In the CAC’s Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course, James Finley and Mirabai Starr describe how the Song of Songs in the Old Testament expresses the soul’s longing for God as well as God’s longing for us. Core faculty member James Finley says:
The Song of Songs is one of the poetic works of the Wisdom literature in the Old Testament, along with the Torah and the Prophets. It’s a poem about two people who are very erotically and intensely in love with each other. They also have a deep reverence for each other, which is the gift of such love. The text’s inclusion in the Bible is interesting because it makes no mention of God.
The scholar Bernard McGinn points out that there’s an understanding of this poem that is relevant to faith communities. The Jewish community viewed it as a poem of God’s love for the Jewish people and of the people’s love as a community for God, but it’s also about each Jewish person’s love for God and God’s love for each person. That understanding carried over into the Christian tradition, where it’s read as God’s love for the church as well as God’s love for each Christian and their love for God. The central imagery reveals a deepening interplay of communion between God and humanity, collectively and personally.
CAC guest faculty member Mirabai Starr continues:
The Song of Songs is our soul’s quintessential blueprint. We often have this sense that to be born is to be separated from our source. The path of this life, then, is a path of return and homecoming—and it’s characterized in many ways by longing, yearning, and remembering in our bones that we come from Love. The desire beyond all other desires is to return to Love. That spiritual longing is often expressed or mirrored in our human relationships. I don’t see that as a problem. Our human relationships are not illusions that stand in for the real thing, the spiritual longing of our spiritual selves. Rather, our human relationships are the field on which this love dance plays out in this life.
Finley concludes:
Anyone who’s ever been smitten by love doesn’t need to explain why the Song of Songs is sacred. In other words, love’s the best thing going. It’s way up there with hummingbirds and sunsets. It’s one of God’s better ideas, because a life rich with love is a life rich with meaning. God is the infinity of love; therefore, our love for each other is an incarnate manifestation of that infinite love, which is incarnate in our love for each other.
The Song of Songs expresses this love song of the heart. The rhythms of the poet’s voice are the rhythms of love itself. The language is so poetic because it’s evocatively incarnating the nonlinear realizations of love. That’s why, when we read Scripture this way, it affects us at such a deep level.
Reference:
James Finley and Mirabai Starr with Michael Petrow, “The Song of Love Lost and Found,” The Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation, Center for Action and Contemplation, 2025.
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:
I am a painter, a chaplain, and an Ignatian-trained spiritual director who found a kindred spirit in James Finley and his writing. I often wondered if there was anyone living who shared my experience of constant contact with God and the burning desire to go even deeper with an expansive awareness of God’s presence within. I’m grateful for Brother Finley’s courage and his “yes” to God’s call on his life.
—Teresa F.
