Direct dealing

The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary as the Church returns to marking time in sequence, one week after the other using ordinal numbers (1,2,3, etc), Ordinary Time, tell us of direct dealing with God and Divine response which immediately fulfills the request. The   sorrow of Hannah who was barren and unable to give birth to the heir is the situation that brings her to the Temple to pray for relief from the derision she experiences. The sincerity of her appeal to God is at first mistaken as drunkenness perhaps because of the surrender of the control of the situation to the encounter she is having with the Spirit. The certainty of Eli, the priest that she could go in peace with her prayers answered is in contrast to the the apparent lack of authority about the action of God presented by the scribes in the synagogue at Capernaum in the passage from the Gospel of Mark. Our relationship with Jesus calls us to be as assertive as He is in coming to the action of confronting evil and delivering our brothers and sisters from oppression and rejection of others.