Hannah's Song
1 Samuel 1; 2:1-10
Rev. Laura J. Collins
November 16, 2003
It's funny how history gets written. Especially of women - the history of women as mothers or wives of famous men. That's mostly it, isn't it? I should know, being one of them. You know about me because my son, Samuel, became a famous leader of the Hebrew people. Then people want to know - how did it happen? What made him tick? Who influenced him along the way? And so the women - sometimes - come into the story.
Had Samuel not become famous, you certainly would never have read about me. But he did and so here I am: Hannah, wife of Elkanah, mother of Samuel, daughter of Israel. And we might add, rival of Peninnah, Elkanah's other wife. The one with all the children.
I suppose it is hard for many of you to imagine what that was like. How can I tell you what it feels like to be part of a culture where women are considered the property of men, where we are honored by our ability to bear sons, where we are expected to share the love of our husbands with other women? You are so different - how could you understand?
On the one hand, it was perfectly normal to us. This is the world we knew. We understood the way of men and marriage - just as our foremothers did. We knew the story of Sarah and Hagar, the concubine who bore Abraham a child before Sarah did, enraging the barren wife. We knew the story of Isaac and Leah and Rebecca and the struggle between the two sisters over the love and respect from the husband they shared.
I suppose, had I listened to those stories closely, I might have trusted what would happen to me. The barren wife, the more loved woman, always had the favored son in the end. But those were just the stories that made it into history. I knew that life didn't always work out that way. I was the barren wife, Peninnah the fertile one. Elkanah always claimed he loved me for myself, not just for the children I might bear. It certainly seemed true when he was with me.
But when he was gone and Peninnah and I were left in each other's company to care for the household, things were less clear. Maybe Peninnah believed that Elkanah did love me more. Otherwise, why would she need to taunt me? She had the children, the honored position. If she was secure in his care for her, why would she need to put me down and shame me over and over, month after month, year after year? But that's what she did.
You see, this is how women get these reputations, for being jealous and catty and petty with each other. But look at the position we were in! We were both dependent on the same man. I had his love, she had his children. Each of us was in a precarious situation. I suppose we could have banded together and formed a sisterhood. Sometimes that happened - the women caring for each other, becoming a family stronger than the ties that bound them to their man. But often it happened as it did with us. Anger and distrust, fear and suspicion, jealousy and depression bound together in this life where we each knew, deep in our guts, that our value depended on what we could offer our husband. Our life depended on it.
Oh, how I wanted a child. I wanted a child for so many reasons. I wanted a child for myself - to have and to hold and to love. But our motives are never simple, are they? Never quite pure. I also wanted a child so that I could be more secure with Elkanah. So that I could end the taunting of his other wife. I wanted to feel like a real woman, and all the real women I knew had children. I cried for weeks at a time. I couldn't eat. Elkanah couldn't console me.
I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. Nothing changed. The more I prayed, the more Peninnah provoked me. Not even God could save me, it seemed. But still I prayed. One day, when we had traveled to the temple at Shiloh to make sacrifices, I went in alone to pray.
Only Eli, the old priest, was there that day. And in the quiet emptiness of that place, I poured out my heart. I laid it all before God. All the anger and sadness, all the longing and confusion. I wanted to purify all my mixed motives that day - not that I really could - but it had been so many years of longing and waiting and at this point I had nothing to lose. So I made a vow to God as I prayed: "If you give me a son, God, I would give him back to you, that he might serve you all of his life." I was in such distress that day, I was praying and crying so freely, that I guess I made a bit of a scene. After a while, the priest at the door came over to me and asked me to leave because he thought I was drunk!
I wanted to laugh when he said that. Drunk? Yes, drunk with longing and drunk with sadness. Drunk with the desperate desire for something unattainable in my life. But I didn't laugh. I simply turned to that old priest and told him my story. "I'm not drunk. I'm pouring out my soul to God. My distress is so great, my heart so broken, there is nowhere else I can go with all this anguish, all this fear, all this loss."
Eli looked at me then and saw that it was true. And all he said to me was "Go in peace. And my God grant you the desires of your heart." And at that moment, I was covered in peace. I felt the anxiety slide out of my body into a puddle on the floor beneath me and in its place was poured a sweet, sweet sensation - calm and quiet in the core of my being. Such calm as I had not known in years. I got up and left and ate and realized that the depression had lifted.
Now the story makes it sound like I went home and got pregnant that night. Don't I wish! "In due time," the story says. In due time for God, perhaps. But for me it was still ages. But even as I waited, something in me had changed. I was no longer on the margins. My value was no longer measured by the number of children I did or didn't have. That day in the temple I found peace and blessing and hope. Something shifted deep inside me and I knew in a way that is hard to describe that I was OK.
So, yes, I did finally have my son. And I kept my vow to God. I took him to the temple to be raised by the priests there, so that he would serve God all his life. That was a vow that cost me dearly. All that waiting for my son and then not to see him for months at a time. But it was a vow I could keep because by the time Samuel was born, I didn't need him for myself as I had before. I didn't need to have him clinging to me, a sign of my womanliness. I didn't even need for him to be Elkanah's special son, to give him to my husband like a prize he had won. No, he was Elkanah's son, as he was mine, but more than that, he was God's child. A gift from heaven. Not to save me from Peninnah's provocations, not to secure me in Elkanah's care, but to serve God. I understood that by the time Samuel was born. It wasn't about me any more.
So after Samuel was weaned I went back to that temple - that place where Eli had thought me a drunken fool - and I poured out my heart again. But this time I did not pour it out in distress, but in praise. I praised the God I had grown to understand. A God who understands the plight of those of us who are pushed to the margins by our place in society; a God who promises us a central place at the table. "God raises up the poor from the dust; God lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth belong to God ..."
I praised God that day and offered to God what was most precious in my life - most precious by far - my very own son. Somehow I knew that just as I had given life to Samuel, Samuel had given life to me. Not only because my status as a woman and a wife changed with his birth, but because I understood that what we think we need most, God is willing to provide, if we can learn to understand that what we really need most is God.
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