Ruth Highsmith invited me to lunch the first time I visited Crescent Hill Baptist Church. I was a new student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Aunt Ruth was a retired schoolteacher who lived across the shady lane on which the big church was located. We continued to have lunch or supper together all three years that I lived in Louisville, Kentucky. She taught me to play Backgammon and Acey-Deucey and was delighted that I played Canasta as a child and was willing to play the card game with her. As a special treat occasionally, I would drive her to Captain D’s or Church’s Fried Chicken for supper.

Aunt Ruth taught at a Christian school as a young woman and loved it. But she never married and could not afford to stay because the pay was low and she had no husband as a retirement plan. She became a public-school teacher because that allowed her to own a home and retire on a pension after years of service.

I was not the only student in Aunt Ruth’s life, although I was special to her. When I was graduating in 1982, she sent my resume to her home church in Bowling Green, Kentucky because they were searching for a new pastor and she thought that I would be ideal.

One year, Aunt Ruth was worried about all the students who would not be able to go home to see their mothers on Mother’s Day. She invited all the students she knew who were staying in town to a special luncheon at her house so they would not be alone. She invited us to invite any others we knew to join us. We filled up the table in her eat-in kitchen and the tables borrowed from the church in her living room and backyard because it was a beautiful day and there were more than 20 of us.

Aunt Ruth asked me several days in advance to say the blessing before we ate, but it was only when we were all in a joyous circle of single men and women in their twenties standing with a white-haired single woman in her 80s that I understood the blessing we were all a part of. Aunt Ruth, who loved children so much she devoted her entire working life to teaching them, who never married and never bore children of her own, was surrounded by young people who loved her on Mother’s Day. On this day, we were her children, and she was our mother.

All these memories came flooding back to me when my Zoom group, which gathers to chant the Psalms on weekday mornings, reached Psalm 113.

The Psalms have been prayed and sung for centuries without a consistent numbering system. The opening words of the text were the traditional way of identifying a psalm. Many Christians to this day use the Latin words, in this case Laudate, pueri. The literal translation of the Latin is “Praise, O children!” The last line of “Praise, O children” is “He makes the woman of a childless house to be a joyful mother of children” (The [Online] Book of Common Prayer). For me, this psalm will always be Ruth’s Psalm.