Artist Unknown
Questions from the Crossroads
Laura Michele Diener
To the curious Jewish child that I was, Christianity, particularly Catholicism, promised a certain sinful glamor, a hand of red fingernails drawing me into a forbidden room. As a grown woman, the spoken word itself still sounds hushed to me, soft and silent like a velvet pall. Catholic. When I visited Florence last summer, I spent far too much money on a droplet of coral hanging from a slender gold chain. The store where I bought the necklace was sepulcher-like and overly warm, with the chains and stones displayed in lacquer boxes lined with velvet. Coral, the elegant proprietress explained to me, symbolized the blood of Christ. Her accented English, the upsweep of her ashen hair, even her wrinkles bespoke a type of old world glamor, like that of Sophia Loren. I walked back into the rainy afternoon with Christ’s blood warm against my throat, pulsing against my own blood stream like conflicting tides. At a church gift shop in Siena, I bought a cheap charm bracelet dangling with the portraits of saints and have worn it every day since on my wrist, another place on my body where the skin runs thin and the blood surges close to the air.
Playing with the tiny gold medallions, listening to their hollow trills as they clinked across my wrist veins, I remembered my first introduction to Jesus Christ. When I started elementary school, I was plunged into a world of knowledge both exciting—French, science, language arts— and sinister—addition and subtraction. I had heard my parents swear constantly, “Jesus Christ!” although it never occurred to me that this was an actual name. For me it was a funny little incantation you exclaimed when you were upset, like when I worked on those slippery number problems, ripping through the paper with the eraser. “Cheesuskryes,” I liked to say, feeling satisfied. It was one of those words that popped pleasurably in your mouth, like gesundheit or pamplemousse. Mrs. Smith, the math teacher, used to clutch at a cross necklace around her throat and snap at me, “Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain!” More strange words. The only one I connected to any sort of image was vein. I understood veins as blue thread, visible just under my wrists or coiled in a wreath on the back of my mother’s leg. The word then emerged into my consciousness as a scribble of blood lines superimposed over the golden cross at Mrs. Smith’s throat that somehow also meant Cheeesuskryes. How joyous that the world consisted of so much noise and sound, so many clanking syllables of color and light that only occasionally coalesced into meaning.
God, on the other hand, whose connection with veins and silly words remained a mystery, was a more familiar concept, a longtime presence in my consciousness. From Jewish nursery schools and pious parents, I knew about God who created the world and spangled the sky with stars and rainbows. My sister and I owned a battered book called Bible Stories for Children that I pored over for hours. Long before I could read it, I stared at the pictures and let them form their own stories. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and thus the book and the world began with an image of streams of golden light through the clouds, feathering patterns all over the sky. In the negative spaces of the clouds, where the light receded—there was God. So spirit, the Lord, and possibly Cheesuskyres, existed somewhere between light and blood, between sky and flesh, between what shines and what pulses.
The images I happily summoned as a child exploded eventually into adolescent yearning for the intangible. When I was fifteen, I went to Jerusalem on a school trip. I was rabid with religious faith, absolutely spilling over with that kind of religious passion I think only late-blooming teenage girls can have. I didn’t have any interest yet in boys or sex; I suppose I had to fixate on something, so I picked God. I wrote out a letter to God, and I buried it in a crack of the Western Wall of the ancient temple. I actually wrote, Dear God, at the beginning, and signed my full name at the end. I remembered feeling along the wall for a crevice, reveling in the vibrating warmth of the sandstone baked in the sun of three thousand centuries, and tucking the crumpled up note as far inside as I could push it, the way barred by other tiny knots of letters. I imagined it resting there in the cool of the rock. I can summon the texture of the rock more readily than I can the memory of faith, which is as useful as trying to remember the language of last night’s dream—the moment I touch it, it recedes.
I used to write letters to God. Now I write lists of questions to no one in particular, hoping I’ll unwittingly scrawl out an answer.
