The Song of Solomon has a history of flustering preachers and youth pastors.
O that you would kiss me with the
kisses of your mouth!For your love is better than wine,
your anointing oils are fragrant,
your name is oil poured out;
therefore the maidens love you.Draw me after you, let us make haste.
The king has brought me into his chambers.
We will exult and rejoice in you;
we will extol your love more than wine;
rightly do they love you.
In the Edmonton Journal, Stephen Berg writes of the Song of Solomon – that though it may make for blushing, it presents both a spirituality and a sexuality that are healthy.
If we’re suspicious of the Song’s passion and its eroticism, it could be because we see it through the adolescent vamping and squandered sexuality of the blue screen….
When we see prayer on a higher plane than procreation, we fall into the Gnostic error that pits spirit over and against flesh. When we see ourselves as wholly separate from the Earth, as master manipulators of organic life, we skirt with losing all that sustains us, while developing contempt for those unlike ourselves. It turns out that our sexuality — that which we find ourselves fired into life by — is given to us so that we might break out of our insular cells and overcome all these separations.
Our sexuality, then, is more than sex. And the Song of Songs, seen in full-spectrum as both a celebration of human sexuality and God’s ecstatic beckoning in metaphor; as both Divine ebullient rhapsody and rollicking earthy poetry — which to my mind is the same thing — becomes one of the holiest books in Scripture, and balm for a spiritually stymied soul.