"Our" Children Are First of All God's

Monday’s First Reading at Mass speaks of the childhood of the prophet Samuel.  Samuel is a critical figure in the Old Testament, a transitional prophet from the era of the Judges to the establishment of Israel’s monarchy.  It is Samuel who, at God’s command, anoints Israel’s first kings: Saul and then David.  Because we are three days away from the Nativity of Him who is the Eternal King of the House of David, born in the City of David (Bethlehem), it is worth meeting Samuel.

But today’s reading introduces us to three-year old Samuel.  His mother, Hannah, brings him with her to a shrine, where she intends to offer a sacrifice.  The nominal sacrifice is a bull, flour, and wine; the real sacrifice is Samuel.

Hannah approaches the priest, Eli, reminding him that she once prayed there for a child.  The Lord fulfilled that prayer.  Today she returned with that child, presenting him to Eli to be raised in the Temple in order to be dedicated exclusively to the service of God.  Eli will train the child in the Lord’s ways.  Sometime in early Ordinary Time, the Church actually reads the account of God calling Samuel in his sleep.  Samuel thinks Eli is calling him.  Eli says he is not, then understands the voice to be God’s, instructing the boy to respond, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” (I Sam 3:9).  Eli’s advice applies to everyone who seeks to do God’s Will.

Hannah’s example is eloquent.  No doubt she dearly loved her little boy, given her ardent prayer for a child.  But she understood what perhaps so many people don’t: our children are not ours.  They were and remain God’s.  Because God is not greedy, He shares them with us, trusting our love makes them better children of God.  But they are never our property.  A good parent knows there is a point in life he must let go.

That’s the lesson of Abraham and Isaac.  The account of God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac repels some moderns.   It shouldn’t.  God meets people where they are, in their mentalities.  God, not we, is “Lord and Giver of Life.”  It’s not that some bloodthirsty god wanted to take a little boy’s life, then changed his mind.  As the late Slovak cardinal Jan Korec suggested, the real sacrifice on Mount Moriah was, in one sense, Abraham: God asked him if he was ready to give up everything he held dear, everything he held most valuable and precious.  Abraham had longed all his life for a son by his beloved wife, Sarah.  Miraculously, in his old age, he received him.  Having received everything from God, would he now have faith in the goodness of that God or would he fence off something of that everything for his own determination?  No, Abraham anticipated by centuries Job’s line: “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: blessed be the name of the Lord!” (Jb 1:21).  Hannah and Abraham both witness to a truth: as profound as the meaning and identity of “parent” is, the meaning and identity of “servant of God” is still deeper.

These same issues play out in history in different ways.  In times past, perhaps, parents obstructed their child’s choice of a priestly or religious vocation because celibacy or consecrated chastity meant the end of the family line through that child.  Today, with modern technology, parental “ownership” of children takes on even more sinister dimensions.  Reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization and gene-editing are leading towards “designer babies,” custom-made-to-order kids to fulfill what former Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit calls the modern “parental project.”  Frozen embryos become property: sometimes discarded, often abandoned, even made into jewelry for a parent to wear.  And some Americans want to call that “rights.”

In that light, consider the Biblical witness.  Hannah recognizes Samuel is first and remains God’s.  Mary gives her Boy Child Jesus to the world, no more poignantly than on Calvary.  What would Hannah – or Mary -- say to people today?