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By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
Courtesy photo
Ruth Jones, our dear friend passed away this week. All of us that knew her were shocked by her sudden passing. The city of Oxnard, the county of Ventura has lost another of the true pioneer activist of the 60’s civil right and social justice movement. Ruth was a passionate disciples of the Reverend Martin Luther King, a nonviolence activist who worked tirelessly to transform our local Oxnard community and the nation into a more tolerant, inclusive and equal society. Today, in this tumultuous divided nation, more than ever Ruth’s work and legacy must live on.
We met Ruth about 3 years ago at the Acuna Art Gallery & Cultural Center, at one of our weekly Oxnard Multicultural Mental Health (OMMH) Coalition meetings. It was the first time many in the group had met Ruth. She had heard that our OMMH group was working on the mental health wellness of our community through what we came to term our own community defined practices. She jumped right into the development of ideas and strategies, and then worked to implement our mental health programs in the Oxnard community.
Ruth was elected the vice-chairperson of OMMH, and up until her death last week she attended every weekly OMMH meeting, come hell or high water, she was there doing the people’s work. That is why so many of us are so shocked at her sudden passing. Ruth was excited about the work we were doing on many exciting mental health and social justice projects and was anxiously like the rest of us in the opening of our new arts and cultural center.
Ruth was a warrior, she did not have time for whiners; and more than once she put me on righteous reality check when I started to snivel. Ruth was that type of activist; action not hollow proclamation. Ruth did not suffer fools or fools play, life was a wondrous gift to be fully lived out in multicultural splendor and appreciated as a daily hands-on active miracle of infinity possibilities made real by our own hands, hearts and minds.
Ruth, was an exquisite mosaic; an introverted soulful intellectual activist. Ruth was one of those very rare souls that was profoundly prepared for her life’s mission of social justice and civil rights activism. Ruth was born in the South, and so she felt first-hand the brutality and inhumanity of racism, poverty and social inequality as a child growing up in the South, circa 1950’s. She would recount that the more the world around her spewed injustice and leveled its hatred and rage on her and her family the more she would turn to spiritual meditation, education and scholarly knowledge to channel her pain and cries for justice. She told me more than once that if it was not for her immense intellectual curiosity and here blind faith in the power of love, prayer and justice, she might not have survived her youth. So early on Ruth took to writing out her pain, anguish, and in the process began to exorcise and dominate her demons, both real and imagined. Ruth the youth, now the writer was now embarking on a spiritual quests that would define the rainbows arch of life that she would follow.
When we first met Ruth she was already a self-published (closet) writer, it was more than a year into our OMMH relationship that she shared with the group her inspirational book, entitled Dream Angels. A book written as she told us that she wrote entirely through a divine inspirational spirit (angel) that used her body as the vessel to execute the writing and what came to become her book of spiritual inspirations.
Father Gregory Boyle, has often reminds us that God is at the “periphery of humanity, where the misery, the anguish and the suffering is the greatest. Where there is the greatest need, you find the greatest hope, and that is the miracle of resurrection”. That is what Ruth represented to us at OMMH, the miracle of the resurrection, a singular highly spiritual soul committed to helping her sister and brothers in their time of need reach for that that spiritual mountain top of love, hope and redemption. We miss you so deeply Ruth, and we love; and are eagerly awaiting your return as a dream angel to help guide us with your love in our journey toward enlightenment here on earth.
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., is the executive director of the Acuna Art Gallery & Community Center/Café on A, The KEYS Leadership Academy@ Café on A in Oxnard and president of the Oxnard Multicultural Mental Health Coaltion.