friends who do not quite know what to say to you any more, a country or a city or a church you no longer belong to in the way you once did. And the inside of you sounds nothing like the women in the bereavement pamphlets. The inside of you sounds like a foreign woman in a strange field, holding a small bundle of barley, not certain whether to keep walking or sit down where you stand.
That is the inside of Ruth. The book named for her opens with three funerals in five verses — her father-in-law, her brother-in-law, and her husband, all dead in the space of a single short paragraph — and the rest of the book is the slow work of a widow learning to be loyal to a future she cannot yet see. What can we learn from Ruth in the Bible is, in part, this: the loyalty did not require certainty. The loyalty was walked one harvest day at a time, in a country not her own, beside a mother-in-law who had named herself bitter, with no guarantee that the bending to glean would lead anywhere except hunger. Mary Tileston — who knew something about the slow patience of bereaved women, having compiled her devotional after her own decades of widowhood — collected three passages in Daily Strength for Daily Needs that read the inside of the loyal widow more carefully than any modern grief handbook. This is the slow reading of them. The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Ruth was probably young. The text never says how young, but the chronology of the book suggests she was in her twenties when her husband died — a Moabite woman who had married into an Israelite family that had migrated to her country during a famine, and who, ten years later, found herself widowed and childless in a household of three widows, with the eldest of the three — Naomi, her mother-in-law — preparing to walk back to Bethlehem alone. Orpah, the other daughter-in-law, did the practical thing and turned back to her own people. Ruth did not. Whither thou goest, I will go. The most quoted line in the book is a young widow’s refusal to take the practical exit from a future she had no reason to choose.
What the loyalty actually was
The loyalty was not heroic in the way the wedding-reading version of it has made it sound. The loyalty was, from the inside, the slow refusal to abandon a person whose grief had named her bitter — and the willingness to walk into a country whose customs Ruth did not fully know, with no man to protect her, no field to glean from until one was offered, no language that placed her in the right kinship category to be safe. The loyalty cost her her own people, her own gods, her own future as a re-marriageable widow in Moab, and the only thing she received in return at the start was the right to walk behind another woman in silence, towards a town that did not yet know either of them.
You will recognise the texture. The loyalty does not feel like heroism from the inside. It feels like not knowing how to do anything else. The version of yourself that would have practical-exited the situation does not, somehow, get up off the chair. The staying is what arrives when the leaving will not come. Tileston, writing for women who knew this kind of staying intimately, opens with a prayer that names the inside of it:
“O Lord God gracious and merciful, give us, I entreat Thee, a humble trust in Thy mercy, and suffer not our heart to fail us. Though our sins be seven, though our sins be seventy times seven, though our sins be more in number than the hairs of our head, yet give us grace in loving penitence to cast ourselves down into the depth of Thy compassion. Let us fall into the hand of the Lord.”
— Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
Read it twice.
The phrase that does the work is let us fall into the hand of the Lord. Tileston is borrowing King David’s words from a different season of grief, but she is using them to describe the posture of any woman whose practical options have closed. Fall. Not step into. Not walk carefully toward. Fall. The loyalty Ruth walked into Bethlehem with was the loyalty of a young widow who had quietly run out of options to manage, and who had fallen — by something that looked from the outside like choice but felt from the inside like collapse — into the hand of the only Person whose hand was still extended.
(If the long slow work of staying when leaving would have been easier has been your shape recently, how to Bible journal in a notebook walks the practice of putting that staying onto the page. And if the writing itself has been the part that has not yet found its rhythm, how to journal after reading the Bible walks three simple frameworks for the page you open after you close the book, while the SOAP Bible study method explained is the more structured cousin for the woman who wants a method that holds her on the difficult mornings.)
The phrase humble trust in Thy mercy is the small theological correction to the dramatic version of Ruth’s loyalty. The Moabite widow did not walk into Bethlehem because she had certainty. She walked because she had a humble trust — the small, costless, almost-empty trust of a soul that has been emptied of its other options. The trust does not require the soul to feel strong. It requires only that the soul stop trying to manage its own way out, and let itself fall. The falling is the loyalty. Ruth had been falling, quietly, for the entire walk from Moab.
