Hearing God

In our passage Samuel is described as a boy. The historian Josephus says he was 12 years old. Eli, on the other hand is old, “his eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see.” It is significant that he cannot see clearly, neither physically nor spiritually contrasting with Samuel who sees well and will do so in both senses. But just now God is difficult to hear :Then the Lord called “Samuel, Samuel” and the boy ran to Eli mistakenly thinking it was he who had called him. 

For a number of years I was a vocations officer for the diocese of St. Albans holding meetings with people, old and young, who wanted to explore and understand whether God had spoken to them. My own experience and nearly always theirs was that like Samual God had been speaking to them for some time but we, I and they had perhaps failed to hear, attributed the words or directions to something or someone else or not infrequently had some suspicions  but had deliberately ignored them. I want to suggest that such mistakes are commoner than we think. We all tend to Samuel’s rationality; three times the Lord called him and on each occasion he went to Eli, who twice saw dimly before recognizing what was happening. Only on the fourth calling does Samuel pay any attention. Samuel was in my view very favoured, he was only twelve and most of us require even more persistence of God before we stop to listen.

I have a childhood memory and it dates from and is associated with the house I lived in only until I was seven. I  was learning all I could from the Catholic Missal that I had been given and was sure that I wanted to be a priest. My mother, like all good Eli's, told me to lie down again!. Not that I regret that at all, it is only when looking backwards that I can  perhaps imagine that maybe God had perhaps been speaking.

Why is it that God is so difficult to hear? To begin with there are so many alternative explanations especially as His word often comes through other people and we can always imagine that they have their own motives for telling us something. For example if now I suggest to someone that they ought to come to church - you can see that this would be easily dismissed as not a divine communication. Samuel, we notice, was spoken to in the middle of the night and I do not know about you but I am very quick to discount the promptings of a disturbed sleep. Added to this why would God be speaking to us anyway? 

Our mistake is too often to set aside a time for God to speak to us, not that I would discourage this at all, but really God may use many avenues to talk to us, words, music, people, nature, poetry, the Bible(!), there is a panoply sensations at any time.

Samuel was very young but we can still learn from his story: if you think that God may have spoken to you, that you may have beard God’s prompting then you probably have.

Amen