Bearing Love: Hannah Cried
“Don’t think your servant is some good-for-nothing woman. This whole time I’ve been praying out of my great worry and trouble!”
-1 Samuel 1:16
In a season where we focus and look forward to the light, we also acknowledge and grieve the darkness in the waiting. Hannah’s birth story makes space for grief in hope.
Read: 1 Samuel 1:1-2:10
Advent, as a season of preparation and darkness, has been pulverized by all the holly jolly. We need Hannah in Advent. Hannah situates us in a deep grief that can’t be brushed off. And, we meet her where so many are this season: trying to celebrate a holy holiday with her family, which only makes her feel her loss more keenly.
Women who struggle with infertility may relate to the way large family gatherings invite questions that whether known or unknown can be painful. Things like:
“When are you going to have a little one?”
“Are y’all ever going to make me a grandma?”
“You’re not getting any younger.”
(Can we stop asking about these things? It is impossible to know what someone is going through, and women have worth beyond their ability or choice to conceive.)
We don’t know what phrases Hannah heard through her struggles, but we do know that her sister-wife Penninah was intentionally cruel toward her. We also see her desire to be a mother leading to an undignified grief in the temple. Her tears become her prayer, and her lament before God brings a response.
Admittedly, it begins with a reprimand rather than the required compassion. Eli works to maintain the decorum in the temple, which is a move we may be familiar with when we sanctify ritual rather than allowing ritual to sanctify us. Hannah doesn’t need quiet prayers or someone to light a candle for her, she needs a lifeline. And once Eli recognizes Hannah’s actions as grief, he adds a “may it be so” to her unspoken request, and Samuel is conceived.
It might be easy to find the hope of the story in her conception. Certainly, the news brought her so much joy. However, the hope of the Advent season is not only in the signs that the kingdom is coming. It can also be found in the signs that the kingdom is needed in the first place. 2020 has given us plenty of those signs, and it is worth allowing ourselves to feel the grief of a world that is broken. In Advent we walk together as a community longing for the kingdom, sometimes with tears, while we wait for hope to be born anew. May it be so.
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Rev. Jana Hall-Perkins shares her own story of lament and loss and feeling God in these moments. CW: miscarriage, infant loss.
