Love You Two Pennies: Open Doors and the Heart’s True Feeding
Who are the Widows? This pairing of Gospel and Hebrew Bible readings each tell stories about widows and extreme poverty. But do you notice something here? We aren’t told anything about the widows that Elijah encounters in Zarephath or that Jesus sees in the Temple. We don’t know their names, their ages, or their circumstances. They are the faceless marginalized and dispossessed, the vulnerable and abandoned.
Isn’t this often the way we still discuss and think about the vulnerable Other? Leaving these details out, I think, might make it seem like they’re unimportant — or worse, that these people are not as valuable to G-d as we are.
I started to wonder about these nameless widows, women apparently left alone in the world without any families or social structures to support them. What we do know is that they are both burdened by the worst poverty we can imagine.
