When I was a second-year seminarian, in 1986, I arrived at the wedding of a two college classmates, Frank and Marta. I was asked on the spot if I would read the Old Testament reading and I agreed to do so.
Those of you who serve as lectors know this is almost never a wise idea. You could get stuck with one of Paul’s run-on sentences or you could end up with some unpronounceable Hebrew name. But I was not prepared to blush. I had no chance to look it over. At the appropriate time, I stood up and read some of the same words we heard a few moments ago:
The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. (and so on and so forth…)
Looking up at my friends, I thought I’d been “Punked.” I had not been to very many weddings at that point in my life beyond my own. I thought I knew the Bible pretty well as a United Methodist with a Baptist grandmother and summers worth of Vacation Bible School – but trust me, this had never came up in any of those contexts. And even though, by this point, I’d taken an Introduction to the Old Testament class in seminary, the truth is that Wisdom literature still takes a backseat to the Torah and Prophets in those classes, even today. And mostly it’s ignored by the lectionary except for this brief end of August moment every three years. Since it really is part of the Bible, however, let’s dive in: the Word of the Lord…thanks be to God!
During the last five or six
years that I was the rector at St. Francis in Holden, I was able to teach one
required Intro to the Bible course a semester at Assumption College, and I made
sure that my students at Assumption knew something about it by the time we
finished spending a semester reading the Bible together. I juxtaposed John
Meyer’s song, “Your Body is a Wonderland” with these words from the fourth
chapter of the Song of Solomon, where the poet is celebrating the physical
beauty of his lover, from head to toe:
How beautiful you
are, my love,
how very
beautiful!
Your eyes are doves behind your
veil.
Your hair is like a flock of
goats,
moving down
the slopes of Gilead.
Your teeth are like a flock of
shorn ewes
that have come
up from the washing,
all of which bear twins,
and not one
among them is bereaved.
Your lips are like a crimson
thread,
and your mouth
is lovely.
Your cheeks are like halves of a
pomegranate behind your
veil.
Your neck is like the tower of
David, built in
courses;
on it hang a thousand bucklers,
all of them
shields of warriors.
Your two breasts are like two
fawns,
twins of a gazelle, that
feed among the lilies…
You are altogether beautiful,
my love; there is no
flaw in you.
I suspect it will be a very long time before that reading comes up in the lectionary or even in someone’s wedding liturgy, although that is most likely the precise context in which those words first arose. So what do we do with this text?
An allegory conveys a meaning other than the literal or obvious meaning, pointing beyond itself to something other than itself that is being represented. Traditionally, that is how the Song of Solomon has been read first by Jews and later by Christians, at least the ones who have paid any attention at all to it. Which is to say, it has been read as a way of representing God’s covenantal love for humankind. God is crazy about us, this reading suggests, and wants that love to be reciprocated. In particular, Christians have read this text in a way that makes Jesus the groom and the Church his bride. Biblical faith that takes this allegory seriously might be more passionate and less about following the rules; more poetic and less dogmatic. You can therefore see why conventional religion has been a little nervous around it.
It is a fair interpretation as far as it goes. But I
think there is a danger in moving too quickly toward allegory. That way of
reading too often dismisses what the text is in fact actually celebrating:
human love. While the text may mean to suggest that God and humanity are in
fact like two lovers, any reading of the text which skims over the fact that
the Song of Solomon is actually celebrating two human beings who are madly in
love will miss the point. It’s why I always come back to that reading at my
friends’ wedding when they were so young, so in love, so hopeful.
That raises the question: is there another way to read this text than just as an allegory? I think there is. In the Book of Genesis, “God creates humankind in God’s own image: male and female God created them.” (Genesis 1:27) These human beings are not created as “spiritual” beings trapped in “sinful” bodies, even if this is the kind of sexual ethic that Christians have sometimes believed is our inheritance. The text says that they were “naked, without shame.” God, in other words, sees the body as “very good” and human sexuality as a holy gift.
