The theologian Stephanie Paulsell considers how praying with the Song of Songs can help us discover “good news”:
What would we find if we turned to this poem listening for God’s voice, as countless readers before us have done? What would we hear if, as Origen long ago urged, we made the words of the Song our own?
One thing we find when we pray with the Song is good news: good news about the glory of the human body, the joy of mutuality in love, the responsiveness of a world that is cherished and loved, and the longing to know and to be known. These are the Song’s own concerns, the Song’s own preoccupations. Bringing the Song into our prayer brings our bodies, our relationships, the earth, and our longings into our prayer as well. This is precisely where these concerns belong: at the intersection of our life and God’s life, at the place where we turn toward God with all we are. [1]
Paulsell encourages us to linger in our reading with the Song of Songs:
The Song offers us a way of reading that is also a way of receiving the world, a way that leads to prayer. By inviting us into the dialogue of the two lovers, we are encouraged to read as they love—lingering in the presence of the beloved, admiring the beloved’s beauty and grace, and adoring both what can be seen and known and spoken of, and what is beyond our sight, beyond our ability to know or describe. In a world marked by speed and overwhelmed by information, the Song offers us a space beneath the pine branches and cedar boughs to read slowly, admiringly, meditatively….
The Song does not rush us…. Rather, it invites us to read and reread and read again, listening for unexpected resonances, allowing multiple meanings to accumulate. It is a banqueting house, a garden, a vineyard, a field: a place to be explored in every season, a place that discloses something new each time we move through it.
Hidden like a jewel at the heart of the Bible, the Song of Songs waits for us to take it up again and so enter with other faithful people in a song that never ends. [2]
Paulsell invites us to encounter the Song of Songs as an opening to prayer and life:
Think and pray with the Song about the life of the body, our life with one another, our life in creation, and our life with God. It is just one life, after all…. One life that opens onto depths that are spiritual, erotic, compassionate, and, on some level, not entirely knowable. One life touched and blessed by the kiss that has been sung about over centuries in language unutterably beautiful. [3]
References:
[1] Harvey Cox and Stephanie Paulsell, Lamentations and Song of Songs: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Westminster John Knox Press, 2021), 275.
[2] Cox and Paulsell, Lamentations and Song of Songs, 276.
[3] Cox and Paulsell, Lamentations and Song of Songs, 188.
Image credit and inspiration: Kim MacKinnon, untitled (detail), 2018, photo, Canada, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Gazing lovingly upon the moon reminds us of the loving gaze of the soul toward God and God’s loving gaze in return.
Story from Our Community:
Today I am feeling oppressed by the sense that my life is out of control and that I am drifting into depression. I’ve been here before and find that what it takes to see me through is trust that God can help me find my way and come out the other side with an awareness of God’s grace. It encourages me to trust and obey. I’m not sure where today will lead but I know from past times that a way is found and that it is God who was making it happen.
—Don M.
