The value of widows is perhaps one of the most distinctive tenets of the Christian faith. This message is both explicit in Scripture’s commands and implicit in its stories. When Elijah arrived at the home of a widow in Zarephath, there seemed to be little she could offer him, yet she did not turn him away. From the last of her flour and oil she set a table, and in doing so became the occasion of her own provision, her hospitality repaid in ways she could not have anticipated. It is one of scripture’s stranger economies: flourishing in famine, abundance flowing from scarcity.
I’m no prophet, but when a work assignment took me some distance from home last year, I reached out to my friend’s father, Tim, asking whether it would be appropriate to rent a room from his mother a few nights a week. He was tentative but polite and said he’d ask his family. A few days later, he called back: rent would not be necessary, but I’d have to provide my own food. This wasn’t an economic matter—she could purchase any food she wanted. It was simply that “there’s not enough food in that house to keep a grown man alive for two days.” Darlene didn’t have much of an appetite, and her frugality prevented her from purchasing what might go to waste, though she did have a sweet tooth—a fact my wife has kept in mind each time she’s sent me off with food for the week and a sweet treat to share.
I first met Darlene as a young teenager. She was serious in disposition but quick to laugh. She was the grandmother of my best friend; their family had graciously adopted me as a fifth son during basketball season to save my parents from an extended commute, but long after the season had ended, the designation continued. The suggestion that I could be one of the family entertained Darlene during her visits, I think, since her grandchildren seemed to have inherited her aggressive metabolism, and it was apparent that I had not.
As the matriarch of a large family—and it is a very large family, one that has grown across generations to a number that would overwhelm most people’s calendars—she maintains a system dedicated to ensuring every child, grandchild, and great-grandchild receives a birthday card on or before the appointed day, without fail. Her reputation for this is, among those who know her, something approaching legend. “Sharp as a tack” is the phrase most often used to describe her. She raised five kids on a small farm in Branch County, not far from where she was born and raised, and it is on that same ground that she lives still. I never met her late husband. She has been a widow since before I was old enough to understand what that meant. I did know her son Dave and hunted with their family on their small farm. Dave lived with her and worked the land; she buried him in 2021. It is hard enough that wives should bury their husbands, but mothers shouldn’t have to bury their sons.
With Dave’s departure the house grew quieter, but the woman I found was cast down but not destroyed. She’s nearing ninety now. Her home reflects her—everything in its place, nothing unnecessary. She still manages her home tightly. She’ll shovel the walk in winter and pick up sticks nearly weekly from her seemingly ancient maples, and she does so with gratitude, not complaint. I enjoy her company and occasionally I can do small things for her, but truth be told there isn’t much to do. She has someone who feeds her dog and mows the grass, another who rents and works the land. Her basement stays full of neatly stacked wood; the meat house still sees use come deer season or when a pig is butchered. Every Friday she makes her trip to the beauty shop—a routine now decades old. She knows her neighbors and is known by them. Often she tells me she’ll be home late from time with friends or church; on the evenings she isn’t, and I’m not working late, we sit together over a puzzle or watch a game.
As I’ve spent much of the last year with her, I have been struck not just by her physical health but by the health of her community—and by how deeply she belongs to this place. She is firmly invested in her church. She attends services three times a week and plays violin in worship. She often spends her time visiting and playing cards with some “older folks” who can no longer leave their homes independently. Her landline rings multiple times each evening from friends and family. Most nights we watch the Tigers or Pistons play—both having good years, to our shared delight—over a bowl of ice cream or a bit of toffee. I came expecting to find a woman diminished, and instead I have been privileged to watch one flourish—thriving in ways that are rare and, I suspect, only possible within the kind of membership she has spent a lifetime building.
She’s blessed to be in the physical health she’s in, but she’s the first to say that isn’t what sustains her. “I couldn’t live here the way I do,” she’s told me more than once, “without the people in my church.” It is her community—what Wendell Berry calls membership. It is not incidental that Berry’s richest description of membership appears in Hannah Coulter, a novel about a woman twice widowed. In a chapter simply titled “Membership,” Hannah reflects: “This was our membership. . . . This membership has an economic purpose and an economic result, but the purpose and the result were a lot more than economic.” The exchange of goods and services—not always in equal kind—was the key to the health of the community and to the health of its members.
Years ago, my wife, then girlfriend, had been offered similar hospitality from a woman in our church, Debby. Debby had buried her husband not long before we met her, and though her loss was still apparent, it did not define her. She served as the treasurer for our church and lived on the dairy farm her children now ran. She looked continually for young women to counsel and mentor, held Bible studies in her home, and referred to summer manure-spreading as “the smell of money.” I always made an effort to drop by when I knew she had been making bread. When my wife’s bridal shower came, it was Debby who gave the speech. And when we were married in North Carolina, Debby made the trip—all nine hundred miles each way—as a passenger with a carload of friends from our Wisconsin church, because that is what members do. Here was the same economy at work: a woman with loss enough to justify withdrawal, setting a table anyway.
Both Debby and Darlene are formal members of a church and informal members of a broader community. They raised families. They are beautiful storytellers. They love games and company. But do not mistake them for the caricature of a sweet old lady. They have buried husbands and children, and carried other losses besides—wounds that go unnamed here but have shaped them nonetheless. They are tough and a little fierce, women who have wrestled with the world and come away with the scars to prove it, and yet neither has curled into bitterness or complaint. They know better than most how dark the days can get, and yet they still greet the sun with warmth—genuine, outward-facing warmth, the kind that has to be chosen. They have earned the right to be otherwise and have not taken it.
They live alone, but they are not lonely—and the distinction matters. Their ability to remain in their own homes on their own terms is not simply a matter of physical health or financial circumstance. It is the dividend of a membership built over decades, of foundations laid long before they needed them. An economy they have long invested in, and continue to invest in, now allows them to flourish amidst what many might think to be the famine-filled years of their lives. The modern alternative is familiar enough: a private room, a television, and the managed care of strangers—comfortable, perhaps, but severed. What Darlene and Debby have is harder to construct and impossible to purchase. It has to be prepared, the way good ground is tended long before the harvest is needed.
Throughout the epistles, the apostles in both word and deed prioritize the care of widows and summarize it as “true religion.” Among the primary concerns of the early church—visible as early as the sixth chapter of Acts—was the question of what membership looks like, specifically when it came to the care of widows. The membership of the church made it a priority to care for those in danger of being forgotten, and by doing so it made widows central to the community’s life. Darlene and Debby are not only heirs of that care, they are themselves shining examples of offering it to others. And in communities wise enough to recognize what they offer, everyone ends up fed and healthier for it.
Image Credit: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, “The Moored Boatman: Souvenir of an Italian Lake” (1861)
