We Are Made for Communion.

 Song of Songs 2:1-7

July 25, 2021

Smithtown, NY

I.

Song of Songs is saturated with nature imagery.  There has always been a tradition in Christianity that creation is God’s “big book,” and Scripture is God’s
“little book,” and both say the same things in different ways.  And what both say most clearly is that “God is love.”

In fact, that is the one verse in the Bible that serves as the best and most concise summary of our faith: “God is love,” 1 John 4:8b.  And that is what this particular book is about, using human sexual intimacy as the guiding metaphor.

God’s creation in the beginning is an act of profound, inclusive, universal, and infinite love; it is the divine, trinitarian self overflowing in self-emptying ecstasy and affection.  The Trinity, for all its being made overly complex and refined to intellectual incomprehensibility, simply means that the one God is a relationship of mutual, reciprocal love of three hypostases or faces, persons, dimensions, facets, perspectives, under-standings.…  

This act of love in creation is finally completed in the outpouring of God’s love in Jesus Christ, who is God’s Word of creation, in whom God becomes flesh and whose shed blood and shared Spirit sanctifies, reconnects, and enlivens everything that God made.  Christ reveals God’s love at the heart, and as the substance, of everything.  

We experience God’s love in nature in the very way that nature operates, the way that life reproduces and multiplies, and even in the way that we all are fed and feed each other in the circle of life.  Fruit does not simply sprout on stem, vine, or branch independently; it requires cooperation in the interaction of male and female.  It requires relationship.  We are surrounded and immersed in an environment that is saturated with sex, from the song of the cicadas in the trees this summer, to the lush tomatoes inflating in our gardens.  

God created us for connection and interaction and cooperation.  God created us for community because as Trinity God is a community of love, and that communitarian frequency or pattern is encoded and embedded in our very nature as created beings.  It is written in our souls and bodies.

Biologists have been reconsidering Darwin’s doctrine of “survival of the fittest.”  Seen through the perverse and twisted mind of modern individualism that phrase has meant that the most powerful, violent, selfish, and cruel individuals survive.  This violent ideology is used to justify rapacious and destructive social, economic, and ecological practices by humans.  

But now we are realizing that “survival of the fittest” really means that organisms and life-forms survive and thrive because they have learned how to “fit” together with others.  In reality it is the cooperative, the reciprocal, and the mutually beneficial who survive.  

Indeed, recent science reveals that not even trees are rugged individuals in mortal competition with others for scarce nutrients, as we have habitually assumed according to our ego-centric delusions.  But trees have lived for millions of years developing ingenious and subtle ways of communication and mutual support.  As people of faith we know that this is because of the inherently cooperative, interactional, communitarian nature of the One who created them, and embedded them, and us, with a mortal need to connect and relate.

God created this whole place permeated with love, right down to the cells and atoms of our bodies, extended out even to the attractional nature of gravity, which we don’t even fully understand.

And the Song of Songs presents all this in the imagery, flavors, actions, and metaphors of human love and erotic desire.  We are made for communion, and that “we” begins here with two people, and then is extended to include everything from rocks to light, with all living beings in between.

II.

So in the Song, the woman is a rose and a lily; the man is a tree hanging with fruit.  She is sustained by his sweet fruit, and she testifies to his embrace.  She is delicate, attractive, beautiful, and fragrant; he is provider, feeder, caresser, who supports with one hand her head — which is to say her intellect and mind — and with the other hand attends to her body, which says that she is both.  God is not just about what we think and say; God also embraces, delights, inspires, and stimulates what we do with our bodies, our actions.  

God’s fruit, when we receive it, moves us to bear fruit ourselves.  Life is a mutual fruit-bearing.  We love others because, and as an expression, of God’s love for us.  God’s love is physical and our response to God is physical; God feeds us and we therefore and thereby feed others.  Anything that we try to keep is dead and inert; we only receive from God what we give away to others in community.

We must not fall into the trap of thinking that this book necessarily presents us with a duality, as if “God is the male, and creation, people, the Church, Israel, the individual soul is female.”  That can lead to bad places when we decide, in the sinful self-interest of dominant men, that this means somehow men are more like God and are therefore to be treated as superior.  But the man in the Song is not “superior” in terms of power and domination, but cares and gives and offers himself for and to the woman.

The different roles presented here are all aspects within God’s love; the One who gives also receives and the One who receives also gives.  The woman could also represent God’s Holy Wisdom, a female figure in the Bible.  The point is to resist the urge to force this into a subject/object, superior/subordinate framework.  

  For what we see in the Song is all God and all of creation as an interactive and mutual dance which cannot be diced into the kind of domination and oppositional language that satisfies the egos of the powerful.  