For I must admit, I have fallen out of faith, as if faith were an old lover whose picture I flip to occasionally in albums, remembering their existence but not their scent. I’m ashamed in some ways to admit this falling out, because who wants to confess to faithlessness? Who wants to be a person who cannot keep their plighted troth, who can uphold no vow? I kept up the habits of faith long after the belief had fled, lighting candles, keeping fasts, uttering the requisite prayers, in the hope that I would fall back into my own Jewish faith or find a new one that suited me more.
I have considered turning to Catholicism, that red forbidden room. But can faith be tried on and discarded like a gown? Or is it your own flesh that bleeds when you rip it off?
***
Convertare, at its Latin heart, means to turn around. It’s a word of motion and reorientation, of a soul in upheaval. The spirit flits into disarray, and then, in a breath of silvery realization, coalesces into a new shape. In that same book that first revealed to me the image of God, I learned about conversion when I encountered the story of Ruth, the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, who followed her dead husband’s mother across the River Jordan and begged to accompany her back to Bethlehem, declaring, “whithersoever thou shalt go, I will go: and where thou shalt dwell, I also will dwell. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God” (Ruth 1:16).
That Latin word, convertare, didn’t yet exist. I don’t know if any word existed for the audacity of choosing one’s own god, of venturing forth into unknown lands, of turning around to find her true self. Ruth’s conversion began at a crossroads, along the ancient King’s Highway, among the sweeping sands where the caravans carrying spices and ivory and perfume paused to water their animals and split East and North. It was there the two women paused to say goodbye. A convert has chosen and in choosing, had been transformed.
I was born into the religion Ruth chose. I am the distant future at the end of the road she set herself upon, winding north from the sunny plains of Moab into the frozen expanses of Russia, plunging into the dark waters and reemerging, newly born, on the shores of a new world.
But in terms of faith, I stand at a perpetual crossroads, lost in unknowing, stagnant with choice.
Ruth must have loved Mahlon, Naomi’s son. Without the force of that love, she would never have been so willing to marry a man from among his kinsmen, so eager to cling to his mother. Love must have flourished between them, need and want indistinguishable in the highlands of Jordan where death was but one poor harvest away. When the stars pulsed cold in the desert night and they were alone, Ruth and Mahlon must have whispered to each other “my dove, my love, my pomegranate.” All the archaic prose of the ancient Levant—those rhythms of unhindered desire. They must have told each other stories of shepherds with lush fields who courted wild huntresses, of gods and covenants and descendants like pulsing stars scattering.
Ten years passed, and each night he drank what she offered, but still, her womb never opened, no heir for their house appeared, and yet, like Jacob and his Rachel, they clung fast to each other, and perhaps their ten years, too, passed like one night never long enough of strokes and caresses and sweet words. One evening she left her father’s house for the Israelite stranger who won her, and the next morning, she buried him in the earth that was not his home. In between lay a thousand nights of dreaming.
Perhaps it was the memory of melting want in the windy sun-settings, the stories whispered between sleeping and embracing, that gave Ruth the courage to seek, if not him, his people. And perhaps the recollection of heated anticipation bound her to his blood so that she grasped at the woman who had borne him, could not let her cross beyond the River Jordan without her, and vowed to her, “the land that shall receive you dying, in the same land will I die, and there I will be buried” (Ruth 1:17).
Is that how we choose our path along the crossroads? To follow the people with whom we want to die? To journey to the land that shall receive us dying?
But not everyone will recognize our choice.
On the evening of August 2, 1942, at the Carmelite Monastery in Echt, Holland, Sister Theresa Benedicta of the Cross had just finished reading the evening meditations to her Sisters, when a harsh knocking interrupted the prayerful silence. The SS arrested her along with her biological sister Rosa. And because Sister Theresa was born Edith Stein, the youngest daughter of a Jewish family in Breslau, she traveled on a train deep into present-day Poland where she died at Auschwitz along with other women, also born to Jewish families. Her body, which was never recovered, was presumably incinerated, twinned with others, until together they drifted into the sky as white ash.
