Song of Songs 2: 8-13 (links validated 7/25/24a)

Hence many commentaries along the centuries have essentially told us that when it comes to these chapters, “When you read ‘X,’ you must think of ‘Y’.” When you read something that looks physical, close your eyes and think of the wispy, the spiritual, the insubstantial. But as Willimon and others have noted, that will never do. This book is exactly what it appears to be: a series of canticles (perhaps for use at weddings) that turns cartwheels over young love. The book nowhere mentions God, but fretting about that is a little like tying yourself into knots over the fact that no character in King Lear ever mentions Shakespeare. Why would they? They would have nothing to say or do without the playwright being behind it all. So also in Song of Songs: we don’t need to mention the Creator of all good things—including of all good sexual things—because we’d have nothing to sing about in the first place if the Creator’s presence did not permeate these songs through and through...

As a baby boomer, I can’t read these words of Scripture without hearing a song from my youth entitled “Time of the Season” by the Zombies. Other generations will recall their own ballads that celebrate the wonders of romantic and physical love, but playing this song over your sound system will capture the attention of all ages. It’s the time of the season When love runs high. And this time, give it to me slowly And let me try with pleasured hands To take you to the sun to (promised lands) To show you every one. It’s the time of the season for loving. And, it’s the time of the season for loving Christ more.

David Bowie says he can't trace time. But the singer of the Song of Solomon can. The winter is past. The rain is over and gone. The flowers are blooming. Turtledoves are calling to one another. Figs are on the tree (clearly there are no squirrels in this world) and the vines are blooming. It is time to sing. Like the singer, painters note the changes of season by things that are new or new again: landscape colors, the state of natural elements like trees, the presence or absence of flowers and birds.. Here, Georgia O'Keeffe moves from Autumn (left), then Winter and, finally (right), the winter is past and Sprig has come. Colors change. Branches are covered and then exposed and then covered again...

I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on.The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry-mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks. ‘Will my mouth always be like this?’ she asks. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it will. It is because the nerve was cut.’ She nods, and is silent. But the young man smiles. ‘I like it,’ he says. ‘It’s kind of cute.’ All at once I know who he is. I understand, and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”...

Throughout history, human beings have apparently been searching for an object to love, serve, and adore wholeheartedly. Despite numerous disappointments, the search continues. The entire history of humanity is a record of this search for some beckoning object. Influential figures have understood this search in different ways. Sigmund Freud thought it was connected somehow with sexual release. Another psychologist, Alfred Adler, thought it was connected with a drive for power. Karl Marx related it to economic issues. An answer that includes and surpasses all of these is that our desire is toward being and its increase. We seek to flourish. We want an abundant existence...

(Scroll down for these reflections.)

("From Frederick Buechner's Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC's: 'Sex is like nitroglycerin: it can be used either to blow up bridges or heal hearts. At its roots, the hunger for food is the hunger for survival. At its roots the hunger to know a person sexually is the hunger to know and be known by that person humanly...")

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, there is a story of a stingy old woman who sought, from the misery of hell, the lake of fire where she found herself after she had died, to be raised to the comforts and joys of heaven. “I wasn’t all THAT bad!” she asserts to an angel passing by. “What about the time when the poor beggar came to my door and I gave him an onion?” The angel swoops down and hovers just above the old woman, as together they look back upon that scene from her life. The woman had resentfully come to the back door of her grand mansion to try to shoo the beggar away, complaining loudly about the filthiness of his hands and face. “You don’t even wash before you come to beg?” Nonetheless, the woman had reached down into the bottom of her larder and produced a rotting onion that she handed over to the beggar. “Well,” said the angel, “that should be enough to open the doors of heaven for you.” The angel lowers to her a rope with that very onion tied to its end. The woman grabs on, but as the rope is lifted, others in the lake of fire climb on, hoping to be pulled out as well. The old woman, alarmed by this, cries out, “Let go! Let go! It’s not you who are being pulled out! It’s me! It’s not your onion! It’s mine.” And just when she says, “It’s mine,” the onion snaps in two, falls out of the rope, and she falls back into the lake of fire. The angel weeps, as she flies away. If only the old woman had had it in her heart to say, “The onion is ours,” surely the onion would have been strong enough to have pulled all of them out together...

Sex and hypocrisy seem to go to bed together far too often. This is by no means confined to religious people. Most of our society seems unable to handle sex with honour and freedom, but Christians have a particularly bad record. This week the story of Jaycee Lee Dugard has been front page news. Kidnapped as a eleven year old girl, she was kept captive for eighteen years. At the age of fourteen, she gave birth to a child, allegedly fathered by her abductor, Phillip Garrido. And sitting in the background of this story of horrific criminal sexual abuse is the news that this Phillip Garrido was a religious man who ran revival meetings, and was handing out religious literature when the alarm was finally raised. Hypocrisy and sex seem to go to bed together far too often...