In the Gospel of John the bold (and scandalous claim) is
made that the Word became flesh in
Jesus of Nazareth. That is to say, that God became human, embodied. And “we
have seen his glory.” (John 1:14) That is not an allegorical statement for Christians, but a radical theological
claim that goes to the heart of Christian faith. Jesus wasn’t masquerading
around Galilee as if he had a body! Jesus
really was born of a woman and he
really was thirsty and he really did die on a cross and on the third day he really
was raised from the dead. He was, as the creed insists, fully human. Why? Because God so loved the world…
In Greek there are a variety of choices to speak about love. Agape is the favored word among the theologians, the one used most often to refer to the love we see on the cross: a self-sacrificial love that is willing to lay down one’s life for a friend. It’s human love but it’s seen as closest to what divine love is like. A close second, a word we discover in Paul’s writing especially, is philia (the root word in the city named Philadelphia, the city of “brotherly [and sisterly] love.”) That is to say, philia is about platonic, non-sexual, friendships.
But there is another word, the one that conventional religious piety tends to shy away from: eros. Eros is about passion and sexual attraction. Eros is about desire. Too often, at least since St. Augustine, the Church has tended to see this aspect of human love as something shameful or at the very least as something that needs to be “tamed.” But that is what makes Song of Solomon so unique: it is an unbridled celebration of human, erotic, physical love.
We sing that ubi caritas et amour, deus ibi est. (“Where love and charity are, there God is.”) That is to say, where we see human love we behold the presence of God. What if “where we see love and charity, there God is” refers not only to agape and philia but to eros as well? What if the Song of Solomon means to be not first and foremost an allegory that “symbolizes” God’s love for humankind but a map that points us to God in the first place and a celebration of love wherever it is manifest? If you want to find God, then look to human love—agape, philia and also eros.
In the desire that two lovers feel for each other—in their desire to be “one flesh”—there we see signs of the presence of the “living God.” That desire is not shameful or embarrassing, but holy and good! It is even sacramental: when two people take vows to be faithful to each other no matter what comes, we see the image of God in their faces. That’s what the marriage liturgy is all about. Technically speaking, this is not a radical idea. I’m not going to be brought up on heresy charges today or if I am, I’d win the case! But at best we have tended to speak in whispers about it and so it may sound pretty radical. I have sometimes wondered if it is because of our confusion and our embarrassment and our misunderstanding around human sexuality that we ended up having all that confusion and embarrassment and misunderstanding about how to fully include LGBTQ folks in the Church. Because we have made no room for eros we got fixated on marriage for procreation. That may be a longer conversation than I have time for today. For today, it’s enough to say that love is love and where we see love we see the face of God.
I miss teaching at Assumption. My current job just does not allow for me to build that into my schedule. I miss being able to not only teach but learn from young people encountering texts for the first time. Sometimes on first reading, my undergraduate students would confuse the language of the Song of Songs for lust or even pornography. They would giggle and blush a bit the same way I did at my friend’s wedding. They have grown up in a culture that sends them way too many confusing signals about human sexuality. They and we live in an “unsteady and confusing world” and there is no doubt that there are all kinds of ways that human sexuality can be misunderstood and misused. Yet the deafening silence of the Church only adds to that confusion. Don't we want to teach our children and grandchildren a healthier sexual ethic than most of us received from the Church?
Sometimes a student might initially feel that the Song of Songs objectifies women. But even my most ardent feminist students quickly realized once they delved into the text that it is hard to read the Song of Solomon as sexist, for it not only celebrates female beauty but gives voice to female desire as well. After all, it is the woman who is speaking in today’s reading, she who is so attentive to her lover who is running to be with her, like a gazelle or young stag. She can’t wait for him!
There are at least two very practical implications from all of this, I think. First is the trajectory that leads to the Epistle of James which we'll be reading from for the next six weeks or so. We cannot just be hearers of the Word; we need to be doers of the Word. Why? Because "thoughts and prayers" is never enough. Because we need to respond to real human needs like poverty and hunger and gun violence and homelessness with real-life embodied solutions.
The other has to do with our prayer itself. Years ago, I had a spiritual director who was French, a former Jesuit who had become an Episcopal priest. I would often tell him my prayer life wasn’t disciplined enough: I would tell him I needed more structure and focus. My Germanic tendencies appalled him. He would say, "Richard, romance isn’t about needing more structure: when you are passionately in love you want to spend every waking moment with the one you desire." He believed that our relationship with God needed to be more like that, that our prayer is a yearning for God and that yearning is reciprocated. That we should be running toward God like a gazelle or young stag and that even more radically, God may already be running to us as well.
He gave me a way into the Song of Solomon that did not rush toward allegory. He saw, and he helped me to see, that
this desire, both human and divine, can be holy and good and beautiful. And that
wherever we find love - including eros - there we see the face of God.
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