I wonder, is there any true turning around?
***
I first encountered Edith Stein at Bayeux Cathedral, in a hushed stained-glass sanctuary. We were both a long way from home, far from the hallmarks of life and death. She wasn’t French, but German, and had died in a bleak Polish summer, the air stagnant and saturated with mosquitos. I was in Poland one summer, too, back in my girlhood of flourishing faith, but I didn’t know then about Edith. It was the incongruous familiarity of her name that struck me at Bayeux and caused me to halt before her altar. I have Ediths and Steins scattered in the generations of my own family. Small white candles burned on the branches of a metal candelabra shaped like a barren tree afire, and a wooden table held a stack of paper cards with the image of a nun in a black gown adorned with a yellow star. I picked up a card and read about Edith, a Jewish woman honored in a vaulted medieval Cathedral, lit red by the light streaming through the windows. Should I say a prayer, I wondered, and which of my dormant tongues—Hebrew, French, Latin, German—would be most appropriate in that place of hybrid holiness? I sensed a man poised silently behind me, so I moved on, and turned to watch him scrape away neatly the waxen drippings of past offerings.
Given my vast propensity to doubt, I find it reassuring that most of the saints I admire were not consistent in their faith. Edith Stein, upon entering the University of Breslau to study philosophy, psychology, history, and German philology, bolstered by the confidence of eighteen years, declared herself an atheist. It was only at the age of thirty-one, during one long night when she read the entirety of the Book of Her Life by Saint Teresa of Avila, that she found herself hurled into faith. Edith devoured Teresa’s words in a hungry ecstasy, at dawn, throwing down the book and declaring, “This is the truth.” Within a few months, she was baptized as a Catholic.
When she took her final vows as a nun, Edith chose to enter the Discalced Carmelites—the reformed order founded by Teresa herself, saint, revered mystic and the unofficial patron saint of Spain. But the canonization and honors all occurred after her death. Saint Teresa came of age in dangerous times; she, in fact, coined the phrase “all times are dangerous times.” And she would know.
***
Saint Teresa shared with Edith Stein the burden of Hebrew birth in an unforgiving regime, in her case, the orange-scented Spain of Ferdinand II, a land newly conquered and continually cleansed, rescued first from Moors, then from Jews, and finally from faithless men and women of infinite heretical stripes. Her father’s father, the woolen merchant Juan Sanchez of Toledo, had been first a Jew and then a failed converso, failed enough to accuse himself before the austere judges of the local Inquisition. In their clemency, they offered him redemption. So he donned the yellow tunic and hat of those who had been false to their oaths, and he walked through the streets in miserable humility, seven Fridays in a row, his children cowering at his side. Some of his neighbors mocked the faithless convert with the full force of self-righteousness. Others kept their eyes downcast. They may have been only a relative or two away from the wrong bloodline. Even though afterwards Juan Sanchez fled to Avila and became a gentleman, everyone remembered. Honor reigned as the ultimate arbiter of nobility in fifteenth-century Spanish society, and the new determiner of honor was limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, red and glorious and free from Moorish or Jewish toxins. To cleanse his honor, Juan’s son Alfonzo married a proper noble lady with impeccable bloodlines and adopted her family’s name and crest. But could he forget that penitential walk by his father’s side? And Alfonzo’s daughter, his fifth child, Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda, knew about the grandfather who had humiliated himself in Toledo long before her birth, although her pious Christian mother raised her to never mention it.
Born in Avila, whose stony ramparts rose up against the brown country wastelands, Saint Teresa realized that cities built walls to keep out the undesirables. But she learned that some undesirables lurked within the protected spaces. At the turn of the fifteenth century, twenty-five years before Saint Teresa’s birth, approximately three thousand Jews had lived in Avila. By the time she reached her twentieth birthday, they were gone—reinvented, their names changed, their neighborhoods repurposed. The Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation rose up on the grounds of the old Jewish cemetery; at the age of twenty, Saint Teresa, granddaughter of a converso, daughter of a noble family, would join that very nunnery, to tread unwittingly upon the bones of the only Jews left in Avila.
