The Song of Solomon in many ways, stands alone. In an Old Testament that is divided by tradition into three parts, the Torah or Law, the Prophets, the records of the words and stories of the messengers of God to God’s people, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah and others, and the Writings, which include Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and so on, in this three-part division the Song of Solomon stands out not just because it’s poetry, there’s plenty of poetry all through the Bible, but because it is fairly graphic love poetry. The Song is a series of statements, poems, if you will, between a woman and a man, with the speaker’s role shifting between the two. And perhaps because we’re not totally comfortable with our emotions and our sexuality, or at least we’re not comfortable talking about them in public, we don’t read from this book often. In fact this passage is one of the tamest parts, and even it is most often read in combination with a section about six chapters later at weddings, and as best I can recall this is one of the Song’s only appearances in our cycle of Sunday morning readings.
Our discomfort with emotions, with human love, is nothing new. The Church has struggled with what to do with human love since the very beginning. There’s almost no dispute among scholars that most if not all of Jesus’ disciples were married. But even as early as the New Testament we find Paul not quite knowing what to do with people who love each other, writing things that basically amounted to, ‘well if they can’t manage to keep their hands to themselves they should go ahead and get married, but it’s really better not to.’ The actual phrase from the Bible is “it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (1 Cor. 7:9), or literally, “it is better to marry than to burn.” As early as the middle of the fourth century there was a movement to forbid clergy to marry, and that prohibition continued in the West until the time of the Protestant reformation, and continues today in several traditions. Attitudes toward those who sought to retreat from the world and enter a monastery or convent implied that, spiritually at least, seeking to ‘escape from the world’ was far better than living ‘in the world.’ By withdrawing from everything, including emotional and sexual relationships, by withdrawing from love of the world, monastics were thought to be better able to devote themselves to loving God.
At the heart of this hesitation and suspicion of human love are two misconceptions. The first that our love for others is inevitably something that pulls us away from God, or from other humans. In other words, this one assumes that love is a zero-sum game, that I only have so much love to give, and if I give some of it to one person, I have less to give to another person, or to God. The second misconception is that spiritual love and earthly love two different and completely separate things, that the very human love we have for family, dear friends, in the here and now has no relationship to love of those farther away from us, or to love of God.
I was a seminarian, at a parish in the part of Maryland that is in the Diocese of Washington, right near the Beltway around the District. I’d been working there for a few months, showing up on Sundays, doing various liturgical things, coming to meetings to listen to what people said, working with whoever needed an extra hand, and trying to figure out what working in a church was about. And one of the most faithful members, one of the ones who was on most of the committees because he was reliable and dedicated, came up to me one day. He didn’t look me in the eye, which was unusual for him, and in a voice that was even quieter than usual, he said to me, I have a question for you. And so, somewhat apprehensively, I said, okay. I mean, this is a man who had been at this church for about a decade when I was born, and he had never seemed uncertain before, just quietly competent. And he seemed to gather his courage, and he looked at me and asked, “how do I love God?” It was that simple, that direct. No beating around the bush. I know how to do the things I’m supposed to do, I even know how I love other people, but I’m supposed to love God, and I don’t know how to do that. I was staggered, both by the fact that this pillar of the church was asking me something, and by the fact that his question was so very simple and yet so very challenging.
I don’t really remember what I actually said in the moment, but I’ve often thought about how I should have responded, and I think my response changes a little bit every time I think about it. If I had that question right now I would probably go back to the Song of Solomon. The Song makes us uncomfortable because it is, unabashedly, a celebration of human, physical, embodied love, and yet we find it in our holy text. But by its very inclusion, it gives us a hint of an answer to that gentle, committed, man’s simple question. How do we love? The Song reminds us that love is not something that can be separated into earthly love and spiritual love, that true love, no matter the object, only adds to love – does not subtract from itself. And so, today, if I had that same question, how do I love God, I would ask in return, how do you love the people you love? Your family, your friends, the people most important to you in the world? I don’t know what his answer would have been, but for myself, I love the people I care most about with my heart, even with my gut, not just with my head. They are the ones that I don’t just like a little bit, but the ones I love from deep in the center of my being, the ones whose presence, when they and I are at our best, brings out a more authentic me, the ones who, by their existence, make me a better person. The ones whom I rejoice to see, whether or not it’s a convenient time, or an organized occasion.
So little of our loving is done with our intellect. Almost all of our love comes from the core of our being, which is not our head but rather our heart and gut. And so it is to our heart and core that we need to turn, as we try to grow in our ability to love. If we pay attention to our own relationships, to our own very human, very earthy interactions, the Song tells us, we learn not only about how we love each other, but about how we love God. In those human experiences of love that we grow in our ability to love not just the people we like, but those we may not like all the time and those we may not ever meet.
