Song of Songs
Reverend Darcey Laine
February 16. 2003
Palo Alto, CA

"Come then, my beloved,
my lovely one, come.
For see, winter is past,
The rains are over and gone.

Flowers are appearing on the earth.
The season of glad songs has come,
The cooing of the turtledove is heard in our land.
The fig tree is forming its first figs
And the blossoming vines give out their fragrance.
Come then, my beloved,
My lovely one, come." 2:10-13 (New Jerusalem Bible)

This is the archetypal voice of the beloved, the voice of the Bridegroom in the "Song of Songs" in the Hebrew Scriptures. How curious to find this love poem crammed between dietary laws, the history of kings and judges, and the wisdom of the prophets. Why would those who edited, anthologized, copied and studied the Judeo-Christian scriptures all these centuries have preserved a short romantic play for future generations? In fact there has been some controversy about this text, not only about its place in the cannon by those who thought it too lascivious for a religious text, but also by those who thought it too advanced a teaching for the common worshiper. For those who would preserve its place in our religious tradition, the poetic dialogue between lover and beloved is understood to be a metaphor for the longing of a soul for God:

"As an apple tree among the trees of the wood,
so is my beloved among young men.
With great delight I sat in his shadow,
And his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house,
And his intention toward me was love." 2:3-4
it is also the longing of God for the soul.
"You are altogether beautiful, my love;
there is no flaw in you." 4:7

For those of us who are used to hearing God personified as a parental figure, the idea of God as a lover might seem quite odd, shocking even. Many UUs who believe in God will say that they believe not in a personal God, but in a oneness or life force which may or may not have consciousness. Because we are all human, however, it is really impossible to conceptualize something which by definition is outside the realm of human understanding. I am sure that most of us could agree that God is not an invisible human with extra super powers, but sometimes we may need to use human words or images to address the divine. Consider the Hindu pantheon. Though Hindus believe that all things are one, and that the fundamental oneness which under girds the reality we experience is called Brahman, they also have hundreds of personifications, attributes, faces of God; creator, destroyer, teacher, mother, lover, child, elder.

Joanna Macy, Buddhist scholar and activist, posits that there are 4 possible ways of imagining our relationship to this world. The first is "world as battlefield, where good and evil are pitted against each other, and the forces of light battle the forces of darkness." (Macy p. 5) To my own mind this is the dominant paradigm in the United States right now. We see this paradigm played out on the political stage, in the movie theatre and in our children's games. Macy says an alternate way of referring to this paradigm is "world as proving ground" where during my lifetime I may overcome challenges and pass or fail tests. This world is valuable only as the stage for that testing. Such an egocentric salvation narrative is what has allowed us historically to pillage and destroy the natural world.

Macy's second paradigm is "world as trap. Some Buddhists understand the world in this way. Our task in life is to "extricate ourselves from this messy world." We escape the physical into the mental or a higher plane. This view, though less bellicose than the first, still encourages contempt for the physical world.

Her 3rd paradigm is "world as lover." The world is an "intimate partner." In the Hindu tradition, for example, the story of creation and many of the devotional songs to god are erotic; desire plays a large role in their religious tradition. I hope that each of us here has had a chance to experience this intimate partnership at some time in our lives. Remember those moments standing on the beach, the warm sand between your toes, the embrace of the sun, or lying on your back staring into the stars. Remember the moment you became a poet or wished you were. In this moment you cherish the world and feel cherished by it in return. The powerful white waters of a river can be as exhilarating as a prom night kiss.

In this paradigm the effort is not towards separation from the physical world, but a deeper embrace of it. How different our actions towards the animals, trees and oceans of this world might be if we recognized it as our beloved. How different our actions towards one another.

Macy's final paradigm is "world as self." This is the perspective from which Alice Walker's character Shug confides "one day when I was quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me; that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed." This is the paradigm of both the mystics and the Grand Unified Theory. It is the systemic thinking that we are all deeply interconnected, to the point of being inseparable. This sense of union with all life is where our passionate love for this world can lead. Our longing for the beloved world has the power to make us one with it.

If one can judge a religion or a theology by its fruits, imagine for a moment how each of these 4 theologies shape those who hold them and shape our world. It may be that understanding the world as lover may not only bring us more joy in our living, but may lead us to greater justice and compassion in our living as well.

To think honestly about the lover's archetype, however, we must admit the reality of loss and of betrayal. The Song of Solomon continues

"Upon my bed at night
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.
'I will rise now and go about the city,
in the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves.'
I sought him, but found him not.
I called him, but he gave no answer" 3:1-2 [NRSV]

Many of us in this room have lost love. Through Death, through betrayal, or simply the cooling of passion that happens over time. We know what it is to loose love. We also know the danger of despair as we search for a new love. The pain of this absence, whatever the cause, can surprise and overwhelm us. If the poets and novelists are to be believed it is one of the most intensely emotional aspects of human experience.

