Beauty Will Save the World.

 

Song of Songs 1:9-17

July 18, 2021 + Smithtown

I.

In Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Idiot, the title character, the naive, epileptic, Christ-like Prince Myshkin, makes this comment that “beauty will save the world.”  I have to say that for Presbyterians that is a barely intelligible remark.  Beauty is not a main part of our religious tradition.

For instance, the word “beauty” only appears twice in our Book of Confessions, both times in the Confession of 1967, which means it took 450 years for us to think of beauty as having any significant theological value.  We’re not known for beauty or much attention to the visual arts at all.  I find classic, spare, Puritan worship spaces to be quite beautiful, in a very Zen-like, understated, spare, and simple way.  But most people might wonder if beauty was what the architect was aiming for.  They were very practical, colorless, image-free, common, and unadorned.  Our tradition tends to be iconoclastic and un-sensory.  It’s all about what we hear; other senses, like the visual, are irrelevant.  (That’s why some of the pews don’t even face the front.  There is nothing to see here.)  This is one of the factors that makes a book like Song of Songs a mystery to us, if not actually offensive.

Song of Songs is about beauty; it is about sensuality, physicality, and even sexuality as values in themselves and as metaphors for the love of God.  This passage pays a lot of attention to fragrance.  In my experience most Presbyterian sanctuaries, if they smell like anything, smell like Lemon Pledge or some other cleaning product. 

But this book wants to connect with all our senses.  These images are supposed to transport us almost to an alternate state of consciousness.  In Song of Songs, God’s love is anything but linear, abstract, and cerebral; it is visceral and consumes the whole person; it stimulates our memory, reminding us that God is somehow present with and within everything that God has made, and that God has always been closer to us than we are to ourselves. 

I mean, look at this opening image.  Song of Songs is mostly an erotic dialogue between the King and the Black Woman, representing different manifestations of God and the human.  Here the King compares her to a “mare among Pharaoh’s chariots.”  Egyptian cavalry only used male horses, which means that the sudden presence of a female among them would have been extremely… distracting.  It could even have thrown into chaos the most potent military power of the time.  Egypt had enslaved the Israelites for centuries prior to the Exodus; it is the great Evil Empire of much of the Hebrew Scriptures.  And this brief image basically tells us that love for God disrupts even armies and empires by appealing to a desire much deeper than the following of orders and the craving for conquest.  The terror of a multitude of armed horsemen can be neutralized by one attractive mare. 

Life wins in the end; life always finds a way.  God has fashioned the world so that life and love always overcome.  Love is profoundly liberating.  “Make love, not war” is therefore a deeply biblical sentiment.  The first commandment God gives to humans, even before the one about not eating from a certain tree, is, “Be fruitful and multiply.”  The woman in the Song exhibits this blessed desire, this fire of life, this beautiful love and attraction at the core of our very being, and within everything that lives, like the song of a trillion Cicadas now echoing through the forests.   

II.

Love, even God’s love, is physical and sensory.  We know how aromas can transport us through memory to our childhood or youth.  How often are these memories really about love?  The smell of cooking pot-roast reminds me of going to my grandparents’ for Sunday dinner; roasting turkey smells like Thanksgiving.  Who doesn’t recall the perfume or cologne of their first love, or their spouse of many years?  For whom does the aroma of fir trees not bring them back to Christmases past?  And of course there was a particular herbal scent that I will always associate with rock concerts.  Bookstores, swimming pools, the ocean… all have smells that might overwhelm us with deep, warm feelings.

Scents fix and ground our emotions, bringing us back to times of delight and joy.  The way to love and beauty is often through our olfactory.  Here the erotic encounter between two lovers is depicted as an airy blending of two pungent aromas, spikenard and myrrh, into one.  

Our relationships with each other, and our relationship with God, are physical, sensory, and enfleshed, which is to say, incarnate.  They are not just something we think and read about.  The spiritual is not abstract or purely rational; it isn’t somehow above all that.  It pervades and permeates the whole person, including our body, the same way a powerful scent infuses the air in a room, and even jars our memory and can cause physical reactions.  All of which demonstrates that faith is not just this opinion we have in our minds or a creed we say with our lips, but it is something that gets to the core of who we are and influences and shapes what we do in our bodies.  It is not like the way we passively watch TV, listen to a podcast, or read a book; it touches us directly, bodily, emotionally, and interiorly.

Love consumes us.  It sends us out of control.  We surrender to it.  Indeed, we lose all balance and rationality.  Love liberates us from the cold, linear framework of our minds and even the calculated defenses of our egos.  It drowns in the delight of the connection.  We are created by God for communion with and in God.  We are created for relationship and compassion with and in each other, and all creation.  We are created for koinonia, which is the New Testament word for intimate, mutual, reciprocal, entwined, physical community.

This is good news, especially for people who have been confined to our homes and staring at Zoom for a year and a half.  I know people who think the future of the church is on-line, and I understand what they are saying.  But without the direct physical and the sensory connections I don’t see the true Church.  God “became flesh to dwell among us;” God did not send a thumb drive or a URL link, or even primarily a written document, to be honest.  God does not communicate merely verbally or digitally. 

Love cannot be reduced to chemistry or physics.  There are some long and detailed commentaries on this book, carefully analyzing the nuances and possibilities of every Hebrew word and tracing the history of interpretation over centuries, languages, and cultures.  People like me love that sort of thing.  But it is all beside the point.  The point is to lose ourselves in the love of God, not to analyze it.

