The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Woman's Life

by Joan D. Chittister

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.

Most women live very unpretentious lives. We grow up, work hard, take care of families, stumble through relationships, endure losses, and, in the course of it, contend, too often all alone, with the complexities that come from trying to balance the values of the world around us with what our own experiences and talents and wisdom dictate.

Women live in two worlds - one private, one public - but, if truth were known, are by and large considered native to only one of them. What we know in the private arena is seldom considered common coin in the other.

And yet loss, once reckoned, once absorbed, is a precious gift. No, I cannot be what I was before but I can be - I must be something new There is more of God in me, I discover in emptiness, than I have ever known in what I once took to be fullness.

We must find what is missing in us and pursue it. We must reassess the essential elements of who and what we are. We must remember how it is that we first defined ourselves - independently of anything or anyone else that has defined us since. We must ask ourselves what is left in us, with these things gone, to become.

Life is a mosaic. Our years are made up of tiny, interlocking parts. Move one piece in a mosaic and nothing is exactly what it was before. Change the color, the size, the placement of any one of the pieces and the whole picture changes. Add the smallest piece to any aesthetic whole and the piece alters, if only so slightly. Something once part of the way the composition went together is missing now. Something has profaned its original integrity. Something is out of balance. Something new is to be reckoned with. No matter how fine everything else around the new piece seems yet to be, no matter how fine the new piece itself, something of the whole has gone askew, has a gap in it, is wanting.