Orpah's Choice

by Martha Sterne

I believe I have known many Orpahs and will meet others. You know Orpah, too.

The first Orpah I recognized is a woman I met in 1997 when I was trying to become the rector of a beautiful little Episcopal church in Maryville, Tennessee, a town nestled on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains. She was the person on the search committee who was assigned to check me out to see if a group interview would be worth pursuing. I don’t remember much of what she said in our initial conversation on the phone, probably because I was babbling and trying very hard to be charming, dignified, holy, available, like that. I do not think I fooled her, but it was the beginning of what turned into a real friendship.

It took me a while to hear Orpah’s story. I often found myself talking to her about me, while she listened quietly, attentively. This is the thing with Orpahs. They do not grab center stage. Orpahs are not drama queens, and often it seems that other people’s dramas are invited to unfold before them perhaps because Orpahs are generous, non-anxious companions.

Supporting roles
Think about the Orpah in the Bible. She plays a supporting role in Ruth and Naomi’s story. Ruth and Naomi are the lead characters. Orpah loves them both and there is a moment when she weeps as she pictures herself not journeying on with them to Naomi’s homeland. But when Naomi begs the two younger women to look at the big, bleak picture of what a move would mean for their futures, Orpah listens. She listens with compassion for herself and for the others, which is what God hopes will happen whenever we have words pass among and between human beings.

What if we listened like that when others, even those closest to us, make their passionate choices? What if we took all that we hear from others and all that we gather from our inner world and then decided what is best for us in a self-discerning way?

That is the kind of person Orpah is. Orpah quietly makes an important and brave choice, too. She knows herself and she assesses reality and she realizes that her new life will be found in returning home. No immortal speeches, just tears and hugs and a turning back to the world she knows and the familiar responsibilities and relationships that await her there. New days and old ways will intertwine. She does not have to travel on geographically to live into God’s future. Sometimes, as T. S. Eliot says, "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." That finding her way back to where she started is Orpah’s gentle pilgrimage.

Staying put
Back to my Maryville Orpah. The first thing I noticed was that she worked like a pleasant demon. Before my time as rector, the parish secretary had died, and Orpah just came into the office and did what had to get done without fanfare. She continued to work behind the scenes all the years I was there, never taking credit, just listening to the rhythms of the parish and then working things out. Orpahs do that — they do the work without an appreciative audience. This is totally foreign to my nature but I admire it.

I also noticed through the years that she rarely said anything in meetings, though she almost always cheerfully volunteered to take minutes. Is that a wonderful quality or what? Sometimes even in small gatherings you did not realize that she was there, listening alertly and respectfully and keeping a record.

Gradually, I learned that her daddy had moved his family around while he rose through the ranks of middle-America small-town newspapers. Eventually he became the publisher of the Maryville Daily Times. He was retired when I came to town but I ran into him enough to see that he was a smart, colorful, excitable man — and that when he walked into the room people jumped up and did things and said things that they thought he would like. He took up a lot of psychic space in any gathering. You know the kind of man — a community mover and shaker. Fortunately for Maryville, he and his paper moved and shook the town toward progressive endeavors.

In the early ’90s, he sold the paper for gazillions of dollars. He put his money where his mouth was — giving big money to things he cared about, as well as passing significant money along to his children. But that is getting ahead of Orpah’s story.

She always adored him and her mother. She told me that her sister, whom we shall call Ruth, was the cute, popular one while Orpah was the studious one, and her parents sent her off to get a good education. Ruth married and lived in Maryville only a little bit of each year.

Ruth had a pleasant relationship with her parents but never seemed to be there when they broke their hips or needed chemo. Perhaps, I don’t know, but perhaps like the biblical Ruth, she was more connected to her in-laws.

That’s the thing. The sisters made different choices. One moved on. One stayed behind. Maybe Ruth is somewhere in Bethlehem earning the Nobel Prize (I don’t think so but maybe). But maybe Orpah’s staying put and tending to home fires deserves the Nobel Prize as well.

