My mother was a gifted person who struggled to follow the Apostle Paul’s admonitions. How often I heard this verse:

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church (I Corinthians 14:34-35).
Within her holy prison, my mother made a place for herself as the pastor’s wife. She led the singing in church on Sundays, choosing hymns that harmonized with the sermon. When the time came to lead a song, she would stand, announce the page number of the hymn, and its title. She’d raise her right hand to beat time, take a deep breath, and lead the singing in her assured, melodic voice.
One Sunday, she decided obedience to scripture dictated a change. In the car going to church, she told my father that because women were not to speak in church, she could no longer announce the hymns. He would have to do it.

He protested.

She was silent.

The showdown came during the service.

“Now we will have our first hymn,” my father announced, and sat down behind the pulpit.
But instead of rising as she usually did, my mother remained seated on the front bench.
“You announce the hymn,” she mouthed silently to him.

“No, you do it,” he mouthed back.
Congregation members craned their necks, straining to understand the silent argument. The impasse was prolonged and intense.

At last, face flushed, my father stood up again. His shoulders slumped. His eyes locked down on his church bulletin lying on the pulpit.

“Please open your hymnal to page 451.”
On the ride home after church, he berated her in a harsh voice. She should have obeyed him.
My mother wept silently.

But she had made her point. If she should not speak, she would not. Her obedience to the letter of the law rhymed, in its ferocity, with her inner rebellion.

Here we come to the Mother’s Day gift I would love to give my mother, were she alive: To have her own voice, and be heard with respect.

Rachel writes from Newport.