Silent No More: Bible Women Speak Up, A Poetic Meditation
By Christine Kohler (Resource Publications)
This brief book (only 59 pages) offers a collection of poems written from the perspectives of female Bible characters of varying fame from across the Old and New Testaments.
As the subtitle suggests, each poem invites the reader to take in a character’s perspective deliberately and contemplatively.
The book offers a welcome invitation to pause and think about these women. Their stories often seem to serve as asides, included in the biblical narrative or in sermons merely as supports for the “main characters” we’re really supposed to learn from in the Bible—the males.
Only a handful of women in the Bible could be classified as having “main character energy,” as my Gen Z kids would say. Few of those biblical women who could be described as having “main character energy” are praised.
Reading these poems the way Kohler intended them to be enjoyed—as meditations—I cannot help but conclude, we sorely have missed out by not spending more time considering the human experiences of these remarkable women.
Their place in God’s supernatural story made the women of each poem important enough to appear in Scripture. Even so, I feel like I’m meeting them for the first time in Kohler’s poems.
Silent No More is a beautiful book, well worth spending time to contemplate. Seeing biblical women with fresh eyes evokes a surprising depth of emotion, perhaps because Kohler and her poems accomplish something many women need, in Baptist life and ministry especially —a sense of community.
Hearing the once silent voices of the women of the Bible, I not only understood them better, but also felt, in a new way, the great cloud of witnesses to be found in Yahweh’s daughters before me.
Dare I say, in seeing and hearing the once silent women of the Bible, I, too, felt more heard and seen?
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I’d gift this book to my sisters in the faith who are struggling or to my own sons in the hope it might help them be more attuned to voices that often go unheard.
I am certain I will come back often to the poems in Silent No More, anytime I need a reminder of God’s care for the quiet ones, the ones who didn’t assert “main character energy,” but who God saw as essential in telling his story.
Calli Keener
Amherst, N.H.
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