"Rapturous Ravishment in the Song of Songs"

Sermon Preached By Susan McCaslin
February 3rd 2008
 Song of Songs 1. 1-4, 2. 1-7 & 8. 6-7

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.

For your love is more delightful than wine.

Delicate is the fragrance of your perfume.

Your name is an oil poured out.

From the author of the Song of Songs to John of the Cross and the Persian poet Rumi, poets have compared the union with God or ultimate reality to the union of a lover and a beloved partner.  This kind of metaphor is risky business, as it seems to reduce the spiritual to the sensual or invite us to confuse them.  Yet there is no more apt and pure symbolism for mystical union, because the love that unites two people sexually can be a manifestation of the same love that holds the cosmos together.
 

The poet Rumi sometimes symbolizes God as the Beloved or the Friend.  He writes: “My being is but a goblet in the Beloved’s hand—look at my eyes, if you do not believe it”[1]

In other places, the Persian poet presents God as the Lover or the burning love that dwells within the core of his being and into which the ego disappears.  In his poetry, as in the Song of Songs, the relationships between the human and the divine are fluid and interchangeable. 
 

Sometimes in the physical act of love it is difficult to discern who is who, as Leonard Cohen reveals coyly in his poem “You Have the Lovers”: “When he puts his mouth against her shoulder/ she is uncertain whether her shoulder/has given or received the kiss.”[2]   In spiritual union too one can’t say who gives and who receives, for the boundaries of God and the self have melted away.
 

But lest we think only contemporary, edgy poets dare tease us in this way, check out the over the top sensuality of the Song of Songs, or how the prophet Hosea had to enact in his life the role of a husband whose wife was “running around” to really “get” his lovelorn God’s disappointment over Israel’s loss of intimacy with the Spirit.  Israel too is often compared to the beloved bride of God, and the imagery migrated into Christianity with the New Jerusalem as the Bride of the cosmic Christ.  In fact, Jesus himself depicted the kingdom of heaven on earth as a festive marriage banquet, a celebration of a union between intimate partners, and his first miracle took place at a wedding.
 

What all this does is sanctify sex and intimacy and shows that when it happens between two people with deep respect for each other, human union participates in the ultimate divine union of all things in the universe with their creative source.  There is a momentary disappearance of ego, an ecstatic drawing together in love.  One could say that one kind of union is a holon or mirror image at a higher and deeper level for the other.  When humans enter into a loving relationship, then, they are not just imitating, but re-enacting in the present what is happening constantly between the original unity and the fragmented parts of creation.  There are no gender wars here, for in love the weapons of destruction are laid down and the crux is whether or not one can be vulnerable enough to step into love’s fire.
 

Perhaps this is why at one point the Church decided to declare marriage a sacrament.  Like the communion partaking, it is a creation of new life—an opening to what the German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg calls “the flowing light of the Godhead.”  In such a union, gender is transcended, hierarchy disappears, and all is one in the life of the One.  Perhaps marriage as inscribed within the legal and institutional structures has been vexed because it has not been able to approximate or encompass the mystical marriage for which our deepest selves unconsciously long.
 

An unusual thing about this tradition known as bridal mysticism, is that many of the mystics who wrote about the experience of inward “touches of union” with God were celibate priests, monks, and nuns, and moreover, often men—Origen, St. Bernard, and John of the Cross. Even those reverend Church fathers from the first century through the Middle Ages often wrote from the perspective of the bride and insisted the soul is “feminine” in relation to God. This is perhaps because they were working within a tradition in which gender distinctions reflected cultural constructs. Since in many cultures, the woman was socialized to take the receptive role, the symbolism of God as active and the human soul as receptive is sometimes used. If one experiences the unspeakable rush of Being as transcendence, it feels like being lifted to a higher level.  Before the One, the only thing to do is surrender the old self and be swept up or ravished, as opposed to raped. Rape is an act of violence and betrayal, while ravishment is a willing entrance into the bliss of ecstatic fusion.  Yet in the act of union itself, lover and beloved merge in such a way that such gender stereotypes no longer apply.
 

In using the love between two people as a metaphor for divine love, mystics, visionaries, and saints are perhaps striving to express in language an ineffable experience of union with Spirit, and choose from human experience the language of love, longing, ecstasy, and bliss to do so.  Surely, the reality of the experience transcends even the language, but the language provides a hint that the God who is Love longs for us to surrender our lives and our projects so that She/He can shower us with a love that as John of the Cross puts it, “transforms each of them [the lover and the beloved] into the other”[3]  This concept is similar to what Jesus meant when he spoke of the mystery of indwelling: “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14.20)  The mystics knew they had stumbled into the territory of mystery, and seized whatever images they could find to hint at it.
 

In contemporary culture, however, where such a thing as bridal mysticism, or even talk of sacred sexuality is rare, one has to ask, “Into what kind of sexuality are our youth inducted?”  I recall when the time came to speak to my daughter about “the facts of life,” I was concerned about informing her of the dangers of  unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and inappropriate touching by adults. And it is certainly proper to teach our children to protect themselves against sexual risks or abuse when we are aware of the statistics.  However, how often do we convey to youth, either verbally or through our actions, that the exchange of love between two consenting adults can be both a transcendent and an into-the-body experience, an act of beauty that connects us with our deepest core?  How often do we discuss the importance of nurturing a relationship through its highs and lows, or speak about how true love is more than emotional fulfillment, but an entering into a process in which two selves empty themselves into a whole greater than any idea they might have had of themselves to begin with?
 

