The Song of Songs is about longing and passion, and rarely about consummation.  It’s about being fully present to the beloved, and if it’s carnal, it’s a carnality that includes all of the senses.  The lovers’ kisses are better than wine, more intoxicating, because they don’t deaden the senses, but bring them to life.  Often, when we are beginners at love, we are frightened by the intensity of our bodies, particularly when we’re young and our hormones hold sway.  The passions that come upon us are terrifying and uncontrollable.  So we drink to excess, because we want to experience passion, but we also want to deaden its intensity.  But by deadening our senses we only allow ourselves to experience a muted version of love.

The Shulamite, the female character who narrates much of the Song of Songs, has all of her senses open.  She loses herself in the scent of her lover, a scent of myrrh and aloes.  She doesn’t see passion as bad, but as a means of opening herself to the fullness of experience – it’s olfactory essence, its tactile nature, its sounds and sights.

Somewhere along the line, most of us learn to close ourselves off from the world, but not the Shulamite.  Evelyn Underhill talks about this closing off when she describes two men, “Eyes” and “No Eyes,” who both decide to take a walk:

“No-Eyes” has fixed his attention on the fact that he is obliged to take a walk. For him the chief factor of existence is his own movement along the road; a movement which he intends to accomplish as efficiently and comfortably as he can. He asks not to know what may be on either side of the hedges. He ignores the caress of the wind until it threatens to remove his hat. He trudges along, steadily, diligently; avoiding the muddy pools, but oblivious of the light which they reflect.  “Eyes” takes the walk too: and for him it is a perpetual revelation of beauty and wonder. The sunlight inebriates him, the winds delight him, the very effort of the journey is a joy. Magic presences throng the roadside, or cry salutations to him from the hidden fields. The rich world through which he moves lies in the fore-ground of his consciousness; and it gives up new secrets to him at every step. “No-Eyes,” when told of his adventures, usually refuses to believe that both have gone by the same road. He fancies that his companion has been floating about in the air, or beset by agreeable hallucinations. We shall never persuade him to the contrary unless we persuade him to look for himself.(1)

The Shulamite’s passionate longing teaches her to look for herself, and surely this is one of the great gifts of passion.  Her longing is egoless – it’s a deep, enraptured love of the beloved and an intense desire to use every one of her senses when encountering the beloved.  She doesn’t want anything to get in the way of her senses – no intoxication, no wine.  What would life be like if we could follow her example and open our perceptions to the one we love?  If our primary love is for God and God’s world, our experience of it will become magnificent if we can be as fearless as the Shulamite.

(1)Underhill, Evelyn (2011-03-30). Practical Mysticism A Little Book for Normal People (Kindle Locations 148-151).  . Kindle Edition.

Spiritual Direction is a way of offering companionship to people who are seeking God and a greater sense of themselves.  It is non-judgmental and generous, and always trusts that the seeker knows more about their own life, thoughts, and longings than the director does.  The director’s role is to listen carefully, invite the presence of the Holy Spirit, practice compassion, and ask questions that will help the directee grow in wisdom and grace.

I am called to be both a spiritual director and an artist, and to bring these two callings together whenever I can.  The pieces of art and the meditations you’ll find on this site were created in the process of my own spiritual journey, and I hope that they’ll be helpful to others.  I love prayer books of all kinds, and I consider each of these meditations to be a page of my own personal prayerbook.  Some of them I’ve made for directees, some for myself, and some for anyone who might find them useful.

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Two events led me to start thinking about, praying with, and making art in response to the Song of Songs. The first was a Bible study during a clergy quiet day. We were reading Jesus’s Parable of the Dishonest Manager (Luke 16:1-13). As we sat in a circle, annoyed and shocked that Jesus would tell his disciples to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal habitations,” I began wondering whether I had ever done exactly that. My mind traveled to the early days of my relationship with my future wife. We met when we were twenty-two and still in college. Neither of us really knew who we were, and we acted out different social roles, imitating our peers or images in the media or, at best, some vision of who we hoped we would be someday. There was something dishonest about the way we presented ourselves to each other – not in a conniving way, just in the fact that we didn’t know who we were, and therefore didn’t have much chance of being authentic in our relationships with anyone. It was through falling in love and being faithful to each other that we learned who we were, and everything that’s real in our lives and relationships now is the result of our patience with each other as we fumbled around and made mistakes and presented ourselves falsely. Reflecting on this as I sat in that circle of priests, I realized that my wife is my dishonest wealth, and I felt how miraculous it is that she should love me, and I her, a true gift of patience and luck and grace.

The second event that led me to the Song of Songs was a planning meeting. We were at the Edge House in Cincinnati, the Lutheran campus ministry that serves UC. A trapeze company had set-up in the park across the street, and as we talked young people were flinging themselves into the air. We were trying to decide on a theme for an autumn retreat, and we started by asking ourselves which questions our students were really asking. After a considering pause, one of our group said, “Well, I think they’re wondering who they’ll love, and how they’ll love that person well.” This was so basic and obvious that it was astounding that we had never addressed this question with our students. We turned to our Bibles and leafed through them, wondering whether scripture really spoke to this question at all. Maybe in Genesis, in those scenes when Isaac meets Rebecca, and then later Jacob meets Rachel, at the well. But more obviously, and certainly more extravagantly, in the Song of Songs.

It’s a primal question – “who will I love, and how will I love that person well?” The way we answer this question will affect not only our earthly relationships, but our relationship with God. This is what the early and medieval commentators on the Song understood so well. Until the Enlightenment, the Song of Songs was the second most preached about and commentated on book of scripture, surpassed only by the Gospel of John. It was treated as an allegory for the soul’s relationship to God, in both the Christian and Jewish traditions. To this day, many Sephardic communities chant the entire Song of Songs before Shabbat services every Friday. For Origen, and Teresa of Avila, and Bernard of Clairvaux, it was a text for celibates, a passionate enactment of human/divine relationship that could take the place of any earthly need for sex. But the Enlightenment, and the 18th and 19th century Biblical scholarship that followed it, put an end to this reading. The Song might be any number of things – wedding choruses, songs for fertility rites, court poetry – but it was, decidedly, not about God.

Last summer I led an adult forum on the Song of Songs, and when we came to those passages that compared a woman’s breasts to twin gazelles and bunches of grapes, one of the participants asked “should this even be in the Bible?” It seems so lascivious, and it is. But the fact that it is in the Bible should tell us something. It seems possible, and even likely, that those who compiled and canonized scripture understood that the Song of Songs is about God, while understanding that it’s also about sex. Perhaps they knew what we’ve forgotten, that the passion we bring to our earthly relationships is a training ground for the passion that we will, through much prayer and worship, eventually bring to our relationship with God. “Who will I love and how will I love that person well?” The Song of Songs suggests that the way we answer that question in our human relationships has everything to do with how we’ll learn to love God. Perhaps, through fidelity and patience, we might all come, eventually, to recognize and give thanks for the dishonest wealth we receive as we form each other in relationship, and through this recognition, come to dwell, spiritually, in eternal habitations with God.