No wonder doubt shuddered in her soul. She was born doubting, of her place in the world, her place in her family, her purity before God. The devil assailed the hearts of even the most well-meaning. Years passed during which her impious heart tormented her, beset her with illnesses that stilled her limbs and brought her to the brink of death, stranded her in dark valleys of sorrow that left her tongue too numb to pray, before she decided that God, not any devil, was calling to her in countless little ways. Only at the age of fifty-two could she dismiss her doubts and declare, “I fear those who fear the devil far more than I fear the devil himself.” That year she left the Incarnation with three like-minded women and set up a new convent under a Rule she wrote herself.
In times no less dangerous, although centuries later, Edith Stein took her name and entered the order Saint Teresa had founded. Edith Stein could never have known about the other woman’s grandfather—it was forgotten conveniently in the generations after Saint Teresa’s death and not widely known till the mid-1940’s when a Spanish historian sifted through some old court cases and stumbled upon her family secret. The woman who stood as godmother to Edith Stein at her baptism into Catholic faith, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a fellow philosopher, once asked her why precisely Teresa of Avila had inspired her to conversion. Edith replied in Latin, secretum meum mihi, “my secret is mine.” What did she sense about Saint Teresa? Did she recognize a burden of commonality? An instinct beyond understanding?
***
A convert is a paradox.
Before Edith became Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, she lived her early life in a Jewish family. She named her memoir of childhood Life in a Jewish Family, and she must have loved that family. It’s clear that she grew up suffused with happiness, privileged with love. She was the baby, the youngest of eleven children, nicknamed “pussycat” by an older brother because her siblings played with her like a pet kitten, and because there was something inscrutable about the tiny blonde child, her brothers and sisters called her “a book sealed with seven seals.”
That inscrutable quality reveals itself in the few photographs that exist of Edith. Each one is now iconic, reproduced again and again in biographies and mementos for sale in Catholic gift shops. Edith as a young undergraduate student at the University of Breslau, leaning back with surprising voluptuousness into a crowd of friends. In 1915, in her Red Cross nurse’s uniform, a volunteer during the Great War, serving on the typhus ward of a field hospital. Edith in 1916 receiving her doctorate in philosophy for her thesis, “On the Power of Empathy.” Her beautifully symmetrical features divided into two calm apple-shaped spheres by a distinctive cleft in her chin. She looks up at the photographer with a direct gaze from under downcast eyes, a pose that could be almost coquettish were the set of her mouth not so somber. The perfectly straight center part in her smooth dark hair renders her even more serious.
After she received her degree summa cum laude, she returned to her apartment wearing a wreath of daisies, prompting her landlady to exclaim, “One ought to take your picture like that, while the glow of happiness is still there. Otherwise, you’ve always got such a serious look on your face.” The only photograph where she doesn’t confront the viewer directly is the one taken in 1938, on the occasion of her final vows as a Carmelite nun. Her large eyes gaze to the periphery, unfocused and soft, like a woman newly in love, with her somber black hair now tucked under a white cap and a cascading veil.
Every new member of the Discalced Carmelites received a set of cards with their photograph and a quotation for distribution to their friends and family. Edith’s phrase: “From now on, my only calling is to love more.”
***
In her new faith, Ruth found a second love in a man of lush fields and impeccable ancestry, Boaz, her husband’s kinsman, the descendant eleven times over of Abraham the patriarch. This was a marriage of survival, her love poised between need and want. By embracing conversion, Ruth had said yes to poverty, to starvation, to the real possibility of assault and rape. She became a woman without a male protector, a strange woman heading toward a strange land, forced to scavenge behind the harvesters in the fields. Everyone knew that the women gleaning in the fields were themselves leavings of dead, broken families, and men could glean at their bodies as they willed. So when Ruth caught the eye of Boaz, she bargained his desire into a marriage. Their first night, there was no father’s house to leave, no kohl for her eyes or perfumed unguents for her skin, no bridal songs. She groped her way into the threshing floor and confronted him with her boldness; she was too starving to be shy, she had Naomi to think about, and she had a child to conceive, one that would bind them both to a clan and a lineage.
