When You Can’t Say It to Anyone

Half past two in the morning.

The house is dark, and the people you might call are asleep. Some things don’t get said on the phone at this hour, or at any hour. They just get carried, quietly, into the next day.

Somewhere along the way a lot of people learn that the strong thing is to hold it together. Keep your face straight at the table. Don’t make it anyone’s problem. Fall apart later, in the car, where no one can see.

This is a very old story about a woman who held it together for years, and what happened the day she stopped.

Her name was Hannah. She lived in the hill country of Israel about three thousand years ago, married to a man named Elkanah. In that time and place a man could have more than one wife, and he did. The other wife was Peninnah. Peninnah had sons and daughters. Hannah had none.

Every year the household made the trip to a town called Shiloh, where the country’s main house of worship stood. An animal was offered to God, and then the family sat down and ate the meat together. Elkanah handed out portions around the table, to Peninnah and to each of her children. To Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her.

And every year, at that same table, Peninnah went after her about the children she didn’t have, until Hannah cried and wouldn’t eat.

The story doesn’t say what was going on inside Peninnah, and it doesn’t ask us to hate her. It just sets down what it was like to sit at that table.

Elkanah saw his wife crying, and he tried. He asked her why she was crying, why she wouldn’t eat, why her heart was so heavy. Then he asked the last one, which was kind and missed the point completely.

Am I not better to you than ten sons?

The story records no answer. The man who loved her most asked her straight out what was wrong, and she didn’t say it to him.

When the meal was over, Hannah stood up. She went to the house of worship. An old priest named Eli was sitting on a chair by the doorpost. A priest was the one whose job was to offer the sacrifices and to bless.

Hannah prayed, crying as she did it. She made a promise: if God would give her a son, she would give him back to God for his whole life. But she prayed in her heart. Her lips were moving. No sound came out.

Eli was watching her mouth, and he got it wrong. He thought she was drunk. He told her to put her wine away.

She didn’t storm off and she didn’t shrink. She told him the truth. She hadn’t been drinking. I have poured out my soul before the LORD.

Poured out. Like a jar turned upside down until there’s nothing left in it.

Eli changed his tune and blessed her. Go in peace, he said, and may the God of Israel grant the petition you have asked of Him.

He never asked what the petition was. She never told him. The only one who had heard all of it was the one she’d poured it out to.

Then comes one short line.

Then she went on her way, and she began to eat, and her face was no longer downcast.

She ate. The woman who had cried too hard to eat at that table, year after year, went and ate something. And her face changed.

Look at what hadn’t. She still had no child. She was going home the next morning to the same house, the same rival, the same table. The priest who blessed her had started out thinking she was drunk, and his blessing was a “may,” not a promise. Nothing she’d asked for had been given.

The next year she did have a son. She named him Samuel, because she had asked God for him. When he was old enough, she kept her promise and brought him to Shiloh to grow up serving there with Eli. Every year after that, when she came up for the sacrifice, she brought him a little robe she’d made.

It ended well for Hannah. That isn’t how it goes for everyone who pours out the thing they want most, and this book won’t pretend otherwise. Plenty of people pray her prayer and the child never comes, or the test comes back the way they feared.

But her face changed at Shiloh, before anyone knew how it would end, Hannah included. Holding it together hadn’t kept anything at peace. The peace came the day she stopped holding it, said every bit of it to God, got misread, and was blessed by a stranger who never learned the details.