Love and the Time of Singing

Sunday, September 1, 2024 – Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, also Song of Solomon 2:8-13, Psalm 15, James 1:17-27

Our first reading today is from a book known as both the Song of Solomon and the Song of Songs. It’s one of five books known as the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. The other four are Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. The Song of Solomon is the last of those five books.

It’s somewhat surprising that the Song of Solomon appears in our Bible at all, because it’s quite an eyebrow-raising poem. In fact, we might even give it an “R” rating if it were a movie. It’s also written from the woman’s perspective, a rarity in the Bible.

Church people have struggled with this text for centuries, usually concluding that it’s either an allegory of Christ’s love for his church or of God’s love for the individual human soul. While that’s a lovely idea, and I’m very much in favor of seeing parts of the Bible as allegorical, this text is clearly an erotic love poem that celebrates human passion and physical love.

It begins like this:

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out;
therefore the maidens love you.
Draw me after you, let us make haste.
The king has brought me into his chambers.”

The story seems to be that this young woman of foreign birth has been taken by King Solomon into his court, possibly as a matter of political strategy, either to be his wife or his concubine. Solomon had so many women of both types in his court that it’s hard to know for sure.

Right at the start, we see that Solomon has already taken her into his bed, and there’s no talk of having married her. (Though a passage in the dream sequence seems to point to the possibility that Solomon intends to marry her.) But the rest of the text expresses her yearning for her true love, a simple shepherd, and her desire for him to come and take her away so they can be together. She sings the shepherd’s praises, has passionate dreams about him, and remembers or imagines his words of ardent love for her.

In today’s passage we read,

⁸The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills.
⁹My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look, there he stands behind our wall,
gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice.
¹⁰My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away;
¹¹for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
¹²The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

In reading this, I was completely captured by the phrase, the time of singing has come. While this may be a simple reference to the birdsong of spring, it made me think of another story from a very different part of the world about a very different kind of love.

It’s called “Skeleton Woman” and is told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her book Women Who Run with the Wolves. It’s one of my all-time favorite books, and in it, Dr. Estes uses myths and fairy tales to talk about human psychology. In this story, the skeleton woman comes to her sad condition, like our woman in the Song of Solomon, at the hands of a powerful man. This one has been thrown into the sea by her father for sins unknown, where she is eaten by the creatures and turned into a skeleton.

One day, a fisherman unfamiliar with her haunted bay drops his line into the water from his kayak and snags her rib cage, thinking he’s just caught a whopper that will feed him and his people for a long time. He pulls in the line and reaches back for his net to scoop up this huge fish.

Imagine his surprise when he turns back and finds instead bald bone and empty eye sockets staring back at him! He grabs his paddle and begins paddling madly for shore, absolutely terrified, but she’s tangled in his line and just keeps bobbing behind his kayak.

At the shore, he drops his kayak, grabs his fishing stick, and flees over the frozen tundra, screaming and running for dear life. Still attached to his line, the skeleton woman bumps along behind him the whole way.

He finally reaches his snow house, and dives in, thinking he’s safe. But when he lights his oil lamp, he sees her lying in a tumble on his snow floor, all her bones going in different directions. In the softening light of the fire, he feels some kindness for her and begins to untangle her.

“Oh, na, na, na,” he says gently as he puts everything in the right place and covers her in fur skins. He then falls asleep and dreams, resulting in a tear running down his cheek.

The skeleton woman sees that tear, and is so very thirsty that she drinks it like a river. She lies down beside him, reaches inside of his chest, and pulls out his heart. Then she begins to bang on it like a drum while she sings.

“Flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh!”

The more she sings, the more her body fills out with flesh and hair until she is a whole woman again. Once whole, she returns his heart to his body, creeps underneath his fur blanket, lays down next to him in love, and they wake up wrapped around each other, now belonging to each other.

The Song of Solomon doesn’t end in that kind of consummation. It ends only with the yearning. The time of singing is not made real in the flesh.

The five books of Hebrew Wisdom literature show us the entire range of human experience. According to Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message bible, the wisdom writing,

more or less specializes in dealing with human experience – as it is. This is what is involved in being human, and don’t you forget it.” These books stress “Wisdom’s unrelenting insistence that nothing in human experience can be omitted or slighted if we decide to take God seriously and respond to him believingly.”

Here’s what we find in the Wisdom books.

1. Job engages the question of extreme suffering, asking why we suffer.
2. The Psalms pull every aspect of human experience into the presence of God.
3. Proverbs shows us that the undramatic dailiness of life and good life advice is also God’s territory.
4. Ecclesiastes is an often-cynical text that asks what the point of life even is.
5. Song of Songs is about passionate love between humans, the kind of love that seems to bring us into contact with God. As is sung in “Les Misérables,” “to love another person is the see the face of God.”

Wisdom literature, writes Peterson, gives witness to “the precious nature of human experience in all its forms, whether or not it feels or appears ‘spiritual.’” In these books, human experience, as “the arena in which God is present and working, is placed front and center.” But of that full range of human experience, Wisdom literature gives the final word to passionate, physical, human love. It brings it all back to the heart.

That’s also what Jesus has to say in the gospel. It’s what is in our hearts that really matters. And James tells us that love without action is empty. We may as well say it’s like bones without flesh.

We love each other in our imperfect flesh. And, as Bruce Epperly reminds us, “we must love God in the world of the flesh.”

Maybe it’s a time of singing for all of us. How can we – in this time and place – let love and song put spiritual and earthly flesh on our religious bones.