***
Theoretically, like Ruth, and like Edith, I could choose that which calls to me, seek beyond the veil of the world in my own fashion. But can I ever turn around far enough? Won’t I simply arrive back at the starting point?
My father has forgotten his memory. He lives in a dark haze, fighting a losing battle with oblivion with all the grit left in his body. Two years ago, I flew to Florida to meet him and my mother for his sixty-seventh birthday. We stayed in a hotel my parents had long favored, but the marble hallways and orange-tree scented gardens baffled him. It was Friday night, however, and I escorted him to Sabbath services which were held in a hotel ballroom, hoping to drop him off and leave, walk alone in the last coastal light of evening. As he and I wandered down the corridors, he grew worried, convinced I was leading him astray. A stranger in a strange land, he had gotten lost in the hotel already and had called my mother’s phone plaintively, asking, “Where am I?” His tremulousness gone by the evening, he was bristling with suspicion directed toward me. Confusion rendered him irrational, often unbearable.
When we finally reached the makeshift chapel at the end of a warren of hallways, I wasn’t sure how I could possibly leave him, so I resigned myself to sitting through a service. Resignation, because faith and I had long since parted ways. I handed him a prayer book from the stack at the back of the room, and when he grasped it, I watched the tension leave his body as he started singing, slipping easily into the postures of prayer. The man who hesitated over my name knew the words to another language. As soon as the book was in his hands, he knew who he was, and his place was fixed. His Jewishness exists beyond memory. It sleeps in his bones which are also half mine. How can it be unlearned?
***
Long before Edith rode her last dark train, she was no stranger to anti-Semitism, which she accepted as one of the unmoving facets of nature, like epidemics and business failures, and indeed, like misogyny. The latter prevented her from receiving an academic position teaching at a university. She worked instead as an assistant to her philosophy professor. She taught at a Catholic school in Speyer, and she lectured at an educational institute in Munster, but she left in 1933, when all civil servants were required to produce Aryan Certificates. She returned to her mother’s house along with the many Stein siblings now dismissed from universities and medical practices. She described all these events without rancor, without railing against the unfairness of it all. The laws of the land prescribed life for German Jews, and God’s plan determined her own course.
No longer employable, Edith resolved at last to become a Discalced Carmelite, donning the white veil of a novice to enter the monastery of St. Maria vom Frieden in Cologne. She had left behind her Judaism, but stubbornly, she clung to that community, that identity, even as the world turned against it. A priest urged her to write her memoir to help people realize the general humanity of Jews, and thus, in the hours left open by her unemployment, she wrote the story of her childhood, Das Leben einer jüdischen Familie, Life in a Jewish Family. She opens with a heartfelt plea to reason:
“Recent months have catapulted the German Jews out of the peaceful existence they had come to take for granted. They had been forced to reflect upon themselves, upon their being, and upon their destiny. . . . Those persons [of Germany] having associated with Jewish families as employees, neighbors, or fellow students, have found in them such goodness of heart, understanding, warm empathy, and so consistently helpful an attitude that, now, their sense of justice is outraged by the condemnation of this people to a pariah’s existence.
“But many others lack this kind of experience. The opportunity to attain it has been denied primarily to the young who, these days, are being reared in racial hatred from earliest childhood. To all who have been thus deprived we who grew up in Judaism have an obligation to give our testimony.” (September 1, 1933, Breslau)
How sweetly naïve those words seem to us today, how innocent Edith and her well-meaning priest friend.
