Readings from the Song:
Woman: 1:5-6 (don’t despise me because I am black)
Man: 4:9-16 (you are beautiful and you smell sexy)
Woman: 5:2-8 (ready for “bed” and can’t find lover)
Man: 7:1-9 (you’re beautiful, this time with food)
I joked with my students in describing this retreat
that it was going to be about the
sexy, sexy Bible. Was I kidding?
For centuries, we’ve tried to figure out this poem.
Some see it as a kind of performance
art,
reenacting a fertility rite to bring
good fortune to crops.
Others as an allegory
—a one-to-one metaphor for God’s love
for recalcitrant Israel.
It’s read on Passover in many Jewish
households because,
in the words of my friend Rabbi Yitz,
“Passover is the dating process
of the just-born Jewish nation with
G-d,
culminating in the Marriage Ceremony
under the canopy of Clouds at Mount
Sinai.”
For many Christians, it’s been God
dating the Church instead.
Others see it as a celebration of
physical and romantic love, God-given.
Still others wonder why it’s in our
Scriptures at all
—God’s not mentioned once.
Do we ever read it in church? Not
much.
And then only the least racy parts.
Like, not the bits with dripping nard
or channels or bellies
and breasts and lips.
That stuff is best kept far away from
Sunday morning.
Only, why? Are we embarrassed?
We are certainly embarrassing
as a Christian people
to non-Christians who don’t
understand why
we’re so embarrassed about our bodies
and what they do.
The Song of Songs is, at least a little bit, all these
things.
The woman who wrote the Song
and the men who included it in the
canon of scripture
and the millions of Jews and
Christians who have read it
across the centuries have already
voted.
This Song is scandalously specific
and ambiguous.
It is almost pornographic and deeply
spiritual.
The Song of Songs is about sustaining
relationships
and about constantly striving
and it is about the love which is the
ground of all our being
in one way or another.
First, it’s poetry. Some of your eyes are lighting up at the
thought,
others are bracing yourselves for a
long, boring lecture
and ultimately not understanding any
more than when you began.
Don’t worry, I only mean that it
means more than it seems to mean.
Like the TV show Lost. Or whatever
your favorite pop song is. Only better.
So, The Song of Songs is about a
woman
who is deeply in love and lust with
her beloved
who may or may not be King Solomon.
Probably not.
And they have frequent trysts but apparently don’t live together.
And they have frequent trysts but apparently don’t live together.
Or maybe they’re married,
though the text doesn’t offer much
support for that.
Or maybe their relationship is
scandalous somehow
since she gets beaten at one point
for trying to find him.
It’s not a straightforward story-poem
with a beginning, middle, and end,
nor is it entirely clear who the
characters are.
It reads a bit like a series of
monologues
between the man and the woman
but they don’t always flow from one
to another.
The language, as you might expect, is
heightened, is metaphorical;
“your teeth are like a flock of
goats,”
“your neck is like a tower, all it’s
stones in courses.”
It’s like saying, “your skin is as
soft as a kitten’s fur”
or “your hips are as curvaceous as
the Guggenheim Museum
and truly, they don’t lie.”
Her neck is not a tower, not really,
and her teeth aren’t hairy like a
flock of goats.
It’s about taking inspiration
from the natural and human-made world
—what’s beautiful to you?
That’s what you compare your love to.
“Your body,” she says in one place,
“is like ivory.”
Which, it turns out, is a lot like
other places in scripture
when someone sees someone else’s
“feet,” meaning genitals.
The Hebrew word translated “body”
means a man’s midsection,
so the woman is speaking of the man’s
penis as like ivory,
like an elephant’s tusk.
Yes, in a lovely, poetic way, she’s
saying,
“my beloved is well-hung.”[1]
Second, the Song of Songs is part of a theology called “Bridal
mysticism,”
the theology derived poetically
that Jesus is our collective and
individual boyfriend.
If you think of it literally, it’s a
bit creepy.
But also beautiful and has a long
history in the church.
We see married people all the time
—certainly we see broken marriages,
but also connectedness and reliance
and mutual giving.
Of course we’d use it as a metaphor
for our relationship with God.
Bridal mysticism takes Jesus as the
boyfriend to its logical extreme
and puts the mystic or the reader in
the place of the bride
—when we read these passages, when we
pray,
we can experience the great hope a
bride feels,
the anticipation of new life,
the excitement of being with the one
our heart most desires
—you know this feeling.
Not just the heart palpitations of a
crush,
but the deep connectedness to someone
we truly love
and who loves us back.
For some of you, that might be a romantic
or married partner,
for others it might be a deep
soulfriend,
for others it could be the
relationship you have
with a parent or sibling.