The second passage: steering safely through every storm
“And we shall steer safely through every storm, so long as our heart is right, our intention fervent, our courage steadfast, and our trust fixed on God. If at times we are somewhat stunned by the tempest, never fear; let us take breath, and go on afresh. Do not be disconcerted by the fits of vexation and uneasiness which are sometimes produced by the multiplicity of your domestic worries. No indeed, dearest child, all these are but opportunities of strengthening yourself in the loving, forbearing graces which our dear Lord sets before us.”
— Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the phrase if at times we are somewhat stunned by the tempest. Tileston is being careful with her verb. She does not say if at times the tempest defeats us. She says somewhat stunned. The stunning is the realistic experience of the loyal woman walking through a bereaved season — the moments she sits down on a stool in the kitchen because the next task is one task too many, the afternoons she stops in the middle of a sentence because she has forgotten what she was saying, the small fits of disorientation that the practical world calls coping difficulty and Tileston calls, more gently, being somewhat stunned.
Ruth was stunned in this way for the first weeks in Bethlehem. The text does not say so directly, but read between the lines and the stunned-ness is visible. The gleaning was done in silence. The greeting from Boaz — the Lord be with thee — was met with a falling on the face that was more than custom; it was the response of a young widow who had not been spoken to kindly by a man of any standing in some time. The eating of the parched grain at noon was followed by her sitting beside the reapers — a small social inclusion that the text marks because it would have been the first such inclusion she had had since leaving Moab. The stunned widow is registering small kindnesses with the strange amplification of a soul that has been running on the bare minimum for too long.
Let us take breath, and go on afresh. This is Tileston’s contemplative instruction for the stunned woman. Take breath. The two-word command is more than a metaphor; it is a literal somatic instruction. The stunned body has stopped breathing fully. The diaphragm has tightened. The shoulders have come up. The chest has narrowed. Take breath — meaning, take one breath that is fuller than the breaths you have been taking, and let the next step come after it.
Ruth’s gleaning was, day after day, a take breath, and go on afresh practice. Bend. Pick up the dropped grain. Stand up. Take breath. Bend again. The loyalty was not a single dramatic act; it was the patient repetition of the small bending in the field — and the patient acceptance, from Boaz and from God, of the small kindness that came back. Do not be disconcerted by the fits of vexation and uneasiness. The fits will come. The loyal woman is not the woman who has no fits. She is the woman who, mid-fit, takes breath and goes on afresh.
A pause, here, for the body
The teaching has a body to it. The bereaved soul holds its loss in the chest and the throat — the long-set tightness of a woman who has been holding her grief in for a season because there was no time to put it down. Pause now.
Sit somewhere quiet. Put one hand lightly over your sternum, the flat bone at the centre of the chest. Take one slow inhale. Notice the small place where the breath catches — usually at the base of the throat, sometimes higher. On the exhale, let the chest soften under your hand by a small amount — not by trying to relax it, but by letting the rib cage settle one half-inch lower than it was. Take one more slow inhale, and on this one, let the exhale go all the way out until the chest is empty enough that the next breath arrives on its own.
That small softening under your hand is the body’s translation of take breath, and go on afresh. The bereaved chest cannot exhale all the way. The body learning to walk loyally through a long season is, at the most basic physiological level, the body learning to let the held grief out by half an inch, breath by breath. The slow exhale is the entry point.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s is built around this kind of slow daily softening. One short passage each evening. Room for the honest sentence. Pre-printed verse, so the page does not demand more than a bereaved woman can bring on a tired Tuesday. Ruth’s kind of loyalty does not get written on a fresh page from scratch. It gets written on a page someone else has already started for you, so you can finish the sentence with what little breath you have.
