
Song of Songs, Egon Tschirch, 1923
February 1, 2025
I’m taking a class called The Eros of God. We are studying the Song of Solomon. Although that is the book’s title in most bibles, since it is questionable that Solomon actually wrote the Song, I prefer to refer to it by its other more poetic name, The Song of Songs.
The Song of Songs is a poem about the love, passion, and desire shared between a man and a woman. It’s incredibly erotic, and there is a lot of sex. A lot. And it’s beautiful. But mixing sex and religion has always been problematic for people. Few are able to image God as a sexual being. I have always believed God’s nature to have a sexual component because otherwise how could God have invented sex??? I was directly confronted with God’s sexuality last semester when we studied Queer Theology. It only underscored what I already suspected about the vastness and the fullness of God’s character and person.
Our reading included this from Renita J. Weems:
“Sex forces the audience to confront head-on their deepest convictions, their unspoken preconceptions, and their own complicated desires. When sex is combined with religion, boundaries are transgressed and lines are blurred, because sex is rarely about just sex. It is about needs, longings, fears, fantasies – in a word, human passion.”
Weem’s description fits my response to the Song precisely. This is the introduction to my first journaling assignment for class.
Introduction Reading Response
I want to share a few things about my reaction to the Song. First of all, I am embarrassed by my lack of knowledge of the Song and my transparent tendency to process all of it autobiographically. I am stuck in disdain for what I perceive as the more conservative interpretations of the Song and have little respect for those of my cohorts and those commentators who see it as limited to an allegory of God’s love for creation, or God’s intent for the love between a husband and wife. I would never express that disdain towards my cohorts, but it is a mighty struggle within me.
I’ve spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out why the interpretation of the Song as God’s ideal for the love between a husband and wife is so offensive. I’ve come up with this. I am single, never married. Limiting the meaning of the Song to God’s ideal for love expressed within marriage is negating on two fronts. First, the assumption is that such love cannot be experienced outside of marriage. That is patently not true. I have experienced such love. Because such love has never culminated in marriage in no way lessens the intense, life affirming, and life changing impacts of such love. I am so much the better for having had the experience of such love. And second, there is the notion that such love should not be experienced outside of marriage. That feels not only exclusionary but discriminatory and judgmental. That’s me working through my anger at my fundamentalist indoctrination and those legions of “Christians” who have harshly judged me and my life choices. Such judgment stings like nothing else. So, all that anger and disgust is me working through my trauma. It’s not pretty.
I fear I’ve gone to the other end of the spectrum of interpretation, celebrating the Song as a poem about sex and desire and failing to embrace the nuance that undergirds its incredible richness. To operate at either extreme is to disrespect the incredible amount of scholarship devoted to the Song and miss the fullness of the academic experience. I fully recognize this class is about opening my mind to a variety of interpretations. As such, I am working diligently to relax my mind and stay open to the mysteries inherent in the text. Discovering that mystery which deepens my connection with the Divine is how I approach all Biblical passages. That is my ideal approach, anyway. Obviously, I overlay my own trauma and get stuck. But my goal is always to ask, “What are the secrets? Tell me the secrets.”
I also recognize I need not be embarrassed of my lack of knowledge of the Song. This class is about developing that knowledge, and in the process, it is fully expected my perceptions and interpretations of it will evolve substantially. I am self-conscious when I know full well I needn’t be. I need to just relax and take it in. I want to experience the Song in freedom, remaining always open to the vastness of its beauty and its message.