Envying Hannah

Risking Respectability for Spiritual Fidelity

This essay appeared in Wayfare issue 7.

I don’t know about you, but some of my biggest regrets in life involve acting outside of integrity by betraying my own understanding of right and wrong. This includes discounting my own inspiration from the Spirit of God, often in deference to others. Regrettably, there have been times in my life where I have acted as though I did not take myself or my personal revelation seriously—or at least as seriously as I should have. My experiences are at least in part a result of gendered messaging around the idea that people who are embodied differently than I am can be privy to a spiritual knowledge about me, and my life, that can trump even my own self-knowing.

One example is when I was twenty years old and preparing to serve a full-time mission. I met with my stake president as part of the protocol. Like many BYU students, I had never spoken with or even met my stake president prior to this formal interview about missionary service. He asked me to tell him why I wanted to go on a mission. After explaining my reasons, he confidently responded with: “You’re right, the Lord wants you to serve a mission.” Although there was nothing negative about this statement, I remember feeling bewildered. I did not doubt that the Lord wanted me to serve a mission and was not seeking validation in this area. Twenty-year-old me thought it strange that he felt the need to tell me I was properly perceiving the divine will for my life. I was already perfectly confident that I was doing the right thing.

While not a detrimental experience, this was a curious one. In ways, that encounter implied that I needed external legitimation in my spiritual decisions. In retrospect, that conversation engendered a sense within me that I ought not to take myself or my personal revelations seriously—or at least that I needed validation from a man in a position of religious authority before I could do so. The result is that I was left more vulnerable to what was a deeply negative experience on my mission; although the mission experience was quite different from my one-time meeting with the stake president, I cannot believe they are unrelated.

Early on in my full-time missionary service, I had strong promptings that I needed to go home at the conclusion of my mission during a specific month. It was over a year away and I was surprised that this was gnawing at me. However, because mission transfers were designed to work out evenly for elders who served for twenty-four months, they did not always work out evenly for sisters, who served for a shorter period. This meant that instead of serving for exactly eighteen months, I would go home a few weeks before or a few weeks after the eighteen-month mark. I brought this up to my mission president during zone conference interviews. During that conversation, I learned that the mission office had scheduled me to go home two months later than the Spirit was telling me I should. Because it was early in my mission, I decided to sit with this knowledge and think about it. Toward the end of my mission, I continued to feel that I needed to go home two months earlier. I approached my mission president, who wanted me to stay longer. After a lengthy back and forth, he finally pulled out the big guns and told me my impression to go home earlier was coming from the adversary. According to him, my revelation was from the wrong source; that was how my priesthood leader accounted for the mismatch. His wife intervened to explain that her husband was making decisions based on what he thought was best for his mission, not necessarily for me, and encouraged me to listen to my own revelation. Although I took myself seriously for a moment, ultimately the guilt and self-doubt won out and I stayed the extra two months, as my mission president had asked. There were blessings during that time, yet the net effect of that last transfer was destructive. For years afterward, I harbored guilt about the deleterious effects of extending my mission rather than returning home to where I believed I was needed much more.

I have come to understand this experience and others like it as instances of spiritual self-betrayal or simply spiritual betrayal. I knew what was true for me and what God wanted me to do. Rather than being faithful to God and myself and my revelation, I betrayed it and broke the divine trust in me, my own self-trust, and enervated my trust in the divine. This was more than the presence of spiritual betrayal; it was also the absence of spiritual fidelity.

In order to better understand an alternate model of spiritual fidelity, I look to a female exemplar from scripture. In the second chapter of first Samuel, we encounter Hannah uttering a profound if protracted prayer, one that presages the Magnificat of Mary that would be pronounced about ten centuries later. In this scene, Hannah is in the temple praising God and dedicating her son Samuel, consecrating him to the Lord’s service. Like Mary would later do, Hannah prophesied that God would create justice on the earth and make wrong things right. She predicted that God would raise the poor from the dust, and lift the needy from the heaps of ashes so that they would sit alongside royalty in seats of honor (1 Samuel 2:8–9). This is just one example of many that Hannah offers to support her claim that God both brings people low and exalts them (v. 7), depending on their needs. Hannah sings the following praise: “My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God. My mouth derides my enemies because I rejoice in your victory” (v. 1, NRSV). In this moment, Hannah rejoices not only in the victory of the divine but also in her own vindication that God has heard her prayer, made her a mother, and not just any mother but a mother of a prophet that will be celebrated in the Jewish and Christian traditions for millennia. Not only did God hear her—she heard God; she listened, she hearkened, and she overcame—and she knew it.

Hannah’s prayer beautifully anticipates and mirrors one of the most celebrated passages of Christian scripture, and she is recognized as the mother of a prophet. Yet in the previous chapter, Hannah is also found praying in the temple, and during that prayer, prior to Samuel’s birth, she was met with dismissiveness and disrespect. In 1 Samuel 1, the barren Hannah, whose pain over childlessness was only exacerbated by her husband’s other wife who had children, is described as appearing in the temple because “she was deeply distressed”; while she was there, she “prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly” (v. 10, NRSV). Promising God that if she bore a son she would consecrate him, she prayed silently while her lips mouthed the words. The temple priest, Eli, assumed she was drunk—and like men of privilege and authority often do, he acted on his assumption before getting curious or asking questions to test his hypothesis, and instead of learning from Hannah’s faithfulness and devotion, he judged and condemned her. Rather than accept his false accusations of inebriation and fleeing from the temple at his insistence, Hannah responds thus, “No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time” (vv. 15–16, NRSV). To his credit, Eli responds to Hannah’s self-defense and self-advocacy with blessings rather than curses.

