Prayers for the longing

Ruth Barnes

The Lord! Milleniums later, we know a great deal about infertility, and this explanation for Hannah's barrenness sounds strange to us. We are reluctant to put it this way. Yet it is to the Lord we cry, as Hannah did, greatly distressed, for the affliction of infertility cuts deep to the heart of who we are. In seeking the meaning of our waiting, of our inability to conceive, we know we have to find it in that stark line: The Lord had closed her womb.

We pray as Hannah did, asking God to look and remember and give. We will not presume to keep the child for our own, we say, but urgently ask to be allowed to bear seed, to find someone living in the ashes of our womb. This is what we want, above all.

Like Hannah, our voices fail. Our lips move incoherently, for we are praying from the heart. We are shaping without sound the anguished syllables of our spirits.

Eli thought Hannah was drunk.

Of course. Such prayers for the longing are completely unconventional. They are like the untidy, unpredictable swell of water over banks in the spring, threatening flood.

No, my Lord, Hannah told the high priest. I'm not drunk. I'm a woman oppressed in spirit. . . . I have poured out my soul before the Lord.

Prayers of longing leave us drained. The essence of us is spilled, and we feel ourselves unsteady, swaying wildly without the weight of certainty to hold us in balance.

More than anything, we ask for reversal--we ask that the Lord will open what He has shut. The fact that He is the Meaning in the closed sentences of our lives is our only comfort.

Ruth Barnes is the pen name of a Manitoba writer

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