“Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
In both the call of the first disciples in John 1 and the call of 1 Samuel 3, we see an emphasis on personal encounter: the Lord sees people and calls them by name. In the case of Peter, he even gives a new name.
Names are intimate things, words of power. The fact that naming is so central in the magical systems of countless fantasy worlds stems from a basic reality that we all know. We notice when people call our name. Maybe we don’t want our name to be called, so this is not a power that is intrinsically good.
Learning to recognize our names is an important part of growing up. When a child responds to her name, we rightly understand that her sense of identity is developing; she begins to see the world not just as light and dark, Mom and not-Mom. She begins to know that she is a person.
When God reveals his name to Moses in Exodus 3, we see a radical development in human knowledge. God’s personal character is already implied with his call of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, his promises of blessing. Yet to reveal his name suggests that this covenant, while not exactly between equals, is nonetheless a covenant between persons. The God who meets Moses is not merely some force who happened to interact with his ancestors; he has a name. The fact that pious Jews have always recognized this name as holy—set apart, unpronounceable—is not mere superstition or magical thinking. It is awe and gratitude in the face of an unimaginable gift: that the transcendent God who is the source of all being would want a relationship with us.
For that really is the heart of these call stories in Samuel and in John. God doesn’t call people just to become transmitters of certain choice pieces of information. He calls them by name so that he can communicate to his people by means of a personal relationship. To say this is to touch on a whole bundle of mysteries, chief of which is that the incarnate divine Son leaves us not a body of writing or ideas, but a group of men charged with inviting others into the same school of discipleship. They have ideas, to be sure, but the heart of their mission involves persons.
A recurring theme of implicitly anti-Catholic rhetoric involves emphasizing Jesus’ personal call at the expense of what is usually labeled religion. At heart, I find these statements rather sad in their ignorance, for the heart of Catholic religion is a relationship with God. If it is not, it is not the Catholic religion. We are all called by God and named in baptism. Further, we must all at some point continue in maturity to recognize this call in a more personal way.
Indeed, religion in its core sense involves nothing but relations. That is what the word means. If it has been dumbed down and reduced to something like a set of rules abstracted from relationship, that is the fault of modernity and its antagonism to tradition, not of the Catholic religion as it is actually taught and practiced. In any case, it would be ridiculous to say that Jesus’ personal call is somehow opposed to rules or to exterior practices. Otherwise, instead of “come and see,” he would have told Andrew and Peter to go back to their homes and think nice thoughts about how God loves them. A God who gives us relationship without any content, boundaries, or goals is not the God of Samuel or of Jesus Christ.
That is how we must understand St. Paul’s call to sexual morality in 1 Corinthians 6. I suppose we could say here that Paul has abandoned the relationship at the heart of Christianity for a set of rules—and there are those today, in various progressive Christian pulpits, who would. But again, this would be to misunderstand both what Paul taught and what Jesus said. The reason that the body matters is precisely because of the relational call at the heart of Christianity. God calls us each by name to follow him. He doesn’t just call our souls. He calls persons who are body and soul. I cannot follow Jesus with just my mind and my heart. If I am invited to someone’s house for dinner, I cannot spit on his table, light fire to his couch, and make fun of his children, all the while saying that what really matters is the relationship. The body and its actions are meaningful. Everyone knows this, even though modern culture takes great pains to convince us otherwise. We cannot escape from this reality.
Because bodies have meaning, when Jesus tells us that he gives us his body and his blood, it doesn’t take a full grasp of the Mosaic Law’s understanding of blood to sense that he is giving us something intimate and personal. His body is his self, and his blood is his life. Once again, the invitation is completely personal. He isn’t, like some spiritual guru, pointing us to a path of enlightenment that has nothing to do with him. He is asking us to join our life to his so that our lives—our souls and bodies—can share in his own goodness. This is so much more than following a set of rules. But there are rules in a very natural sense: if you want to share the life of a person, you have to configure your own life so that it is capable of doing so. I can say that I love my children, but if I order my days so that I never see them, or that I always prioritize other things, I am not doing a very good job of it.
We may be inclined to insist, as an immature child might insist, that the relationship must happen on our own terms as we define them. But such a relationship will only become disordered. In his meditation on 1 Samuel 3, Peter Kreeft points out that, when faced with someone wiser than ourselves, we should always listen more than speak. Eli wisely instructs Samuel not to unload his thoughts and feelings to the mysterious voice, but rather to listen.
How hard that is for us in our relationship with God! We just want to explain everything, justify everything, frame everything on our own terms rather than simply listening at the times when he tells us to listen: in the proclamation of Scripture, in the breaking of bread, and in the silence of our hearts in his presence. The problem with so much modern theology—call it “contextual” or “from below” or whatever—which wants to start with us and move to God, is that we never actually get to God. We just get to pseudo-divinized versions of ourselves, which it turns out aren’t really capable of salvation, just of endless introspection.
The opposite temptation, I suppose, is to listen in such a way that we cannot take a step without direction. Should I brush my teeth tonight? Let me pray on it. That, too, is the wrong posture, for it places the voice of God in competition with our ordinary natural life, suggesting that any decision I make on my own is somehow apart from God’s providence.
The virtue of religion—there’s that word again—might be described as the virtue of right relations, the virtue of listening and acting well with God, neither becoming automatons who need strict programming nor agents of chaos who value ourselves over the relationship. A right relationship remembers the past, appreciates the present, and looks forward to the future. I’d suggest that we need all three of those things for a healthy relationship with God: diligence over what he has revealed in the past, patience and attentiveness to his presence today, and a willingness to grow more fully into the life he intends for us. May we hear his call to us and respond, like Samuel and the first disciples, with faith. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”