Yet, this kind of unity presupposes the capacity for distinct identity. Love can be a de-centering of the self through interaction with another, but before two people can become one, they must both become something in themselves.  As the poet Rilke puts it in his Letters to a Young Poet, “Love…consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”[4] Instead, in the tabloids and in many Hollywood films, love is often reduced to sexuality at its most banal and unimaginative where the “two solitudes” are never allowed to develop because they are exploited by the culture around them.
 

If one looks at people as beings who like the other mammals have evolved out of nature, sexuality is a double-edged sword.  In nature and in human nature, the sexual act can be deeply tender or sometimes fraught with violence.  One might say that our sexuality is a site of ambivalence because it offers the potential for the deepest surrender to mutuality as well as the most brutal acts of rapine and dominance.  Perhaps this is why sex in art has been the subject of rhapsody, romantic fervor, comedy, tragedy, pornography, and the absurd.  As a species, we are faced with a choice between treating sex as a mere reproductive function, a means of procreation, a source of pleasure and loving exchange, or a something that may include and transcend all of these.  Perhaps in a way, the “small death” of surrender in love, is a prelude to the larger surrender of ourselves to the mysterious ways of the cosmos, and to the realization of how deeply and intimately the universe loves us.
 

When I first encountered the luscious and sensuous language of the Song of Songs at around seventeen, I was drawn in not only by its frank eroticism, but the sense of joyful abandonment to the power of love.  I knew in my bones that this was poetry at its most evocative: “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick with love./ His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me” (2. 5-6).  Years later, I began to wonder how such wild imagery could have made it into the Bible in the first place. Scholars still have not decided whether the Song is an erotic love poem, possibly based in pagan, middle-eastern rituals celebrating the nuptials of a god and goddess, a simple celebration of human sexuality, or an allegory or metaphor for spiritual union.  Who is the mysterious “dark but comely” woman, the Shulamite?  Is her partner King Solomon or a shepherd?  One thing is evident:  the interpretation of the voluptuous imagery as sacred coincided with its inclusion in the canon.[5]  Rabbi Akiva, a Jewish scholar of the first century BCE, wrote:  “All the world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”[6]
 

Yet if the Song is a holy text, it is one that upholds the value of sexuality and the body. Alicia Ostricker, a poet and feminist theologian, calls the Song of Songs a “countertext” because it “resists dominant structures of authority, divine and legal” as generally represented in the Bible.[7]  Firstly, the woman’s experience is at the centre of the poem and she is presented as Solomon’s equal.  Her desire parallels his, as do her speeches of praise for his beauty and her ability to express pleasure in her own sensuality. And though these two are relatively balanced in terms of power, power is not the issue, for the whole desire is to relinquish it into the keeping of the other.  Both of them say at various points in the dialogue: “I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem, not to stir my love, nor rouse it, until it please to awake” (2.7 & 3.5)  Perhaps the lines suggest not only a loving care for the other, but a sense that love itself must await the right timing for its fruition.  Often in the sequence, it is impossible to tell who is speaking, as the speeches of lover and beloved blur into each other, reflecting how in love the boundaries between self and other merge. 
 

 Secondly, the lovers are completely integrated into and inseparable from the natural world.  They are compared to ewes, roes, horses, and gazelles.  The locale of their drama is a lush garden overflowing with pomegranates, apricots, and apples that practically cascade from weighted trees.  We are enveloped in a pastoral world of rich abundance where the line, “love is strong as death” (8.6) is affirmed in the imagery.  In a sense, the book is a countertext to the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis because here the woman is active in her relation to her counterpart and their sensuality is not presented as “fallen.”
 

Thirdly, the sensual and secular, the spiritual and sacred are totally fused in the poem.  Some have argued that the Song of Songs is merely a secular love poem—literal and erotic.  Others have allegorized it but denied the sensual levels of meaning.  Yet what if the world is so constituted that the erotic and physical are indeed complementary?  Then human love can be both sensual and spiritual.  The allegorists are not wrong to extend the image of the lovers into a metaphor for spiritual union, but only mistaken if they deny the erotic level of meaning. 
 

What if we looked at the figure of the lovers as a shining icon for both human love and the relation of the divine and human?  What the poem suggests is that Spirit is more like a lover than a lawgiver or judge, and that living in harmony with Spirit is more like falling in love than living up to an external standard of rightness. What if the intelligence of the universe is constantly wooing us and enticing us into meaning in order to fill us with radiant glory, and fulfill every bit of our potential?  
 

Finally, the Song offers a model of what the ancients called a “conjunctio oppositorum,” or union of opposites that demonstrates love without violence.  Love is a gentle call, a loving reciprocity that would infuse us with delight through interconnection, an enhancement of being.  Like the mysterious Beloved, love advances and retreats, sometimes disappearing, since we cannot control its motions; yet it suddenly returns in newness.  In this dance, we are both lover and beloved, as is the equally mysterious Godhead.  Whether we are single or married, celibate, gay or straight, the images speak to us because they point to the Eros of all relationship in the largest sense as the love longing that draws the fragmented parts of things together.  Protestants seldom preach on the Canticle and its lines seldom grace our liturgies.  Perhaps it is time for this “Holy of holies” of ancient Hebrew wisdom to be included once again in our songs, liturgy and hearts.