The third passage: the heart’s depths
“In the heart’s depths a peace serene and holy / Abides, and when pain seems to have its will, / Or we despair, — oh, may that peace rise slowly, / Stronger than agony, and we be still.”
— Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
Read it three times.
This is the most piercing of the three passages, because of the verb abides. The peace, Tileston is saying, is already there. It does not have to be summoned by the right effort or the right amount of belief. It abides — quietly, in the heart’s depths — even on the days when pain seems to have its will. The bereaved widow has been searching for the peace as if it were elsewhere. Tileston gently relocates it: the peace is in the depths. The agony is on the surface. Both are simultaneously true.
For Ruth in Bethlehem, the surface was the bending in the field. The surface was the worry over how long the gleaning would be permitted, whether the men would touch her, whether Naomi would survive the winter, whether any future was actually possible for a foreign widow with no man and no land. The surface was loud. The depths, the text quietly implies, were already holding her — the Lord under whose wings she had come to take refuge (the metaphor is Boaz’s, used in chapter two and answered by Ruth in chapter three) was the same Lord whose peace was abiding in her heart’s depths through every disorienting afternoon.
May that peace rise slowly. This is the phrase that catches the contemplative woman who has been waiting for an emotional turning that has not come. The peace will rise slowly. Not suddenly. Not on a felt-grace afternoon. Slowly. The way the barley harvest in Bethlehem ripened over weeks; the way Ruth’s standing in the community grew over conversations; the way the kinsman-redeemer arrangement assembled itself over chapter three and chapter four. The slow rising is the actual shape of God’s work in a bereaved life. The dramatic moment is not the shape. The slow rising is.
Stronger than agony, and we be still. The peace, when it rises, is not the absence of the agony. It is something stronger than the agony — coexistent with it, but more foundational. The bereaved widow does not stop hurting. She becomes, somewhere underneath the hurt, still. Ruth at the threshing-floor at the end of chapter three has not stopped hurting; she has become still. The stillness is the rising peace. The hurt has not gone; it has been under-laid by something larger.
For the modern woman whose loss has shaped a season she did not choose, this is the line that gently corrects the timeline of recovery. You will not be done with the grief on a particular Tuesday. You will, slowly, become still while still carrying it. The stillness is the work the peace does in the heart’s depths while your surface continues to bend and stand and bend again in the field that is not the field you would have chosen.
(For the sibling slow readings in this contemplative-fathers series, what can we learn from Mary mother of Jesus walks Tileston on Mary’s Magnificat, and what can we learn from Hannah’s prayer walks Spurgeon on the praying woman — both of them lives that began, like Ruth’s, in a loss whose shape was eventually quieted into a still and rising peace.)
What Ruth’s loyalty becomes, given time
The book of Ruth is four chapters long. The first chapter is the loss. The second is the gleaning. The third is the threshing-floor. The fourth is the redemption — the Boaz arrangement, the marriage, the son, and the small last verse that names the son as the grandfather of David. What can we learn from Ruth in the Bible, taken across the full arc, is that the loyalty walked one slow harvest day at a time turned out to be the soil the line of the Messiah grew in. The young widow whose name had been a Moabite name in Moab became, four generations later, the great-grandmother of a king — and, four hundred generations later, an ancestor named in the genealogy of Jesus.
She did not know this. The text does not give her the foresight. She walked the gleaning without the genealogy in her hand. The loyalty was loyalty to the next bending, not to the long arc the bending was building toward. This is the consolation hidden in the slow daily practice of any woman walking a bereaved season — the bending you are doing now is not seen by you in its full arc, and the arc may be larger than the bending suggests. Your job is not to know the arc. Your job is to keep bending faithfully in the field you find yourself in.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotional for Women in Their 40s. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the bereaved heart in proximity to the One whose peace abides in the depths, until the rising becomes the stillness.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries Tileston’s slow vocabulary — fall into the hand of the Lord, take breath and go on afresh, may that peace rise slowly — into a daily companion built for the woman whose loss is, at last, ready to be named and brought home.