***
My richest memories from Middle School take place in the sweeping yard of Janaki Nair, my best friend from those years. Every stump, every bush, every small incline formed a landmark in the mythic landscape of our imaginations. In the back of the yard stood the Secret Passage, a shaded corridor formed by a double row of trees, and a wooden fence, which separated her property from the burned wreckage of an old convent. We ran through the Secret Passage while holding our breaths in delicious fear, especially in winter, because behind the bare branches the convent lurked at the edge of our vision. In my memory, but no doubt amplified by my imagination, the convent rose up at least four stories high, a ghostly monstrosity, the windows blackened holes, the insides impenetrable, the dwelling places of vagrants, murderers, and ghosts, all things dangerous and forbidden. Janaki and I climbed trees all the time, and we could easily have climbed over that fence, but our trepidation formed a barrier. We would swear bold promises about climbing the fence, exploring those beckoning windows with flashlights, but we never did. Despite that, I dream regularly about returning to Janaki’s yard and wandering through the waste grass of the convent grounds. The windows glare down above me, oblong and narrow, dark coffins.
I feared the ghosts the most, the vestiges of strange women whose vows I didn’t comprehend, who had prayed to a god forbidden to me, and whose lives had been consumed in a fire.
***
Not having our hindsight to know such border crossings were futile, Edith and her older sister Rosa left Germany and sought refuge in Holland, at the small Discalced Carmelite in Echt. The thirteen choir Sisters and four lay Sisters were awed by the education and authorial credentials of the refugee Sister in their midst. They watched her write and pray through her days, and when the SS took her away, they gathered up all her manuscripts and bound them together. These papers included the draft of her last work, The Science of the Cross. They carried them along to the convent of Herkenbosch when they evacuated Echt to avoid the allied bombings. Throughout the remaining years of the war, Edith’s papers remained in the attic of Herkenbosch.
I imagine the shade of the ink growing lighter with each line; she must have mixed her dwindling ink supply with water. She wrote in haste, knowing her time in the convent and perhaps on earth, was almost finished. The Germans had entered Holland in May of 1940, and her deportation was imminent. She wrote about love, prayer, and faith in dense prose, weighted down with scholarly German wording, difficult to wade through even in translation. But all the words of an otherwise inscrutable woman are precious. “In our time, when the powerlessness of all natural means for battling the overwhelming misery everywhere has been demonstrated so obviously, an entirely new understanding of the power of prayer, of expiation, and of vicarious atonement has again awakened.” People speak rather meaninglessly about the power of prayer in words I tend to ignore, as they generally don’t translate into action. But Edith’s words are meaningful precisely because they suggested new forms of action. Look to the saints, she advised, not knowing she would soon be among their number. Saints can illuminate the path to faith through their ability to react in true emotional proportion to events. Everyone else in the world blocks themselves from deep feeling. They avoid deep sorrow through their days even though they inhabit a ravaged world. But the saints, in the extremities of their misery, recognize the import of human behavior, and react appropriately—grief or delight or both together. As Edith explained, “Deep genuine pain also seems to us a grace when compared to our rigid insensitivity.” Rather than abhor suffering, welcome it with gratitude for the compassion it awakens in you. Others will rely upon your compassion.
Her long night of grace began just after evening meditation on August 2, 1942, when SS officers banged on the door of the Sisters of Echt and carried off Edith and Rosa. The night stretched on as the train launched her back east, toward the dark Silesian hills of her childhood. She, the woman who had relinquished family and friends for a life of prayerful solitude, was never alone for the rest of her numbered days, hemmed in by dejected mothers and hysterical children and all their sweat, waste, and fear. But she knew how to react to things with appropriate joy, so I imagine that she cheered them all as best as she could, and distracted the children when their mothers withdrew, exhausted from the lack of food and answers. When would this end? Why were they there? Edith knew it would all end too soon, and she bore that secret, too, and instead spoke of common cheerful things in a brisk voice, chirpy as a mother bird, firm as a schoolmistress, being sure to call them by their names—Miep, Jan, Gretje, Annike—so they would find comfort in the familiar. Remembering the days in the lumber yard growing up in her Jewish family when her brothers played with her like a kitten, Edith organized the children into nursery rounds, so their voices could dance around each other, their high open voices dipping and rising with the lurching of the train. Songs of ducks and goats and evening silences, and only in their sleep, lapsing into tenderness, touching their hair, sour, smelling like puppies unwashed in the yard, sweet under the dirt.
