The Book of Ruth is a woman’s story about a woman’s life. Written thousands of years ago—anywhere from 500 to 1000 B.C.E., depending on which linguistic clues we choose to follow—it is nevertheless, a perennial. Composed, faith tells us, under the inspiration of the Divine, it calls us to reflect in every generation on what it means to be a whole woman, a spiritual woman, yet today. It models what every woman alive lives still. It is an icon of what it means to be a woman of God, to live under the impulse of the Spirit, to be a creative part of God’s creative power. One moment at a time it teaks us from one life moment to another to show us how God works is us all, to remind us to what God calls us all, whatever the period, whatever the place. It is a silhouette of every woman’s life frozen in time and held up for reflection.

Life, it seems to me in retrospect, is only incidentally made up of chronological pieces specific to this person in this place at this time. Instead, life its substance and meaning, is really made up of a series of defining moments—moments of loss, risk, change, transformation, relationship, and survival—that mark every woman’s passage through time in a way separate from the men around her and that shape her as she goes. All of them stand stark and unadorned in Ruth, pared to the marrow and clear in their challenges. The way we deal with each of these moments determines who and what we really are, who and what we are intended to be, who and what we can become both spiritually and socially.

Naomi and Ruth have something to say to each of us, even yet, even now as we face loss and change and risk the unfamiliar in our own lives and the eternal debate over God’s will for women. The Book of Ruth is a treatise on the spirituality of womanhood.

   –from The Story of Ruth by Joan Chittister