Deaf Mute Ordination

Puzzled Bostonians saw congregating last week on the triangular trottoir before Trinity Church, which faces on Copley Square opposite the Public Library, a group of silent men and women--folk who had just darted warily across Boylston Street, who seemed to greet one another with ingenuous, unmasked pleasure, but who spoke no words. The attentive noted that these silent folk looked at each other with wide, quick-moving eyes which certainly observed everything, especially the queerly gesticulating fingers of their fellows, fingers that seemed to fly in fluid curves, hooks and angles, fingers that flipped with exact intention. Then the realization came that these deaf persons had come to Trinity Church to attend the ordination to the Episcopal priesthood of James Stanley Slight.

Into Trinity, which famed Bishop Phillips Brooks, who died in 1893, made world-noted, these deaf, many of them mutes besides, filed to watch the ordination by Coadjutor Bishop Charles Lewis Slattery, to watch the versicles, to respond by signs. They even "sang" a hymn, in slow movement, with their flying fingers.

Mr. Slight has been the sympathetic lay reader for the deaf of New England these many years, has been their acting minister the past six months. He takes pains in bringing to all his people the word of God. And this the deaf appreciate because, deprived of a sense and often mocked at, they tend to withdraw from more normal associates. They all too constantly fear a neighbor may be gossiping about them.

To counteract this morbid tendency the generous of the world have succeeded in devising methods of communicating for the deaf. One will recall the experiments which enabled blind, deaf, mute Helen Keller finally to speak. In reading lips most deaf people have become so adept that no longer do cinema actors dare blaspheme or talk ribaldry before the camera. Incidentally the cinema has been a great blessing for the deaf.

In conversation the deaf use three systems of signs: 1) natural signs to express ideas; 2) methodical signs for words; and 3) manual signs each of which represents a letter of the alphabet.

*Her attendants manipulated her throat muscles until she was able to utter intentional, intelligible sounds. Playfully, they used the same methods to make one of her pet dogs, a Great Dane, "speak" the word "mama" in asking for tidbits.