In the dark unknown of night, Samuel speaks these words to Eli in the first reading. It turns out, it was God calling to Samuel, and that night’s encounter with God began Samuel’s life journey as a prophet. “Here I am” is a phrase that other prophets in the Hebrew bible speak in the presence of God, such as Moses at the burning bush and Abraham when God calls him to take his son Isaac up the mountain as an offering. There’s an almost unearthly faith required to respond in this way, a radical giving over of oneself.

At the core of Jewish existentialist philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s thought is that ethics is the ‘first philosophy,’ meaning our ethical duty to one another precedes thinking or knowledge. His ethical philosophy focuses on the encounter with the Other and how we respond to the one who, in their radical need, makes a demand of me.

The response of “Here I am,” according to Levinas, is one of the most ethical we can give. The ‘Other’ that Levinas writes of has connotations of being the orphan, child, widow – those who have a particular vulnerability and nakedness that God calls us to protect and remember: “My position as I consists in being able to respond to this essential destitution of the Other, finding resources for myself” Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity (1961). “The Other who dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obliged.” 

In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), the command to welcome the stranger is mentioned 37 times, while the command to love the neighbor is mentioned only twice. The stranger is someone who is totally unfamiliar, unknown and unassimilable to me, and they are who I am called to respond “Here I am” to. It is an inexhaustible responsibility throughout one’s life to respond in this way, never a contract to be fulfilled.

The holy call and response of “Here I am” is woven into Hebrew letters and language itself. In The Book of Letters: A Mystical Alef-bait, Lawrence Kushner writes about the ancient Hebrew letter “Hay” of the word Hineni, a word/phrase meaning “Here am I.” “While everyone can say, ‘I am present,’ only a very few can say ‘Here am I,’” he writes. “For to answer ‘Here am I’ means that you no longer belong only to yourself. To answer ‘Here am I’ means that you give the Hay of your being over to the One who calls. That is why Hay is the letter most often linked with God’s name.”

Speak, for your servant is listening. Here am I. Listening and ready to act, not to appease my guilt or to perform my goodness but to genuinely be a servant to the Other who calls out to me.  Sometimes the only ethical thing we can say in the face of suffering and injustice is, your servant is listening, here I am.

In Canada, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) started in the 1990s during the AIDS pandemic to bring harm reduction to an area that was seeing an epidemic of overdose deaths. It is run by people who use drugs themselves, and several founders were inspired by liberation theology and its preferential option for the poor. The organizers combined the values and education techniques of the liberation theology movement to organize drug users through discussion groups, making their suffering public to the wider community.

One of the founders said, “It was almost a spiritual thing that we had talked about, that the cry of suffering users themselves, if that could be heard publicly, that was the most powerful weapon of all. . . what is most denied and repressed in society is the collective expression of pain. There are so many institutions that privatize pain and keep it hidden, whether it is the psychiatrist’s office, the mental health system, or bars. Facilitating the public expression of pain was the most subversive thing we could do.”

VANDU continues to have a strong impact on public education, advocacy for medical and mental health services, peer and community support, needle exchange and recovery, and more. Those who use drugs are not treated as victims but as human beings with inherent dignity who know best what they need for their own, and the community’s, healing.