Showing up
Orpah went into the newspaper business, working for her father. She married and had three girls and eventually was the editor of the Maryville paper under her publisher dad. This was what you might call multi-tasking carried to the tenth power.

The marriage did not survive. She says the girls raised themselves, but I don’t believe it. There is a love among them that didn’t just come out of nowhere. My guess is that Orpah worked like a dog all day running the newspaper and trying to please her excitable father (who I am sure had an opinion about most every single word of most every single article in the paper). And then she went home and hugged her girls or at least sat with them full of love in the dark while they slept in their rooms.

So. Orpah showed up at the Maryville city council meetings and the county commission meetings (which are long and character building, believe me). And she showed up at many of the other often tedious meetings that make a community run because she was the editor of the newspaper and because that is what her father did before her.

Unlike her father, she did not change the atmosphere in the room when she entered. People didn’t say, "Ooooh, there’s Orpah. Let me think of something brilliant to say." Instead they smiled and said, "Oh, good, hey Orpah."

She did the best she could with her girls, mainly respecting them and the Holy Spirit enough to step back and let them grow into the creative, useful women God intended them to be. She encouraged other young people, including staff members at the paper. She loved and still loves animals and has many friends of all sorts and conditions.

Orpah never has seemed to notice who is important; she just courteously listens to everybody. She has hiked many of the trails in the Smokies with a variety of companions — including countless climbs with a woman in her 80s. After a divorce hiatus, she got back re-involved with the church.

Being there
I can see Orpah’s face in prayer to this very moment. Eyes closed. Generous mouth in repose. She’s gone somewhere deep in her spirit. I have seen this face before — the face of faith in a Renaissance rendering of the Madonna or in a fourth century Buddha.

When the paper was sold, Orpah retired at a young middle-aged age. She travels to exotic places like Antarctica and India and the Galapagos Islands, but she always comes home and gets back in the traces. She watched over her mother as she faded and died. She watches over her father who still has that very strong personality and will. (He’s fabulous, but he would drive me crazy.) He remarried, and he and his sweet new wife want Orpah to drive them to their place way down in Florida a couple of times a year. She does it, though she says it is getting to be too strenuous for them (and surely for her). With her eyebrows slightly raised, she murmurs, "It is quite a trip."

She remains an active, generous community volunteer still doing what needs to be done and giving what needs to be given. She is back as the senior warden of the church during an interim between-rector time. And she loves her grandchildren and babysits with pleasure. She keeps her mouth firmly closed unless asked a parenting opinion.

Orpah is not a saint. She has her faults. Who doesn’t? But she is there. For her father, for her town, for her kids, for her grandchildren, for her friends, for her church. Nobody ever stands around and waxes eloquent about how brave and daring Orpah’s love for others is. She would be horrified if somebody did. But when Ruth moved on to more exotic adventures, Orpah stayed in place, in season and out, which to some of us seems brave and daring as well.

Orpahs are an endangered species. While people blog and video every step of their journeys, Orpah quietly takes her notes and passes on only life-giving information. Her choices are not huge dramas; they are what seems right to her by the light of her faith and experience.

I must say ruefully I wish there were an Orpah in my family. In a time when many of us have moved away from our families and aging parents, Orpah stayed home to love and serve and bloom where she was originally planted. She is a hero to me, and she would be a godsend to my mother living alone whose children are hundreds of miles away.

Orpah is not right and Ruth wrong. But neither is Ruth the only heroine in the story. I want to say "Bravo for Orpah! Bravo for all the Orpahs!" If you are an Orpah, please thank God for yourself today. And if you know an Orpah (and you do) please thank her and God for the gifts she brings to the universe.

Martha Sterne is the associate rector of Holy Innocents’ Episcopal Church, Atlanta, Ga. She is author of Alive and Loose in the Ordinary and Earthly Good.