Advent 2, December 6: Hannah's Prayer of Thanksgiving

Hannah's prayer of thanksgiving for the birth of her child is a prayer for all of Israel and its future.

Here is the NRSV of 1 Samuel 2: 1-10

We read this prayer aloud, each of us reading about 4 lines.

The first two lines are:
"My heart exults in the LORD
  My strength is exalted in my God."

We immediately saw the parallel and perhaps the source of the "Magnificat," Mary's prayer of thanksgiving on hearing that she will give birth to Christ.  Hannah has been barren, and in praying for a male child, she promises that she would raise this child as a Nazarene and dedicate him at theTemple when he is three years old. She does conceive; Hannah says this prayer as she leaves her son,  Samuel, with the priest Eli, having dedicated him to the service of God.
Our discussion centered on these questions:
What kind of prayer is this? What lines are the most important for you? For whom is it encouraging? Challenging? Who are the other parties referred to in the prayer?

What kinds of prayers of thanksgiving have you offered lately? How were they similar or different? 

What would it be like if our prayers of thanksgiving had a communal aspect to them?

We noticed that a major difference is that our own prayers of thanksgiving tend to focus on us as individuals and do not often extend in to the greater community. Hannah's prayer is a prayer for the future of Israel, making it quite clear that God's work is being done in this world and that Hannah has played her part in Salvation History. We wondered what it must have felt like for her to give up this toddler when he was 3. At our Monday Advent quiet hour, we looked at the prayers of thanksgiving in the Book of Common Prayer, especially the General Thanksgiving on p. 836--and we discussed the times when our prayers of thanksgiving had been offered spontaneously and with passion.