Trinity 14
Embarrassed by love
Life. Three score years and ten, fourscore if we’re strong. A great gift from above, perhaps the greatest, at least until we’re upgraded to eternal life.
None of us recall being given the gift; nobody remembers the early days, back when the clock was fully wound at the start of that incredible journey. We can’t, our brains are too busy with other things like calibrating our screaming for maximum penetration and figuring out how sphincter muscles work. We can’t remember the start so other people remember it for us. And lavish their memories on our friends when we are older. Often with photographs to spice up the mix. Wasn’t she a sweet baby! Look at him in his Christening gown! Yes, this was the time they were sick on Granny. Other people remember for you.
The preceding highlights another inevitability of the journey, the unloved but compulsory addition to every packed lunch of life: embarrassment. Sometimes the wrapper says awkwardness, sometimes excruciating self-consciousness or mortification or humiliation, but whatever it says on the tin, the contents are always the same.
Not that our experience is the same at every stage of life.The potential for embarrassment through life has a sort of rat–shaped curve: a lump not long after the beginning which hangs around a while then slowly fades away into a long tail of forgetfulness. As an infant we don’t know anything about embarrassed– what’s that?– we’re still developing our self awareness. At the other end, as we hit our dotage we’re fully self aware but we just don’t care any more, at least I assume that’s what explains pensioner behaviour. In-between are the the awkward years and the head of the rat if you like, the peak potential for embarrassment, humiliation and mortification comes in adolescence, just about the time your mother rediscovers those old photographs of you in your baby bouncer.
What is the most excruciating part of this most embarassing phase, youth? The betrayal of your skin as your hormones give you overnight lumps and bumps? Developing a crush on the most unlikely and 100 per cent unavailable to you other? The fool you make of yourself the first time you find out how to get into the drinks cabinet? Much I’m sure I have forgotten: it was after all a long time ago. Mercifully, memories fade. There is so much that provokes that constant youthful desire to shrivel away out of sight but time has blurred the detail. So much forgotten.
However, ever since childhoods have been accompanied by the cathode ray tube in the corner, everyone can always remember the pure torture squirm of watching TV with your parents when without warning something slightly racy comes on. Who finds it the most awkward– parent or offspring is a moot point: my father was always at the TV changing the channel before you could get more than two words into the question ‘what’s that they’re doing Dad?’ An experience all the family can share. What is embarrassingly racy changes over the years: though it didn’t at the time, I imagine the entire output of 70s TV would appear hopelessly twee and vanilla to all of us now. Our ideas of what is beyond the pale change. They do. I know. A few years back my mother came to stay and had me watch the second part of the Man in the Orange shirt with her because she’d seen the first part and didn’t want to miss the dramatic climax. I know it was on the BBC so passed her inner OK test, but- my mother? If the show rings no bells, let’s just say if Mary Whitehouse had still been alive it would have finished her off in the first five minutes and then incinerated her corpse. Suffice to say, it’s still possible to suffer the TV squirm in your 50s, with the added humiliation of the parent now expecting you to answer the question ‘what’s that they’re doing’?
Finally getting to the point, there is an exact replay of just this kind of awkwardness in churches when the Song of Songs comes up in the Sunday Readings. Suddenly, everybody is back in the front room when Play for Today turns all Dennis Potter. Yes, some poor person will have to read out the flowery prose, and everybody else will have to listen while they do and nobody can change the channel.
I’ve never heard a sermon preached on the Song of Songs probably because, unlike lectors, preachers always have a choice and generally choose to steer well clear of Bronze Age love poetry. In mediaeval times, however, and I don’t personally remember them, but back then, nothing could be further from the case. The Song of Songs was a wildly popular book to talk about, to preach about, to write about and never more so than if you had taken the monastic vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. You might have thought the last thing a vowed celibate would want to do was read about pomegranates and leaping gazelles, but apparently not. However the mediaeval obsession with the Song of Songs was not because it is a passionate epic of romantic love, but because it would be read allegorically. Your mediaeval monks understood the book not as being about the baser things in life, but as being all about the love between the soul and God. What appears on the surface to be physical passion is actually spiritual. You may be tempted to sneer– they were just embarrassed!– but this is a venerable and ancient Christian way of reading the scriptures. From the earliest times we;’ve know that the scriptures can be read literally (the most basic way), alnd also allegorically and spiritually.
However, fine theology and hermeneutics aside, there is no denying that there is an ulterior motive, from 19th century onward for allegorically spiritualisde reading of the Song of Songs, and that is our old friend embarrassment. As Victorian reserve hardened into puritan prudery it was soon clear that there could be no place for a passionate love song in the Bible, because ardour, of that sort, is well, not very holy and somewhat distracting and just not religion and encourages all sorts of sinful thoughts and you wouldn’t let your servants read it and anyway it might just frighten the horses. And not in front of the Sunday School.
And so, the pretence that the Song of Songs is all about wholesome spiritual things even though it sounds for all the world like something that would have your parents rushing to change the channel if it came on.
And I suppose it is about wholesome spiritual things, but not in that way. You don’t have to allegorise the Song of Songs to make it holy; you don’t have to pretend that the line about kisses better than wine really means mystic ecstasy; you don’t have to sanitise the Song of Songs for it to tell us about God.
Here’s why.
When God became incarnate in Jesus, when he inhabited our humanity, he inhabited all our humanity, including those parts of our lives when we fall in love. When God became incarnate in Jesus, then the things of this material world– this world that God made and sustained and saw that it was good– these things of our lives can become ways of meeting him, channels of his grace, sacraments of holiness. Including those parts of our time on earth when we fall in love.
Romantic love is a rudimentary form of spiritual love but not thereby a wrong or unholy one. As the soul yearns for God she’s recognises Christ in his brothers and sisters. God may be loved by loving his creature, seeing his hand in his handiwork; God may be loved by loving what he loves, love me, love my creation. When Jesus performed his very first miracle at the wedding at Cana, he wasn’t blessing a heteronormative patriarchal economic contract with his presence: he was celebrating a match of love.So, what better place is there for a love poem, a celebration of love between two humans; what better place then, than the Bible?
Song of Songs can be excruciatingly embarrassing to read in church, even the more tame parts such as we heard today. But the awkwardness is not because it’s inappropriate, it’s because our great great grandparents were Victorians.
God is love. To experience love is to experience God.
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