In our human love, in loving and being loved, we grow more and more into God, whose deepest essence is Love. For this reason we focus, in all of our activities here at the church, whether for babies, children, youth, or even adults, for this reason we focus on providing a place and a community that allows us to have that experience of loving and being loved. That experience of unconditional acceptance, and appreciation not for what we can achieve or for what things we have, but for who we are, blemishes and all. In providing our children and youth with that experience of love, or more accurately, in holding a space in which they offer that love to each other, we offer them an experience, right here and now, of the love God has for each of them, and of a way in which they can love God in every other human.
A few years ago, near the conclusion of our youth trip to Ecuador, the group of youth who had traveled there was led through something called an ‘appreciation circle.’ There was a staff, which was placed in the center of the circle of people, seated on the ground. Anyone was allowed to come and get the staff, take it to someone else, sit in front of them, look them in the eye, and tell them something they appreciated about them. The hardest part, for me at least, was that the person receiving the appreciation was not allowed to say anything other than ‘thank you.’ They couldn’t deflect the comment with something like, “oh it was nothing,” or “it wasn’t really like that” or “is that how you remember that?” All they could say was ‘thank you.’ And then the staff remained in front of that person, and anyone else other than the person it was in front of, could pick it up and move to another person. That last restriction was so that the person who had been appreciated did not feel any sense of obligation to “return the compliment” as it were and say something to the person who had just said something to them.
I have been part of this kind of a circle once on around a campfire in Ecuador and once in a small chapel room in a little boarding house in England. Both times there were between 10 and 14 people present. And both times it took these people, mostly youth, the better part of two hours before they ran out of things to say to each other, and even to the youth advisors who were there as well. Appreciation for attitudes displayed, for laughter shared, for effort demonstrated, for knowledge given, for tears together, all of which were, truly, appreciations and recognitions of love offered and received. I cannot tell you the number of things these young people found to thank each other for, to remember and notice about each other, things they might not ordinarily have ever mentioned, but things that had remained with them deep in their hearts, that were now coming to the surface and being offered up to each other and to the group as a whole.
This is the kind of love that we have for each other, expressed in gratitude for the human parts of life, smiles, hugs, sympathy, tears, laughter, work and play together, this is the kind of love that draws us out of ourselves, that says to us, “Arise my love, and come, come away.” Come out of your self, be drawn by the experience of loving and being loved, be drawn into the other, into God.
True love, you see, draws us ever deeper into relationship with all those around us, draws us deeper into community. Love is never a zero-sum game. The more love we have for each other, the more our love can grow. And, of course, when we allow ourselves to be part of a community of love, we also have some defense against the other side of our hearts, the side that can produce anger, greed, hatred, avarice, all the things that Jesus warns us against in the Gospel today. There is a reason that God, whose essence is Love, is also Trinity, the Holy Trinity from which this parish takes its name. God’s innermost nature is neither that of the solitary, one alone in isolation, nor the duality that, if we are honest, has a tendency, (and we’ve all seen it at one point or another in our lives – the friends who suddenly fall in love and have no time for anyone else), to exclude all outside that one relationship. Our God, by nature and grace is, in God’s very self, is love in community. In that love, our communal God reaches out to all creation, to the whole cosmos, and to each one of us, and draws us in, in love.
When we live in deep community, we live love and in that love we find a hint of the truest and deepest nature of God, not separate or removed from us, but just like us in our ability to love and be loved. That is what the Song, in all its celebration of what seems to us to be earthly love, reveals to us; that we are to be made in the image of God is not to be like God in power or might, but to be like God in our ability to freely give and receive love.
The Church is called to be that community of love, that community that reaches out beyond itself to the world while still caring for those who are part of the church. We don’t always live up to our calling, but God’s invitation to us remains, to grow in love with each other, with the world, and by so doing, to grow in our love for God. It is not, for most of us, a single flash of enlightenment or revelation after which we have no questions, no further growth. We do not achieve perfection in this life. I recently read a scene in which a young pilgrim complained to a wiser one, that, no matter how hard he tried, he always seemed to fall down, to fall short. The response was, “get up again.” And then the first one asked, “how often do I have to do this? How often to I have to fall down and keep getting up again?” And the answer came, with a gentle smile and the faintest hint of a wink, “Until you die.”
We don’t ever love perfectly all the time. But as we go through our daily lives, we can look for those moments of love, whether we would normally name them as love or not. We can cherish those we love, rejoice in their love. We can remember what the Song of Solomon reminds us, that in our human love, we catch a glimpse of the immeasurable, indescribable, eternal Love that is our God.
Amen.