The Widow’s Harder Task

As for the honors that widowhood enjoys in God’s sight, there is a short summary of them in one saying of his through the prophet: Do right by the widow and the orphan; and come, let us argue it out, says the Lord. These two names are left in the care of God’s mercy, and just so far as they are stripped of human help, the Father of all takes up their defense. See how the widow’s benefactor is put on the same footing as the widow herself — for it is her champion who will argue the case out with the Lord. [a]

No gift so great, I take it, is given to virgins. Granted, in their case unbroken wholeness and complete holiness will have the nearest sight of God’s face. Even so, the widow’s task is the harder one. It is easy not to crave what you have never known, and easy to turn away from what you have never had to miss. Abstinence is more glorious when it is aware of its own right and knows what it has seen. The virgin may perhaps be counted the happier, but the widow the more heavily worked: the one because she has always kept “the good,” the other because she has found “the good for herself.” In the virgin it is grace that is crowned; in the widow, virtue. For some things come from God’s generosity and some from our own labor. What the Lord hands out is governed by his own grace; what a person sets out after is won by hard pursuit.

So pursue hard the virtue of abstinence, which is modesty’s agent; and industry, which does not let women turn into “wanderers”; and thrift, which looks down on the world. Seek out gatherings and companions worthy of God, remembering that short line the apostle made holy by quoting it: “Bad company corrupts good character.” Women who share your quarters and are talkative, idle, hard drinkers, or nosy do the very greatest damage to the purpose of widowhood. Through talk, words that are no friends of modesty creep in. Through idleness they coax a woman off her strictness. Through drink they work in any and every evil. Through prying they pass on the itch to compete in lust. Not one woman of that kind knows how to speak of the good of having had one husband only; for their “god,” as the apostle says, “is their belly” — and so is the belly’s neighbor.

These are the things, dearest fellow-servant, that I put before you now, well ahead of time. I know I have handled all of them more than was needed, coming after the apostle. Still, they should be a comfort to you: if it turns out that way, you will keep my memory alive in them.