I recently came across a recommendation for a new 2025 book by author Kate Riley called Ruth. It was advertised as a book for the curious and persistant seeker, following a “fictitious” religious commune/communty that has obvious and direct allusions to the Hutterites.
I’ll be honest, after going out and purchasing it and now having finished it, I find myself conflicted. I can sense, and even see in part, notes of brilliance behind the page. And yet, the further I got into the book, the more distance I was experiencing when it came to grasping that brilliance. Even further, I felt like the story had lost me despite my best efforts to stay centered in it, and no amount of retreading and re-reading pages and even chapters seemed to help in relocating me within what this book was trying to do.
However, the book did leave me thinking and wrestling. In particular, I loved the way the author uses the basic premise of this fictionalized Hutterite community, which we navigate from the point of view of a young woman named Rtuth, to flesh out certain nuances regarding the human experience, especially where it relates to our beliefs. Where the book feels like it is operating as a critique in one moment, it deftly “critiques the critique” with the same brush using certain questions or observations or plotting to try and upend and overturn our expectations for dogmatism on either side. For example, as it explores the restrictive social dynamics of this community, the challenge of an ideological vision for a community where no one lacks is juxtaposed against this idea of an enforced impoverished state. Or the idea that this is built on a partioning out of needs and wants, an act that often blurs where and how and why such lines get drawn. The same “want” can be seen to restrict ones sense of self while similtaneously being correct in the potential destruction it can bring about in the life of a community, family or individual. Or the same “need” can be seen to give itself to the illusions of wanted desire, leading one to question where certain restricitons are actually leading to forms of oppression and harm.
These sorts of nuances play through the intracicies of Ruth’s own delicate dance between the safety of the community and the constant allure of the world that lies beyond it. In a very real sense this is a book about seeking truth, and the more Ruth seeks the more complex and shadowed things become. It is one thing to note sexual desire, for example, it is another to attend for the ways such desires can enslave. In this, the world might offer us the allure of desire and discovery but it cannot attend for the destruction. It can only contain such realities within the reductionism of our constrcuted ideas of a liberated self. Which of course is never a truly liberated self. We are all slaves in the end.
The book also uses this same approach to explore the nature of belief in God. After all, when God is rooted in the bigger questions regarding the nature of reality and the foundations of our beliefs and convictions, the temptation is to reduce that to the sorts of practicalities of rules and regulations that are easier to control, which of course are part of any given society, Hutterite or secular. And as is common, where we find rules we want to break them and escape them. Thus seeking the world often means seeking a world without God precisely because we believe this promises true liberation from the shackles of religious oppression. As is often the position of the common secular humanist/atheist, in a world ruled by a particular conception of law and order, religion achieves such control of society by attaching the ideas of reward and punishment as negatives that belong to this agent called God. And yet in Ruths story, we find in the world that surrounds this community the same shackles and the same questions and the same control built on systems of reward/punishment. Thus this forms the essential struggle of the faith journey, forcing us to see beyond the trappings of moralism to find what actually grounds such constructs in something true. This constant push and pull between feeling God’s absence and God’s presence, between the practicalities of acceptment and judgment, of the allusive natures of Love and what we might call evils, of encountering our doubts and our convictions, is the thing that finds us always sitting in this pervasive tension regardless of where we find ourselves on this journey.
This is as far as I got with this story, and most of this I gleaned from the book’s first half. There is a transition that takes place around the halfway point in the story that progresses the plot, and it was here that I found myself trying to keep up, trying to figure out where to place and fit those above observations. And to be clear, there’s a good chance that the issue here was me. I’m okay with that being the case, and I would actually love to get someone elses thoughts regarding their navigation of the story. Maybe it will help clarify and bring some of that struggle into fresh light. As it is, I appreciated it more than I was able to truly experience it fully, even while I found its themes resonating nonetheless.
What was helpful for me however was finding some illumination on similar ideas in another book I’m presently reading. This was another recommendation, having come across an interview with the author that sold me on her voice and vew of the world. It’s a book called Confessions of an Amateur Saint: The Christian Leader’s Journey from Self-Sufficiency to Reliance on God written by Mandy Smith. To offer a very concise summary, its a book about how it is that Smith occupies space in Christian community while holding the sorts of tensions described in Ruth above. Part of what emerges from her own observations and experiences to this end is firstly, the simple concession that these tensions follow us regardless of where we find ourselves, and second that experiencing and carrying these tensions does not and should not disqualify us from occupying the spaces that we do. This is true even though the common perception is that it does and it should, a perception that is not discriminative to secular or religious grounds. It is not contradictory or hypocritical to exist within a community that abides by certain rules that we might or might not make sense of or disagree with or embrace on any given day with differing degress of nuance. In fact, this is precisely what it looks like to partcipate at all.
Here there are three insights Smith offers that I found especially resonant.
First, she invites us to root ourselves not in our own imagination but in God’s imagination. This distinctive becomes more than semantics, as it shifts our point of view towards an embrace of both a necessary foundation and its proper and fallible and always incomplete contextualization in our lives, societies and communities. There is something liberating about Ruth’s journey towards seeing the tension as much bigger than illusions of her individuality, and for Smith this becomes an important part of how it is we exist in the world, and how it is she exists in the Christian world.
Second, seek the grace to find a new river. There is context for this insight in Smith’s own journey that the book makes available, but to explain why it resonated with me leads me to my own love of rivers, oceans, seas and lakes. It is here in this essential image that we find the tension of existence embodied and symbolized. Chaos battling against beauty. Expanse battling against barriers. Life against Death. There is a reason why humans have long found a potent and transcendent imagination captured and held sacred in this space, in this image. For her, she uses this to imagine the necessary act of always seeking within the tension, and we should not be resistant to the notion that this requires binaries, even as participation works to flesh out what this means beyond (or within) these binaries. In a certain kind of irony, it is the existence of these certain binaries that seem evident in the foundation of the cosmos that liberates us to deconstruct the boundaries in the emergent properites that we find within.
Lastly, she invites us to test God’s resources. If this world is one in which we find God, if this world is one in which God exists, this world is then defined as a resource. The question is, a resource to what end. Further, to what degree of responsibility does this resource obligate us towards. If we are to move outside of ourselves we thus find ourselves moving towards something other. And our beliefs and convictions are simply acts of similtaneously naming this other while locating our acts of participation as the necessary means of knowing this other. In a world that is defined as one in which God exists, such a world is the resource of God, and thus to participate in this Reality is to know God.
There is a definite practicality to the way Smith unpacks these big ideas. It just struck me as profound in the moment, and perhaps it was reading Ruth that effectively helped prime these observations to take on an even greater weight. That’s the power of story after all.
The Stories of my Life 