There are many things that could be teased out of this story, but for now, I wish to focus on the fact that Hannah looked drunk: Perhaps today onlookers would be more inclined to pathologize Hannah than to assume she had imbibed some illicit substance. That is to say, Hannah looked crazy, but she wasn’t. She understood who she was to God, what she needed to do, and what she wanted. Hannah took seriously her righteous desires and her understanding of who God wanted her to be. Being sure of who she was and what she wanted to lay claim to, she was willing to do whatever it took, including risking respectability to both fulfill the divine will and secure the desires of her heart. Hannah took this risk for the sake of spiritual fidelity.

Let’s unpack what I mean by “spiritual fidelity.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “fidelity” means, among other things, “the quality of being faithful; faithfulness, loyalty, unswerving allegiance to a person, party, bond, etc.” and “strict conformity to truth or fact.” For fun, let’s add in one more: “Of a description, translation, etc.: Correspondence with the original; exactness” and “the degree to which a sound or picture reproduced or transmitted by any device resembles the original; esp. in high fidelity.” Hannah embodies all of these definitions as she stays true to her self-knowing, her personal revelation, and stands her ground to receive the blessings and social standing she needs to carry out her divinely given mission.

Hannah evinced what philosopher of religion Pamela Sue Anderson describes as “gendered epistemic confidence.” The branch of philosophy known as epistemology, from which the word “epistemic” is derived, addresses questions of how it is that human beings attain knowledge and who has the authority to make knowledge claims. The term “epistemic confidence” refers to a person’s confidence in their own ability to know what is true and false—they recognize themselves as having the authority to know independent of others. Anderson contends that women often lack confidence in their own knowing, as well as their own ethical commitments and practices. She observes, “Confidence as a social phenomenon, but also as a practical disposition of trust in, or faith with oneself as another, remains vulnerable to personal contingencies,” such as gender and other factors that socially shape bodies.¹ To have confidence is to be able to say “I can” in regard to knowing and acting in a way that is congruent with that knowledge; yet too often, gender and other factors of embodiment leave a person feeling that within their social context they cannot know and act in accordance with that knowledge.

Women are often at a remove from their own knowing and, as result, from acting with integrity in accordance with that knowing, precisely because they lack this epistemic confidence. They doubt even their own experiences, including spiritual ones, because they believe their knowledge and epistemic confidence must be mediated by others. As the post-Christian feminist theologian Mary Daly put it, “Women have been unable even to experience our own experiences.”² In order to protect not only women but all people from such detrimental circumstances, we must allow God to mediate our relationship to the Church and also recognize that just as with Hannah, sometimes it is those in power that need to re-examine their assumptions and perceptions, rather than just the less powerful people whose views may come into collision with them. If I had better understood this more than half of my life ago, I believe I would have made better decisions, ones that were more in line with my understanding of my personal revelation, and been willing to stand my ground when the legitimacy of that revelation was called into question by others with male bodies and institutional power. I would have trusted that ultimately I needed to answer to God for my missionary service and every other part of my life. I would have made choices that reflected the understanding that I live with more accountability to God than to a fallible leader.

In Mosiah 4:9, Benjamin teaches that human beings should always remember that they cannot understand all that the divine understands, “that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend.” Here, Benjamin encourages all human beings, regardless of gender, to take a stance of epistemic humility in relation to the divine, recognizing the provisional nature and limits of their own knowledge relative to divine knowledge. Although this is a message I wholly endorse, with regard to the topic of spiritual fidelity and gendered epistemic confidence, I propose that women consider taking “man” here not as a synecdoche for human beings, but in a literal gendered sense. Read this way, Benjamin’s imperative can be interpreted as an injunction for women to resist the diminishment of their sense of confidence as knowers. In the face of both external and internal pressures to discount their own personal revelation, women are to keep in check external (male) resistance to their revelation, since even male authorities cannot know or comprehend all that God does. We can re-read this scripture as an invitation for women to trust and fear God more than men.

One of our greatest challenges in staying faithful to personal revelation is when it comes into conflict with our values of pleasing others or appearing to be nice. This is one of many reasons that, as a community, Latter-day Saints need to hold up the value of integrity and rank it above niceness and people-pleasing when they are at odds with one another. In moments of tension, we must recall Paul’s teaching that seeking human approval and “people-pleasing” subverts the project of being a servant of Christ (see Galatians 1:10). Hannah models this prizing of integrity beautifully, and she is willing to tell Eli that he is wrong, because he is, as scripture makes plain. In this instance, she is the only one who has the full perspective. It is the woman, in this narrative, who carries the whole story and brings God’s purposes to fruition. She believes her own experience of God and does not allow someone else to distort her confidence in that knowing.