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 Her old values had been  replaced by both the pursuit of money and by a need to be desired in order to feel herself to be of value.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.