becoming a self in history, becoming a self in my street
Ruth Fitter
Ruth Fitter was brought up in Christian household and was both baptised and
confirmed when she was nine years old. When she was fifteen she met her first husband and left her religious
convictions behind.
Her values changed and she gradually became aware they she was no longer
happy. Her old values had been replaced by both the pursuit of money and by a need to be desired in
order to feel herself to be of value.
Her compulsion to find some kind of sense of self led her to seek
out and flirt with men.
Although at first she never strayed from her marriage, eventually her
behaviour led to an affair and then to divorce. Ruth became an ever more sexual person who only felt her
worth by being desired.
This led to a deep love affair where she was finally rejected, which caused
her deep pain.
Paradoxically, her soul-pain made her step back from the way she was behaving
and she was finally able to acknowledge the damage she was doing both to herself and and others.
Her pain made her reconnect to her old religious life.
One day while she was in church she had
an inner experience of Christ.
She found herself in a garden. There she saw Christ coming towards
her and asking her to come to him and be happy. Her overwhelming experience of this whole time of crises
was the healing realization that she was worthy exactly as she was. With this realisation her old compulsion to
be desired dissolved in the experience of love and acceptance that she re-found in her experience of
Christ.
Ruth has since gone on to be ordained herself and has remarried. She has two
children.