Maybe that’s what the Lord Jesus really means when he talks about how we need to lose our life in order to save it.  Maybe it’s not so much a matter of ascetic discipline as erotic surrender.  Maybe it’s not so much controlling the body as it is letting go of our thinking and giving ourselves up to more primal sensation and feeling.

III.

Which most certainly does not sound very Presbyterian.  We have historically been quite cerebral and suspicious of anything smacking of hedonism, not to mention the body and senses.  Just reading and encountering this text is demanding for us.  It makes us uncomfortable.  It might even make some of you wonder, “Is he allowed to say that?”

There are some very good reasons for this.  Because under the domination of our corrupted egos and our distorted desires, our chronic fear, ignorance, and resentment, these urges that God blesses and declares very good get turned into deadly, hateful, destructive, exploitative forces.  We too easily sink into the horrors of sexual assault, human trafficking, child abuse, domestic violence, prostitution, pornography, rape, and a culture that objectifies people and holds them to standards of “beauty” and “desirability” imposed by the demands of commerce. 

And what spawns this in us, this twisting of the good into evil, is our self-centeredness, our conviction that we are independent and alone in a society of enemies and competitors, our illusion of being isolated individuals in a world of scarcity and zero-sum games in which we have to fight to get what we want and someone else has to lose and that’s just the way it is, and it is better to be a winner at all costs.  We admire the winners and the strong, those who take what they want when they want it, by any means necessary.

What is going on in Song of Songs is awesomely powerful and easily abused to do unconscionable harm to the innocent and the weak, when read from a selfish and fearful perspective.  Jesus preaches against gaining and hoarding and keeping and storing and saving stuff for our own individual benefit.  To own something is to kill it; its beauty dissipates and becomes enslaved.

The Lord condemns nothing so much as our ego-centricity, self-righteousness, self-interest, and self- anything that takes and steals and grabs for ourselves by any kind of force or violence.  This is the false self that Jesus insists we have to lose as a condition of gaining our true and deeper and original Selves.  We have to lose our pride, our self-importance, our property, and even our identity for the sake of love and beauty.

That is what is going on in the gospel reading for today.  Mary of Bethany comes to Jesus bearing spikenard, an expensive aromatic ointment, also mentioned in the Song of Songs as the Black Woman’s gift to the king.  Her gift represents herself, her desire, her devotion, her heart, her courageous love.  She anoints Jesus’ feet with it.  Since this is the only time Jesus is ever actually anointed, it is therefore her act that identifies Jesus and gives him his title “anointed one,” which is what “Messiah” and  “Christ” mean.  Her love literally is where he gets that title from.

Her offering represents her ecstatic self-emptying, reflecting Jesus own self-emptying in becoming flesh to dwell among us, and finally giving his life, which expresses God’s very nature in creating the universe for communion and love.  She anticipates his lifting up on the cross and pouring out his own blood for the life of the world in just a few days.  She is showing us what is going on in the Song of Songs where we see, in the words of an old hymn, “love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my soul, my all.”  We participate in God’s self-emptying love when we empty ourselves in love for others.  In giving of herself to God, Mary shares in the love of God for all.

IV.         

This is where we come to true beauty, a poignant and profound beauty that consumes and completes us, infuses us and is woven within us, connecting us to each other and to everything.  A beauty that negates the negation of death, and blossoms out into resurrection.  A beauty that is not in getting what I want, but in offering what I have so as to merge with all.  This beauty is the love of the Creator permeating all creation.  This beauty that is a sensory overload transporting us into God’s timeless realm of joy.

I grew up in cedar log house in southern New Jersey; so cedar has always smelled like “home” to me.  The aroma of cedar would also have meant “home” to the Jewish people in Jesus’ day, for the interior of the Temple was completely paneled in cedar from Lebanon.  The air would have been permeated with cedar, mixed with the myrrh oil with which everything had been anointed, and the frankincense smoke that filled the air, catching the light so that the air seemed to glow.  Inside the Temple all your senses would have been stimulated; you would know you were in a special, sacred, transcendent space.  

The Temple is the place of love: sacrifice and beauty, death blossoming into life, individual material abundance lost and communal spiritual abundance found and shared together.  Jesus Christ — fully human, fully God — is the new Temple, and he makes our physical bodies little temples by his indwelling Breath or Spirit, and by feeding us with his Body and Blood.  

We are now the place where love lives in the beautiful aromatic blending of the King’s myrrh and the Black Woman’s nard.  Love is this blessed and fruitful mixing, infusion, permeation, and braiding together of two into one, like the veil of the Holy of Holies woven of blue, white, purple, and red yarns representing the elements of creation, and how individual identities get combined and completed to shine as something new.

The Church, the gospel community, is the Body of Christ, the Temple, the open space of coming together for liberation and for the restoration of our original unity and diversity.  The Church is therefore given to us as the place where all are aflame with beauty and desire for the God of love.  It has to be where we lay down and offer up our whole selves, everything we have and are.  Where we bring what we have and receive what we need, where we connect to each other, to our true selves, and to the living God whose fragrance infuses everything.  Where we realize, share, and spread the overwhelming beauty of God, reflected in us.

That is the beauty that saves the whole world.

+++++++