Sacred Response

Part 41, "The Story We Find Ourselves In"

So marriage has been under real threat for a long time.  From any close reading of Scripture it was under threat back then.  Consider Proverbs 5 and its timeless advice to “rejoice in the wife of your youth.”  There the writer warns of the adulteress.  Is she a prostitute, a fertility priestess, or the woman next door?  We’re not sure.  Literally, in the Hebrew text, she’s the “strange woman.”  How enticing are her words!  Keep away.  Do not go near the door of her house—Don’t click that mouse—lest you give your best strength to others (verse 9).  At the end of your life you will groan when your flesh and body are spent (verse 11). 

Instead (beginning in verse 15), in language that is provocative and sensual and erotic, “Drink waters from your own cistern, running water from your own well.  Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares?  Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers.  May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.  A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.  Why be captivated, my son, by an adulterous woman?  Why embrace the bosom of another man’s wife?”

Now, the language is provocative and sensual and erotic, because marriage is meant to be provocative and sensual and erotic.  Be intoxicated with her love.  And marriages where men attend to their wives, affirm their wives, listen to their wives, and focus on her breasts, not others’, such marriages will become provocative and sensual and erotic.  And this is part of the story we find ourselves in, that is, it’s part of the story in which we actually can find ourselves, find our souls, find our God-given destiny.  Then out of the satisfaction of a well-tended marriage comes the energy  and the freedom to reach out in love to others, cleanly and purely.

It’s important to remember again why God gave us marriage.  Marriage is a God-given space in one’s life where love is learned.  It’s not simply what two people do who’ve fallen in love.  It’s the starting point for learning the way to love.  Marriage is a place where two people can come together in growing trust and feel safe, accepted, and loved.  It is a place to relax and feel free from all the stress and confusion of life.  It’s this safe, protected place where love is learned.  How do we so rise out of ourselves, out of our different families, heritages, and experiences that we are devoted to others in a way that is always beneficial to, and protective of others, without regard for the consequences to ourselves?  How do we achieve this mature love?  Marriage creates a God-given space in which this kind of love is learned.  You anchor this one relationship in a covenant.  You bind yourself to make it through, through everything together.  Nothing counts against you.  You learn to forgive.  You have to learn to forgive.  You have no choice.  You’re in covenant.  And slowly in this context of absolute commitment, trust grows—and with it mature love.  There is no good “how to” book on it; you simply stay prayerfully attentive to one another.  And years later, by the grace of God and if you hold the course, you will find in this one relationship the full measure of love you were born to give. 

Meanwhile there is so much that is sensual and erotic, there is so much that is arousing in a well-tended marriage.  Craig Glickman in his book Solomon’s Song of Songs opens up this incredibly, amazingly stirring and arousing love story set almost exactly in the middle of our Scriptures.  He sees the Song of Songs simply as the story of King Solomon’s courtship and marriage to a maiden named Shulamith.  Jaded by all his marriage treaties and the politics of his harem, he finally finds his one true love in Shulamith.  And he describes her in the most sensual of terms.  In chapter 4, for instance, the imagery is of a rural land 3000 years ago, and it requires some cultural imagination.  Having said that, it’s not hard to see that the lover’s eyes are traveling up and down the body of a woman he adores: looking deep into her eyes, thrilled by her hair, charmed by her bright, playful smile, lingering over her mouth, a mouth inviting him to kiss her, yet respecting her strength and integrity (hence,  “your neck is like the tower of David”), celebrating her breasts, and until day breaks, that is, all night long, going to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of incense.  How explicit need we be! 

How does Shulamith respond?  Now verse 16: “Awake, north wind, and come, south wind!  Blow on my garden, that its fragrance may spread abroad.  Let my lover come into his garden and taste its choice fruit.”  And her lover’s response is, “I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride; I have gathered my myrrh with my spice.  I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey; I have drunk my wine and my milk.”  It’s a sexual feast.  They have learned in this one safe place how to delight completely in one another’s bodies.  But now who is speaking in the second part of 5:1—“Eat, O friends, and drink: drink your fill, O lovers.”  The NIV suggests “Friends,” but really who except the lovers knows all that has happened?  Who was there besides them?  Who orchestrated this celebration from beginning to end?  I think it’s God saying: Enjoy the feast; be intoxicated with one another.

The Song of Songs is an amazing book; it doesn’t even mention God.  But of course God is there all the way through it in the provocative, sensual, erotic world of the Song of Songs.  So rejoice in the wife of your youth.  See your wife as God sees her.  See her in God’s story.  Help her toward her God-given destiny. 

Then at the very end of the Song of Songs (8:13-14), there’s another insightful exchange.  The man says, “You who dwell in the gardens, let me hear your voice.”  The woman says, “Come away, my lover, and be like a gazelle, or like a young stag on the spice-laden mountain.”  That is the timeless truth, about what the man gives the woman—he deeply listens—and what the woman gives the man—she invites him to the spice-laden mountain.   May Christian men today tend to their wives, affirm their wives, listen to their wives, and rejoice in the wives of their youth.  It’s part of the story in which we and our children can truly find ourselves, discover our souls, find ourselves as we are meant to be.  It’s that safe, protected, sacred space where love is learned.