These are beautiful experiences and
we ought to want them—
but they require a certain
vulnerability on our end.
We have to be able to be vulnerable
to God.
Bridal mysticism requires us to
present ourselves
exactly as we are to our bridegroom
Jesus.
Third, and maybe most important,
“the protagonist in the Song is the only unmediated female
voice in scripture.”[2]
Meaning, every other woman’s story is
told by someone else,
either by another character in a
story or by the writer of the book.
Here, the woman speaks in the first
person,
she is a woman in touch with her own
heart and mind,
a woman in touch with her sensuality,
a woman empowered.
And so, because her story needs to be heard, I’ll tell it to
you,
at least, an imagined story of how
she came to write this poem.
I was told I had to work in my
brothers’ vineyards.
I was told I had dark, ugly, black
skin.
I was told I’d never amount to
anything, that I was unloveable.
I was told I would have babies and
that would make me valuable.
I was told to be quiet in church, to
submit to my husband, to lie back and think of England.
I was told it was all in my head,
that it was my fault.
I was told.
And now I will tell.
When I saw him the first time, I came
over all giddy.
I was talking to my friend and
suddenly I was stammering
and my hands were shaking and my nipples
were hard
and I couldn’t stop staring.
When he talked to me the first time,
I looked down at my shaking knees,
knowing he couldn’t possibly find me
pleasant to look at,
but he lifted my chin with a finger
and looked at me
like no one else ever had.
He really saw me—what did he see?
He said that I was more beautiful
than a flock of goats on the hillside,
more sweet than persimmons dipped in
honey,
more elegant the Temple Mount itself.
He said, “she’s a brick house!”
He compared my breasts to round baby
sheep
nursing at their mother’s side.
He said my heart was bigger than the
Jerusalem marketplace,
that my mind was sharper than the
rocks at the shore
which tear up the hulls of boats,
that my ass was as round as melons
and how he wanted to take a bite.
How could he see this when I am, at
best, average?
He saw me and he loved me.
And I saw him and I loved him.
We devour each other with our eyes.
When we see each other around town,
from yards and yards away,
we cannot resist seeing, we cannot
resist knowing.
I know that last night we spoke of
philosophy and the nature of God,
we spoke of politics and farming and
birds and bees,
we spoke of our fears and of our
darkest fantasies.
And we touched each other
—we removed each other’s clothes
slowly, achingly slowly,
fingers tracing the hollow of the
throat,
like the curve of a spoon dipped in
custard,
fingers circling wrists vulnerable as
newborn puppies,
fingers caressing inner thighs,
open like a book revealing its
secrets.
And today, when we see each other,
we know, deeply, what the other looks
like under their clothes,
how they respond to kisses and
challenges.
We devour each other with more than
our eyes.
Yet I cannot see him now.
And so often, I cannot find him.
He doesn’t respond when I text and
our friends have not seen him.
I run across sidewalks and fields,
through the autumn trees smelling of
wet leaves and death
and I weep.
I meet people as I wander and they
look at me in disgust.
They speak harshly, telling me no one
could love me as he does,
telling me I’m making a fool of
myself,
telling me to not to speak up for
myself,
telling me to go home.
And so I return to my bed, to my
empty apartment
which still smells of his soap and
his skin and sex.
I return to my shower and wash away
my tears in hot water.
I rub lotion into my skin and put on
my pajamas,
giving in to exhaustion.
I tell myself it will be better
tomorrow.
I tell myself he will return.
I tell myself to fall asleep.
I give in memories and touch myself.
And just on the edge of sleep, I
think I hear him next to me,
his hand on my belly, his lips at my
ear.
I wake with a jolt but he is not
here.
I run to the door,
my hands still slick with lotion and
my own moisture,
my feet bare,
but he is not there.
And later we have carved out time to
lie on the grass,
feeling the warm sun on our skin,
seeing the red glow of it through our
eyelids,
smelling burning leaves and each
other’s familiar scent.
Cloves and eucalypus and nard filling
my nose and my heart.
His hand in mine, our only
touchpoint, yet containing multitudes.
I bask in my beloved’s presence and
he in mine.
And tell him,
Many haters cannot quench your love
for me.
Many insults will not quench my joy
in my own body
nor the want I feel for you, my
beloved.
Many sorrows and arguments will not
quench our commitment.
Many wars cannot quench the spark of
the divine and the hope of peace.
Many waters cannot quench the fire of
my love,
neither can floods drown it.
For the holiness of all that is love,
hear me tell you my story and know this same love.
[1] http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life/what-bleep-does-bible-say-about-profanity#DSeOAuW9zxew2TM4.99
Accessed 1:06 pm, 10/2/14
[2] Women’s Bible Commentary, “Song of
Songs” by Renita J Weems, 164