Chapter 5 - Women, Keep Silence
I began to scour the Bible, looking for the Scriptural justification that women were indeed qualified, by GOD, to be justifiable candidates to the priesthood. The priesthood is not an ordination and consecration of sinful human flesh ; rather, it is an indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a mortal body which allows that person, in persona Christi, to perform the miracle of transubstantiation. In other words, Jesus is the one to turn bread into His body, and wine into His Blood.
"It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." John 6 : 63
If one believes the Word of God is perfect, and that the Bible contains the perfect Word of God, and that we can therefore believe each word of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, then... we can read the words of Psalm 28 with a profound reverence for the Eucharist :
"The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped. Therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth, and with my song will I praise him. The Lord is their strength, and he is the saving strength of his anointed. Save thy people, and bless thine inheritance. Feed them also, and lift them up for ever." Psalm 28 : 6-9
As verse 9 says, being fed by God is essential to our strength, our praise, our blessings, our prayer ! When King David says in the Psalm, that "in His temple doth everyone speak of His glory," (Psalm 29 : 9), I immediately thought of Anna, the widowed prophetess who was blessed to see the infant Jesus in the Temple, who "in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem." Luke 2 : 38 Do we not also need the strength of the Eucharist to praise our Lord ?
But that realization became a stumbling stone for me when, again, I tried to reconcile the words of Jesus with those of the Apostle Paul. There is an undeniable instruction from Paul, recorded in a letter he wrote, which requires : "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 anything, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is a shame for women to speak in the church." 1 Corinthians 14 : 34-35
How can Paul be asking the Church to silence the woman's voice ? Would Paul want to silence that same voice of Anna, a woman joyfully evangelizing in Temple ? Does not John record Jesus Himself as saying, "Those who have My co
