The life of St Hannah, the Prophetess
Praying once at the sanctuary in Shiloh with such intensity that her lips moved though no sound left them, she was taken by the priest Eli for a drunk woman and scolded, until she told him her sorrow plainly and received his blessing instead of his rebuke. Not long after, she conceived and bore a son, naming him Samuel, and, true to a vow made in that same prayer, brought the boy to Eli once he was weaned so he could grow up in the Lord's service at the tabernacle rather than in her own home.
This December commemoration honors the same Hannah remembered on a separate day in July, and should not be confused with a different woman of nearly the same name kept on this very date: the righteous Anna, mother of the Virgin Mary, whose own conception of her daughter the Church also commemorates on December 9, centuries removed from Hannah's own era.
She is honored as a prophetess, remembered for a grief turned to prayer and a prayer turned, in time, to the mother of Israel's last judge.