Every one of us has both masculine and feminine characteristics and traits.  There is not a rigid either/or here, which society often demands; rather we all live somewhere on a continuum of male and female.  And so does God.  Genesis itself says we were created “in the image of God…, male and female.”  God, and God’s Image, includes male and female.  God is both and humans are both.     

So the Song depicts a joyful dance, an intimate, mutual encounter, a wild embrace joining and balancing the necessary elements of love: giver and receiver, nurturer and protector.  This engagement generates the energy of life itself, and it comes from, and is, the identifying signature of, God.  God’s primary act is creation; love is both the cause of creation and the way creation happens, through the interaction of different elements playing, weaving, and kneading together in relationship and community.  In the Song of Songs we are given a kind of glimpse into the very source-code of how creation itself works.

III.

Unfortunately, not only do we habitually and chronically forget this basic and fundamental truth of the universe, many if not most of us have never even heard of it.  And if we have heard of it, we almost certainly didn’t hear it in church.

This is a tragedy, that the very community called by the Creator to bear witness to it most explicitly, has repressed, suppressed, and oppressed, this truth to the point where precisely the opposite usually gets expressed.  The Church ended up too often merely dutifully ratifying the values and morals of Empire, insisting that God and creation, male and female, spirit and matter, humans and animals, different races, classes, and nations are in opposition where one is considered not just better, but where the “good” has to exterminate, or at least subjugate, the “bad.”

This attitude, which is purely a product of human egocentricity applying its own fear-driven values and structures to things, has dominated human civilization and existence, especially for the last 500 years, to the point where we are driving species to extinction at an unprecedented rate, poisoning the natural world, and kicking the atmosphere out of balance.  

From within this lethal mind-set we are helpless to do anything about any of this.  So we watch in helpless horror as wildfires explode, the temperature soars, floods rage, hurricanes strengthen, sea-level rises, habitats disappear, the number of living things on Earth declines and the number of refugees swells, our politics disintegrates into toxic insanity, and pandemics spread and mutate.  (And a handful of people who made themselves obscenely rich off of this planetary catastrophe entertain themselves by going into space.)

We have forgotten the ultimate way, truth, and life of the universe, revealed in Jesus Christ and celebrated in this obscure book in the Bible: that God has created us all by, for, and in love.  We — that is, all creation — are created for communion… with God and with each other.  We have forgotten this, and consequently we exist in a narcissistic, nihilistic lie that is killing us and all creation.

We need to remember this truth and goodness.  But, as we see at the end of this passage, holding this memory alone will not immediately make things right.  The woman in the Song remembers whose she is: “O that his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand embraced me!” she cries.

Then she advises others, the “daughters of Jerusalem,” invoking the beautiful wildness of gazelles and birds: ”Do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!”  I find that very troubling because it means, “Don’t get your hopes up, don’t get too excited, don’t allow yourself to be aroused too soon, don’t dissolve in an erotic swoon before it is time!”

IV.

In other words, do not wallow in the past or fantasize about the future.  Do not live in either memory or longing.  Neither of those alternatives is real.  They are different kinds of illusion and may be easily manipulated.  They are lies.

Rather, I wonder if this book isn’t advising us simply to be here now.  Be present.  To find within ourselves in this moment God’s living Presence, which is always here.  We have to learn to center ourselves, to set aside memory and longing, to open ourselves to, and fall into, the arms of love, the embrace of Creator and creation, at our deepest place.  That is where we discover and emerge into God.

For this last verse resolves into the rest of chapter 2, which will conclude with a consummation of Presence and union, when she finally exults: “My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures his flock among the lilies.”  She dissolves in the delight of a true union which is always in her power, if she would only let go and receive it.

What we have to let go of is our delusion of separation.  In Genesis, the fall of humanity did not happen when they ate the forbidden fruit; but when the snake got the woman to talk about God as if God were not there.  God subtly became an object, the world became a thing, the fruit became a commodity to be evaluated and consumed, humans thought they were separate from creation, “and they were ashamed.”

The Church, the gospel community, is called to be a place where we realize and recover our original blessing, our essential connectedness, our communion with and in each other, through Jesus Christ, in whom God becomes flesh to dwell among us, who is true humanity and truly God in one person.  Showing us that so are we.

The early Church affirms that: What Christ is by nature, we are by grace.  We are not separated.  We can now let go of our shame, release our anger, and put down our fear.  We may relax.  We may trust that we are held tight and secure, our mind and body in God’s left and right hands, which are the Spirit and the Word.  And we may glorify and enjoy this God, dancing together in ecstasy and thanksgiving in the glory of this good creation in which we share.

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