The next morning, we called a neighbor to help us look around outside. Lo and behold, he found hoof prints in the gravel outside my window, either from a deer or even a young moose. The terrible stranger at my window was nothing more than a curious animal, checking out the new arrivals in town. Whenever I read the words from today’s lesson in the Song of Solomon, I can’t help but chuckle, imagining a love-sick Canadian moose: “Look, he comes … bounding over the hills … Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”
The Song of Solomon is love poetry, pure and simple. I invite you to read the whole book sometime … Believe me, you’ll wonder what on earth it’s doing in the bible. For centuries, though, its descriptions of passionate, longing love were seen as the key to unlocking the whole of scripture! Read as an allegory, The Song has represented for Jews the love between humanity and God. For Christians, it has depicted the love between Christ and the Church. One scholar writes, “This book of love poetry, in which no body part is left uncelebrated, no fragrance or taste undescribed, was once a devotional text par excellence. This book, which nowhere mentions God, once functioned as a cherished path to profound intimacy with God.”[1]
Today, if you’re like me, you might squirm when this erotic language is used for God. And yet, what better metaphor do we human beings have for divine love, than human love? As embodied creatures, what better language do we have for spiritual longing, than powerful physical longing? Why can’t the lover at the window, impatiently rattling the screen, inviting us to come away, inviting us to be transformed from winter into spring, be our ever-loving God? Why can’t God come to us in the night, mysterious and hidden, yet as devoted and intent as a young lover?
My favorite C.S. Lewis book is Till We Have Faces. It’s a Christian retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, a myth as full of erotic imagery as the Song of Solomon is. In this myth, the god Cupid becomes a young girl’s unseen husband, visiting her only at night, when she is unable to see his face. Lewis’ title comes from the end of the book, when the narrator, placed in a kind of trial before the gods, realizes that all of the self-justifying words with which she has covered herself during her lifetime, are meaningless. In a moment of revelation, she says, “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”[2]
For true relationship with God, it isn’t God who must become visible, but we ourselves. Theologians often accuse James, the author of today’s epistle, with preaching works righteousness, with forgetting that we are saved by God’s grace and not by what we do on our own. But I believe that, in today’s reading at least, James is pointing out what the old woman in C.S. Lewis’ novel is making clear: To act upon God’s invitation is to take responsibility for knowing who and whose we are: to love as Jesus did, to love one another, God, and the world, in the passionate, outpouring and embodied way that God loves each of us. It's Christ’s face that we are to adopt as our own. It’s Christ’s voice with which we must learn to speak. It's by caring for the poor and outcast in their distress, says James ever so plainly, that we take on the face of Christ.
In my spare time, I’m busy studying
the writings of Elias Neau. In the late 1690’s, Neau, a French Huguenot ship
captain, living as a refugee in Boston, was captured on the open seas and
returned to France. There, he was condemned for his protestant religion and
sentenced to life on the king’s galleys. Because he kept singing psalms to God as
he rowed, authorities transferred him to the Chateau d’If, an infamous prison
near Marseilles. Because he kept singing psalms to God in his cell, they
transferred him to an isolated dungeon. There, he sat for years in almost total
darkness. In his dark prison, Neau could still hear our loving God panting at
his window. Neau hung onto the embodiment of divine love that he knew in the
words of the Song of Solomon. In response to God’s call, he created poems that
he sung to the Huguenot psalm tunes of his tradition. In one poem, Neau sings back
to Christ, his unseen Lover:
Come kiss me with your mouth / You, my only love / For I smell the scent of your clothing when I touch you … May my mind embrace you in your silence / Come, the only Author of my being, to transform me into you / Come to make yourself known and to make me love you / May I taste in your embrace your ravishing love / that forms me in your image.[3]
Neau’s prayers were answered. Once liberated from his dungeon, Neau returned to America, gave up his career as a merchant, gave up his membership in the French Church to join the established Church of England, and spent the rest of his life ministering to the enslaved Africans of New York at Trinity Church,Wall Street.
What about us, today? Can we hear
God knocking longingly in the night? Can we hear God’s invitation, “Arise, my
love, my fair one, and come away?” Can we look through the shadows at others,
at ourselves, at life itself, with the compassionate eyes of Christ? Can we
find
beauty everywhere we look, in darkness and in light, like passionate lovers
who receive the whole world “with love and awe and praise?”[4] God
pleads patiently: Come out from underneath the covers! I’m
here, and I love you. Taste the Beloved in the juiciness of a ripe peach. Hear
the Beloved in the supplications of the sick room. Reach out to the Beloved in need
on the streets, in the pleading of a refugee. Embrace the Beloved within the
shadows of your own soul. “In me,” God offers, “become the Face that can turn
even winter into spring.”
[1] Stephanie Paulsell, “Old Fashioned Love Song.” The Christian Century. September 2009. Found at https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2009-09/old-fashioned-love-song
[2] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (New York: Harvest Books, 1980), 294.
[3] Elias Neau, “Cantique V.” In Histoire Abregee des Soufrances du Sieur Elie Neau sur les Galeres et dans les Cachots de Marseilles. Ed. J. Morin (Rotterdam: Abraham Acner, 1701), 260. My own translation from the original French.
[4] Paulsell.
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