This Sunday the lectionary actually includes a text from Song of Solomon! The church ignores this book--it is good to have a chance to preach out of it. About 15 years ago, it began to be the fashion to decry the "allegorizing" of the eroticism in this book. For most of the history of the church, it has been described as a love scene between Christ and the church, or Christ and the Christian. In an attempt to reclaim sexuality, some authors have insisted that it is actually speaking of two lovers (married? not? who knows?), with a celebration of the erotic aspect of love. These authors deride the allegory, saying it is just another attempt to "spiritualize" sex.
And this Sunday I will probably talk a bit about how it has been interpreted through the ages. (who knows what its original intent was! some historical-critical questions can't be answered). But the bulk of my sermon will be on how a major theme in mysticism is erotic mysticism (or bridal mysticis)--that in some way, communion with God is so very erotic, and yes, very sensual.
Some people look at Teresa of Avila and scoff as some of her descriptions of her interactions with "His Majesty" (as she likes to call God). These writers like to point out how Teresa is "obviously" sublimating intense sexual feelings. These authors have clearly never had a genuine encounter with God with erotic overtones. In my experience, spirituality and sexuality can be next door neighbors--I daresay they share some of the same neuronal pathways. And why not? Consolations and the like are spiritual experiences that are in some way similar to physical experience. Erotic mysticism is another valid expression of God's closeness--not something generated by our psyche. What is peculiar about all of this kind of talk is that you don't have the foggiest idea what it means until you have had the experience.
Having said all of that, it also seems to me such experience is more commonly found in beginning mystics. It is always dicey--trying to talk about development in contemplatives and mystics. God dances with us in so many different ways. Nonetheless, in my own experience, erotic mystical experience was more common during my spiritual awakening than it is now.
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I just stumbled onto your blog and wanted to offer a comment.
ReplyDeleteI started attending a UCC church recently, and, interestingly enough, the pastor used a reading from Song of Songs the week before the passage that you referred to appeared in the lectionary (basically the week before last instead of last Sunday). The passage that she read from was from chapter 4 of that book. The pastor's message was that our faith celebrates both the mind and the body, and neither should be ignored or suppressed in Christianity. As she put it, despite all the embarassed attempts at allegorizing that book of the Bible, it is, as she puts it, "Jewish love poetry".
That being said, it is interesting that I have found my relationship with God to have been liberated considerably when I conceived of the divine as female. Whether it relates to the fact that I am a heterosexual male or not I cannot say. I don't view my relationship as sexual in the least, but I realized that I cannot conceive of my relationship with an infinitely loving, tender deity in any other way but with a female God. I realize it is only a metaphor, that God has no gender--sexual reproduction being a product of biological evolution on one small planet in a very, very large universe, after all--but how can we as finite beings relate to an infinite God except through metaphors? So perhaps we choose the metaphors that work best for us. God defies our simple, limited, human understanding; yet God's love can break through our limited nature despite that, which attests to the power of God.
So perhaps it isn't that we have to understand the erotic Song as a metaphor for a metaphysical relationship with the divine; on the contrary, maybe we as humans have the need to understand our metaphysical relationship with the Divine in a more human-like (perhaps tinged with the erotic?) way.
In other words, my feeling is that we can accept the earthy nature of the Song without having to lift it up to some sort of ethereal height of meaning; we can accept that the Song is a book of erotic poetry that speaks lovingly of women's breasts and so forth without having to allegorize it, and thereby celebrate the erotic as part of God's creation. But on the other hand, we may have to do the opposite when we relate to God--we may have no choice but to relate to her/him in terms that we can better understand.