Abstract
This chapter is a reflection on grace in the Song of Songs. What is striking about the Song is that the lovers endure, and this in spite of their essential differences, their irrecuperable mistakes, the depth of their betrayals and their continuous recklessness. In the end, love is said to triumph even over death! There is thus a quality of love which escapes human understanding and effort; it is a sacred flame that burns on in the heart of God even when the lovers find that their love for each other has cooled down. Our text thus seems to imply that the source of love lies beyond the lovers themselves and that it is thus that their love has been found to endure in spite of their mistakes. There is therefore an element of grace to love that is often forgotten.
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- 1.
Most sex education classes can be summarized as follows: Don’t have sex! And if you do, all of these diseases—long list of sexually transmitted diseases described in graphic detail—will happen to you … including pregnancy! I can hardly imagine anyone graduating from such a class with a healthy view of sex.
- 2.
Interestingly the success of the lovers’ love goes against some commentators’ view of the Song as a “cautionary tale” that preaches “about the risks of passion” and whose moral is “to stay upstairs in the balcony, Shulamite woman, for withheld consummation is the best kind” (Daphne Merkin, “The Women in the Balcony: On Re-Reading the Song of Songs,” in Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible, edited by Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel [New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994], 249–250). The fact that the lovers succeed and do not receive divine punishment or the withholding of divine blessing for their reckless mistakes shows that grace permeates our Song and that it is not limited by or relative to human behavior.
- 3.
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), 11.
- 4.
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet, 12.
- 5.
Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (New York: Harper Perennial, 1964), 29.
- 6.
Rumi, Bridge to the Soul, translated by Coleman Barks (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007), 44.
- 7.
Cf. the beautiful essay Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (Melbourne, AU: Rough Draft Printing, 2014) by Søren Kierkegaard.
- 8.
And as such, the Song of Songs remains profoundly Biblical, and this in spite of its subversive character, for, as Lacocque puts it beautifully, “love is the core of revelation; all the rest is commentary” (André Lacocque, Romance She Wrote [Salem, OR: Trinity Press International, 1998], 39).
- 9.
Here one cannot help thinking of Levinas’ ethics of the face which operates the very central shift from modernity’s principle-based ethics—whether the principle is external as in Hobbes, or internal as in Kant—to a people-based ethics, where the command is found not in a law concocted by reason but in the vulnerable, needy face of the other. In Levinas it is no more reason which pushes us to do the moral thing, as in Kant, but an emotional response to the other’s face and the plea for help one finds in it.
- 10.
This idea of the Song of Songs having ethical value in spite of its unconventionality has been observed by Ginsburg who describes the Shulamite as a prime example of virtue and this even though she breaks every rule in the book: “The individual who passes through the extraordinary temptations recorded in the Song and yet remains faithful is a woman. Who can find a virtuous woman? This was a question for the Ancients, was reiterated in the Middle Ages and is still asked by many. Here is a reply to Solomon’s own inquiry. He has found one at least of spotless integrity, and her virtue is recorded in Scripture, for the defense of woman against a prevalent but unjust suspicion” (C. D. Ginsburg, “The Importance of the Book,” in The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 1st series, edited by Athalya Brenner [Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993], 47).
- 11.
This is also Carol Fontaine’s observation: “The Song is a harsh critic of the status quo, religious or secular. It presents an internal hermeneutic on sexuality that needs to be fore-grounded in any Biblical ethics of sexuality and in any use of the marriage metaphor” (Carol Fontaine, “Song? Songs? Whose Song? Reflections of a Radical Reader,” in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, edited by Lesleigh Cushing Strahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006], 305).
- 12.
Cf. Saint Augustine and his seventh homily on First John (cf. Homilies on the First Epistle of John, translated by Boniface Ramsey [New York: New City Press, 2008]).
- 13.
Rumi. Bridge to the Soul, 46.
- 14.
Cf. Ephesians 5:22–24.
- 15.
Carol Fontaine also observes this: “The Song’s conversation with the reader concerns a partnership in Eros, rather than subjugation to social codes and expectations. The beloved asks him to set her as a seal upon her heart; this is an invitation not a command. It pierces the veil of religious language more powerfully to me than any other speech in the Bible” (Carol Fontaine, Scrolls of Love. “Song? Songs? Whose Song? Reflections of a Radical Reader,” in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, edited by Lesleigh Cushing Strahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006], 304).
- 16.
Søren Kierkegaard. Works of Love, 49.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 53.
- 18.
Cf. Kierkegaard’s Prayer in the very first page of Works of Love.
- 19.
Gabriel Marcel, Creative Fidelity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 167.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid., 156.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Søren Kierkegaard. Works of Love, 9.
- 24.
Richard Davidson. Flame of Yahweh (Peabody, MA Hendrickson, 2007), 629–630.
- 25.
André Lacocque also notes: “Love is here compared to a flame of Yahweh. … This indicates precisely that human love can only be described with terms commonly used for divine love” (Romance She Wrote, 171).
- 26.
I’m borrowing an expression here from Pete Scazzero, founder of the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality movement. In his book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), he describes the marriage between a man and woman as a sign and wonder pointing to the deeper mystery of God’s love.
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Doukhan, A. (2019). The Crucible of Grace. In: Womanist Wisdom in the Song of Songs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30052-4_7
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