The separation arises not only from physical separation. Sometimes even when our beloved is right in front of us, we cannot see her. We look at our partner of 40 years, or 6 months, and we see only an adversary. Our connection is somehow hidden. Sometimes we seek our beloved even within a committed relationship.

"I sought him, but found him not. I called him, but he gave no answer"

If we buy the premise that ones relationship to the divine can be compared to that between a lover and his beloved, then this separation, this longing for reunion is part of that relationship as well. I remember sitting Satsang a few years ago, and the teacher, her name escapes me now, was asked what was required to achieve union with God, "You must be thirsty for it, you must burn for it" she replied. We find this longing for union in a diversity of voices, from the Christian writings of St. Augustine's Confessions or Rilke's Book of Hours, to Rumi's Muslim poetry, to the Jewish Kabbalists, to the writings of Starhawk and other pagans. The awareness of our separation from the divine, our hunger for reunion is what drives the spiritual journey. It is rooted in desire, as that of a lover for her beloved.

Let me reframe before I lose our atheists altogether. We return to Joanna Macy's conception of "world as lover." While the poems of Whitman or a hike across Yosemite may suggest for us a falling love with the beauty of the world, if the sun or wind on my face suggests an intimate partner, contemporary culture is also filled with images of separation and estrangement from the earth and from other living things. Concrete separates us from the fertile earth. Climate controlled offices and airplanes cut us off from wind and rain. The boundaries of our cities and suburbs push many mammals, reptiles and birds into wildlife preserves which make up a small fraction of a continent that was once theirs.

Lucinda Williams, contemporary songwriter captures such isolation in this refrain:

"We may pass on the interstate,
We honk and cross over to the other lane,
Everybody's going somewhere, everybody's inside,
Hundreds of cars, hundreds of private lives
We are so out of touch"

At certain moments each of us feels the pain of this disconnection from our world. We may recognize that alienation whether or not we can conceptualize something beyond the separation, a reunion with the world, a longing for the original oneness. As if we really could be separate. As if my actions have no effect on you, on my family, the plants in my back yard, the air we all breathe.

There is some urgency that we remember our fundamental connection. We stand on the brink of war with people who are fundamentally connected to us, who are part of us. This war, and it looks like it is immanent, will devastate not only our brothers and sisters, but the "stage" on which the battle takes place. Our conflict with our Arab brothers and sisters, and theirs with us, would seem to be rooted in a mutual forgetting of our fundamental commonality as humans, as beings on this earth, as deeply interconnected members of one system.

"I opened to my beloved,
but my beloved had turned and was gone." 5:6

If we understand the world as our beloved, what does that call us to do in this moment? How will we seek for the beloved hidden behind the grim façade of a world on the brink of war? For some here, whose conscience called them not to endorse our congregational statement in opposition to the war, a connection to the suffering of the Iraqi people calls them to support armed intervention. Others will be getting on a bus in the next hour to march and rally against the war. But even a peace rally can be rooted in a paradigm of "world as battlefield." Some of the rhetoric I have heard at recent rallies is filled with hate and a desire to win. If we say our cause is peace, the healing of the world, how will we prepare a place on the battlefield to stage that reunion? Wherever you stand on this issue, please remember love. Please remember not only what you are against, but what you are for. Remember not only the love of a spring breeze, of fig trees in bloom, but the love which under girds all things. The love which is a companion to truth, (Parker) which holds the promise of cherry blossoms alongside a battleship set out across the ocean from America, and feels acutely the intimacy and truth of each. We must remember our longing for reunion especially in times such as these, lest we forget that this world is our lover.

"…when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go…" 3:4 If you were challenged in our practice of Metta Meditation earlier, so you will find that this is a challenging and rewarding way of being with the world. It is not for beginners. It flies in the face of our dominant way of looking at the world, as a battlefield. It is built on a theological assumption that at the deepest level, we are all connected, that we are all one. Or in the words of Solomon's Song:

"love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
Neither can floods drown it.
If one offered for love
All the wealth of his house,
It would be utterly scorned. 8:6-7
"Love is strong as death,
Passion fierce as the grave"

Selected Bibliography:

Macy, Joanna World As Lover, World As Self Berkeley: Paralax Press, 1991.
Parker, Rebecca "Charge to the Congregation" Installation of Cinamon Daniels and Kathy Huff
Walker, Alice The Color Purple
Williams, Lucinda "Out of Touch" from Essence.

Closing Words

God wants to be thought of As our Lover.
I must see myself so bound in love
as if everything that has been done
Has been done for me.
That is to say,
The Love of God makes such a unity in us
that when we see this unity
no one is able to separate oneself from another.
Julain of Norwich from "Meditations with Julian of Norwich" in Cries of the Spirit

"See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things."
Tao Te Ching trans Stephen Mitchell #13

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