A Closer Look
I find it deeply moving to imagine that Hannah felt that the God of all creation, the God of the ages, would listen and have mercy on her. She must have thought that God had a tender and generous heart. How else could she share such a prayer from her own heart? Perhaps Hannah, our ancient mother in faith, could teach us better how to pray, just as mothers do today; perhaps reading and hearing her story could have an impact on our prayer life, individually and communally, right now. What if we examined our spiritual practice each day (do we think about God only on Sunday?), and the worship we share in our churches, and searched for the places where our prayer springs from our deepest need and a “trustful theological innocence” that believes, as Hannah did, that we are human beings loved by the God who hears the prayers of the “little” ones, the broken, the poor, the desperate?
We live in a culture very different (at least in some ways) from the culture of Hannah, Elkanah and Samuel. Those ancestors of ours led what Eugene Peterson calls “large lives” lived in “the largeness of God….God is the country in which they live.” Right in the middle of those “large lives,” but also in our own little, fragile yet remarkably enduring, frayed yet often inspiring lives, that’s where God finds what God will use to transform, to save, to heal, the world. Peterson then cautions us that God is “the leading character in the story of our life,” and yet we should not look for God in our life stories so much as “to see our stories in God’s” (Peterson provides a beautiful introduction to I/II Samuel in The Message). It seems to me that if we spend much time in spiritual reflection, we mostly search for God in a situation or incident in our lives. Peterson adjusts our perspective radically, and reminds me of something I read some years ago by someone else: “You have heard it said, ‘God is in my heart,’ but we should really say, ‘I am in the heart of God.'” Where do you fit into the story of God?
And so we come to church and seek some kind of connection with God, a sense of God’s presence in a way that is more intense than in our daily lives. Hannah walked in (right past the priest) a woman of faith, pressed down but trusting and ready to pour out her heart and expose her need, and she walked out a woman of faith, radiant with confident joy that what she needed would be coming her way. Eugene Peterson observes (cautions us?) that we’re not changed in a place of worship, but instead, it “intensifies whatever we bring to it.” I’m reminded of something the character Shug says in Alice Walker’s book, The Color Purple: “Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.” What sort of God did Hannah bring with her that day, to the place of prayer? Where did she find herself in the the story of God?