The train stopped at the crossroads in Breslau, the town of her birth. Johannes Weiners, a postal worker from Cologne, newly recruited to form a mobile military mail unit, peered into the dark entrance, startled at the woman in a white veil. Behind her crouched the shapes of innumerable bodies. He crossed himself and must have looked at her with kindness, because she spoke to him. “This is my beloved hometown. I will never see it again. We are riding to our deaths.”
“Do you all believe that?” he asked in horror. “It’s better that they do not know it.” It was time to go; he boarded his train, headed to the eastern front, with his own story of horrors, ending at last in a Russian prison camp.
That was the train ride. It was only the beginning, but the record ends there; the witnesses all died. When her veil and habit were stripped off of her, she had no cross at which to clutch, only the loose skin of her breasts. “My greatest vocation is to love more.”
***
“I am who I am,” says God to Moses, in Bible Stories for Jewish Children. The picture of the burning bush frightened me—a black-hooded figure cringes before a dark fire. Moses holds up his hand plaintively, his fingers inches away from curls of grey smoke, ready to consume him. If you are who you are, you must confront fire.
There is no conversion from who you are because there is no turning away. Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross died as Edith Stein breathing in Zyclone B. But she died with all her accumulated faith, rich and layered like the age rings on the true cross. Had Edith been born a Catholic, would she ever have come to such depth of vision, such intellectual but passionate devotion? The strongest loves are the most hard won.
***
Ruth’s new God must have admired her boldness in becoming one of his followers, and as he did in those days, he made his favor immediately apparent. Her womb opened in the land of the Israelites so that she bore a son to Boaz, a child who began the great begetting. Her great-grandson was King David, the renowned warrior-prince, the ancestor of Joseph the carpenter, husband of Mary. For according to the Gospel of Matthew, “from David to the transmigration of Babylon, are fourteen generations: and from the transmigration of Babylon to Christ are fourteen generations.” So by biblical logic, Ruth’s choice led directly to the origins of Christianity. Since the stories of the Bible formed my first narratives, I still turn to them in question. Faithless as I am. When she crossed the River Jordan, Ruth started the chain of conceptions and births that would lead to Mary’s confinement in a stable. Without Ruth’s choice, who would Saint Teresa or Edith Stein be? Who would I be?
But Ruth’s story stretched back as well as forward, for Boaz himself was a descendent of that Abraham whose loins generated two sons and two faiths and whose children’s children had scattered across the Mediterranean like stars. So in Ruth’s begetting of Obed, the three religions of the book are linked forever, with her womb as the crossroads, and her Moabite gods, Jesus, Yaweh, and Allah at the four points. I find that knowledge infinitely comforting. You drag your own soul wherever you travel. There is no relinquishment of self, but there are depths within us, untapped oceans of faith and knowledge, rich in their multiple truths, carrying more than one land within them.
Edith must have realized that she could turn around continuously without losing sight of her starting point, but rather move in circles. We all circle through the paces of life, from single person to married to single once more in widowed old age, from child to adult to forgetful petulant child once again. Possibilities arise and dissipate before us in our many years. When you forswear your fertility, as did Edith, you end your life caring for children. When you leave the home of your birth sisters, you end up with vowed sisters, from Great War to Second World War, from battlefield hospital to death camp, spinning from point to point.
I wonder what words Edith uttered in her last moments? In what language did she pray?
Is there a place for me always at the crossroads—poised between belief and question?
