by Rev. Deacon Lawrence A. St. Onge

Today’s first reading is a continuation from the last two days. Faithful to her promise (that we heard in yesterday’s reading), Hannah brought her son, Samuel, to the temple to live in dedicated service to the Lord God. Samuel, a young boy, is awakened from his sleep at night by a voice calling to him three different times. Each time he goes to the priest, Eli, who states that it was not he who had called Samuel. On the third occasion, the wise Eli, realizes that it is the Lord who is calling Samuel, and he tells Samuel to answer the Lord by saying: "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening."

From today’s readings we see that our God is very active in the world. In the first reading we hear God’s call to Samuel and Samuel’s response to God’s call. And in the gospel today we physically see God’s healing grace as Jesus heals those who were ill with various diseases, and how he drove out demons from those who were possessed.

Most of us would probably admit that this is the way we would like to see things, because our faith would be much easier if God occasionally spoke to us in our sleep, or we were able to routinely see miraculous healings. However, this is not the world that we seem to regularly live in and experience.

However, we should take some consolation from the opening of today’s first reading, for it says: "During the time young Samuel was minister to the Lord under Eli, a revelation of the Lord was uncommon and vision infrequent." Also, we have to remember that it took three tries before Samuel realized that the message was from God. It was not immediately obvious to him.

Unfortunately, however, I think most people today do not expect to receive such revelation from God. And perhaps, because we do not really expect to hear such revelation, it has caused most of us to become bad listeners. In all honesty this is probably a trait that is lacking in most of our prayer lives. We tend to speak to God continuously in our prayer, and seldom if ever, give God the opportunity to speak to us, which he can and will do, if we give him a chance and the opportunity.

Our faith teaches us that God is not too busy for us and that He knows each of us intimately and personally. He calls each of us to be his special person. We need to realize that each of us has a personal call from God to serve him in a unique way. Unfortunately, our call is not always perfectly clear to us. Consequently, we need to reflect and pray and discern what God wants of us. The first step is to be open to his call: to desire to do what he wants of us, rather than, what we ourselves think we ought to do.