It's a hard passage to understand, as your own experience with it testifies, Pastor Mikie. Some parts of scripture are just hard for us today. That's why it became such a prodigious undertaking for me.

The reason I got so involved in it is that I felt the Lord brought it to my attention during a period of fasting and prayer at the beginning of last year. He brought some other things to my attention as well that I've also pursued. I had done a little studying of the head covering passage a few years earlier and decided that it did mean women are to cover our heads in worship and prayer but that it would be too disruptive to make an issue of it so I dropped it altogether, no doubt with a little help from my own preference not to have to put something over my head.

But when it came up the second time during a period of seriously seeking the Lord, I concluded He didn't approve of my just dropping it. So at that point, without further study, I worked at finding something I could stand wearing on my head and made myself a sort of beret out of an old black sweatshirt that worked OK. I didn't want to feel conspicuous and I didn't want to make a big issue of it, and mostly people just thought I was wearing a "cute hat." Eventually I explained it to more and more people and it was not well received, but I didn't make an issue of it.

But I started feeling that if the Lord was telling me this is what the passage means then I should make a bigger effort to persuade others, and that's when I got into studying it in earnest. It took me months before I felt I'd covered enough material to present it to the elders of my church. Well, I wasn't going to push it on anyone. Only one elder responded that he'd like to read it but unfortunately I left the church for other reasons and don't know if he had a response or what it was.

I've found Christians online who do believe in the head covering and enjoyed their websites and forums. But it keeps nagging at me that if we're supposed to be covering our heads and the majority of churches are no longer doing that, it's not an issue to just let drop or confine to a small group who share the same conviction. So at a forum I'm likely to bring it up again as I did here. When there is as much opposition to it as there is here, however, I am content to let it drop, but when people respond with a kneejerk pat answer my Irish temper comes up. And I'm not even Irish.

The way I read it, Paul had advocated women's covering their heads and some were objecting to that, possibly in the spirit of Christian freedom as some have suggested, so that when Paul acts to silence the contention at the end by declaring they have no such custom, he's declaring it a custom decided by apostolic authority. He has to mean that he won't hear any more arguments against the head covering, since he'd used a number of arguments in favor of it and if they won't accept those then they have to accept his authority. What seems to me to make this even more certain is that historically women did cover their heads in all the churches after that up until very recently.

But it is a difficult passage and I appreciate your acknowledging that.