Ruth amidst alien corn

G.K. Chesterton is going to be a saint!!!!! 
That's really great news. What i remember most about Chesterton is not his Holmes-like Father Brown. It is the anecdotes about his encounters  with G.B.Shaw ; hilarious indeed are some of those yarns! 
But to think of him as St. Gilbert Chesterton ........! Don't know,when I shall start praying for his intercession!! But he is the one who has written real saintly lines. Let me cite just two such quotes here:

"To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless."

 Here is another good quote from 'The Innocence of Father Brown"

" Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."

Aren't these quotes enough to make GKC a candidate to sainthood?
My first ever prayer to St.GKC will be to consider throwing a rope to purgatory to pull GBS up to heaven. Or is he already in? Has he already managed to hook St. Peter with his jokes and has he slipped in through the Pearly Gates, I wonder! I do doubt that at the moment he fell down from the tree on November 2, 1950, he sure must have held on to the Tree upon which his Redeemer died, "paying for him in full"! And the day November 2nd naturally is the day when many souls just leave this earth to enter Paradise at no cost!!! (GKC, do pray for GBS if he is still not there with you!)
  ...
      And today's reading at Holy Mass was the story of Naomi and Ruth. Ruth too brings in a lot of memories. The first memory is of course the day I was in my English Literature class ( 44 or so years back!!!) . Ms. Thomas , our beautiful English teacher was taking "Ode to a Nightingale", and immediately I fell in love with Keats and his lyrics. The voice of Ms. Thomas still resound in my ears:

" Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home

She stood in tears amid alien corn;"

,http://britlitwiki.wikispaces.com/Ode+to+a+Nightingale

That picture of Ruth looking forlorn amid the alien corn has been an ever haunting figment that still prefers to linger in my memory. Ruth again became my favourite, when Rachel, my friend and mentor of those college days, spoke to me about the deeper meaning of Bible . She asked me,  in those my salad days of yore, to read the Bible. She asked me to start with Ruth! 

How the years have gone by. But still, Ruth remains as the very woman of faith, Ruth the Moabite, who left her idolatrous past to follow the faith of her husband. And Yahweh did reward her for her sacrifices - she followed her mother in law Naomi, and stayed in Bethlehem and is in the genealogy of Jesus! 

Life is beautiful!