Religion, “Pure and Undefiled”

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Pardon me if I’ve told this story before.

On one of my trips to rural El Salvador with fellow parishioners from Iowa, I was walking down a dirt road - probably on the way to visit the family of one of the high school scholarship recipients our parish supported - and heard someone talking in a small corn field next to the road.

I turned to see a woman, looking to be about 55 years-old, digging around a corn plant and talking to somebody I couldn’t see. I came nearer the woman and still couldn’t see who she was talking to. Finally, she looked in my direction and we exchanged greetings.

Probably a little too boldly, I told her I couldn’t see who she was talking to and asked where that person was. “Oh,” she said, “I was talking to the corn.” That piqued my interest, but I didn’t have to ask. “I often talk to the corn while I’m working,” she said, “because there’s nobody else to talk to.”

Open and Kind

She was open and kind, and we engaged in a 10-minute conversation. She told me she was a widow with five children and that she had lost her husband the previous year. “Well, at least you have this corn field,” I said. “Oh, no,” she responded, “I work for the owner.”

It struck me, for the first time, how desperate is the plight of widows in many parts of the world. Without their husbands, who are nearly always the breadwinners in such families, she was left completely on her own to support herself and her children. There were no government programs to help, no psychologists to talk to, no bank accounts to draw from. It was just her and her friends, the corn.

And then I understood much better how the New Testament writers were continually writing about the plight of “widows and orphans,” as in the first chapter of the Letter of James: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction….”

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I recalled the encounter with the woman in the corn while listening to the readings at a recent Mass. The first reading was from the prophet Elijah and his puzzling story about his encounter, during a famine, with a widow who was gathering sticks for a fire so she could cook her last meal for her and her son.

The prophet asked her for a cup of water and some bread. She responded that she had only enough flour for bread for one last meal before she and her son would die, presumably from hunger. The prophet insisted, promising she would not run out of flour or oil. She complied and Elijah’s promise panned out.

The second reading was from the gospel of Mark: the moving story that is known as “the widow’s mite,” the latter being a coin of the time that was close to valueless. In this story, Jesus is watching people place contributions in the Temple treasury, noticing that “many rich people put in large sums.”

“A poor widow came and put in two copper coins, which (the translator wrote) make a penny.” Jesus tells his listeners that the rich people contributed “out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living.”

What do these three widows have in common? And what’s the point for us who are searching for God?

Desperately Poor Women

Trust, in my view. The gospel story isn’t so much a put-down of the rich (although Jesus didn’t shirk from doing so in other circumstances). It and the story from Elijah was about two desperately poor women who placed their trust in God. “Trust” didn’t come up in the brief conversation with the woman who talked to the corn, but she was generous in her hard work to support her family, and it was obvious she hadn’t lost hope.

“Irresponsible and unrealistic,” some would say about the biblical widows. “Failure to care for themselves properly is undoubtedly the reason they’re poor. They only have themselves to blame.”

Sr. Mary McGlone, writing in the National Catholic Reporter, sees it this way.

“The two widows,” and I would add the woman who talked to the corn, “exemplify what it means to act like Christ. …Their simple example dares others to believe that generosity, like love and the widow’s jar of oil, need never be considered a limited resource. Their example can embolden others to act like they do. This is their free, courageous and faith-filled way of redeeming the world.”