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In
ten years as a priest I’ve done a lot of weddings. Some have been very simple, like the brief
ceremony I did once on the beach for an old friend and his bride, with only my
wife and daughter as witnesses. And some
have been lavish church weddings like the one I did for the daughter of a Texas
real estate tycoon, with a string quartet and two hundred guests and at least 20
grand worth of flowers. But the essence of what happens at a wedding
is always the same, no matter how much or how little effort people put into
making it especially memorable or beautiful or expressive of their
individuality. The most important part
of any wedding is the most personal and at the same time it is the most universal. It is
the moment when the couple makes their vows.
Nowadays
a lot of people decide to write their own marriage vows. I guess they feel more authentic saying words
they came up with themselves. But there’s
a way in which the ideal of “personal authenticity” that means so much to us
today fails to capture what the marriage vow is all about. The truth is, I have yet to find that anyone
has improved on the poetry of the Book of Common Prayer. But more than that, depending in that moment on
other people’s words, words spoken by millions for generations feels to me like
an honest admitting of ignorance in the face of the mystery of love.
When
I stood facing my bride and declared in the name of God that I was taking her
to be my wife, to have and to hold, for better for worse, until we are parted
by death, I didn’t really know what I was getting into. No one does. So when I hear what people come up with who
try to tell the world something new about love, about their love, that is so singular and personal that only their own
words will do, I might smile to myself, and think that it’s cute, but it won’t
make it any easier to believe that it’s true.
Now
it’s not that I’m cynical about love or marriage. I still find that weddings have the power to move
me. I often experience a deep felling affection
for the couple, and joy at their happiness, but there’s also something more
than that—something more akin to reverence.
When two people make their wedding vows it is a sacred act; but it is not
the beauty of the ceremony that makes it holy, or the words that are said. It is the love that the couple has for one
another, but even more than that, it is their willingness to act on that
love. On the basis of their limited experience
of love with each other, they pledge their lives to what they only partly know. And that act of faith, that unconditional
commitment to do whatever it takes to sustain that love, to grow with it, no
matter where it takes them, and to keep loving all the way to the end, reminds
us of the generosity of God.
The
love poetry that fills the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible is just that, love
poetry. It is earthy and, in places, frankly
erotic, and is not really that different from the love poetry of Persia or
Mesopotamia or other literary cultures of the time. So it’s fair to ask why the ancient scribes
included it in the Holy Scriptures. To
begin to answer that question I think it’s helpful to know that authorship of
the Song is traditionally attributed to King Solomon. Solomon ruled over a free and united Israel, at
its zenith of territorial extent and power.
His reign was a brief interlude of stability and security in all the long
story of struggle and suffering that is the Bible. And so Solomon exemplifies for later
centuries the grace and nobility of a people at peace, who are concerned not merely
with survival, but with cultivating wisdom, and beauty, and all that we might
call the art of living well. And the delight
in the sensuous pleasures of earthly life that fills the pages of the Song of
Solomon is also the joy of knowing first-hand the fullness of blessing that God
intends for his people.
But
if you read the whole Song you notice that its central theme is not
fulfillment, but desire. Chapter 3
begins:
“Upon
my bed at night
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.”
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.”
These
episodes of intense longing repeat throughout the book, and are the key to
understanding the tradition of interpreting the Song that developed in Judaism and
carried over into the church. This is a
way of reading the Song metaphorically, as a meditation on the bliss of rapture
and the pain of desolation in our love affair with God. The language of human love works so well to
describe this relationship because it is in that realm that we experience our
greatest pleasure and sense of completeness.
But such moments are fleeting; they slip through our fingers and are hard
to regain, and romantic love, or the lack of it, can also be the place in our
lives where we experience the sharpest heartache and deepest longing.
The
Jewish sages saw the mirror of this human dance of fulfilment and yearning in
their story as the people of God. And the church brought this tradition into its
story of Jesus, whom it speaks of as the bridegroom, the answer to the world’s
longing to see and touch and be embraced by God. And yet in that story the Christ who pitched
his tent among us and dwelt with us, is also the one who ascended again into
heaven. His living presence with us in word
and sacrament is also the sharp reminder of his absence, and our yearning hope
for the fulfilment that still is to come.
It as if in his brief love affair
with humankind, Jesus fanned the flames of desire for union with God into an
urgent passion for its consummation that is still sweeping through the
world.
Our
tradition has channeled that desire in two directions at once. One has been the path of worldly renunciation
and interior prayer. The Christian masters
of the contemplative life, most of them celibate monks and nuns, have left us a
vast body of mystical work full of erotic images of longing and fulfilment,
including many volumes of spiritual commentary on the Song of Songs. But here is an equally vast tradition of
Christian teaching about another path, the mysticism of loving one’s neighbor. It’s like the refrain from the old Stephen
Stills song: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” We’ve come to think of loving other human
beings, or at least being nice to them, as an ethical demand. It’s something you do because it’s what good
people do. But here I’m talking about
loving others because you are aflame with longing for God. This is an active mysticism that seeks union
with Christ by sharing in his tender, passionate love for every human being,
because each one is the image of the Beloved.
The Christian
spiritual masters have always understood that these two paths, the path of
inner union and the path of outer service, are really one. And in these times when the church is in a historic
crisis of identity, of vision and of purpose, some of us are seeking renewal in
this unitary path of love. We live in an
age when people have had enough of going through the motions of superficial
religion, but just can’t shake their yearning for the real thing. This deep longing drives us to search for
personal authenticity. And for some that
quest completely personal. But it leads
some of us to the altar. So here we
stand, amidst the somewhat shabby beauties of a former age, and make our vows
in words we did not write.
They
are strange old words, yet oddly fitted to the tongue, and we use them to
pledge our lives in love to one we only partly know. We have only just begun to know Christ, have only
have tasted the least morsels of the delights of being his bride, but even that
little knowledge is the longing for the complete fulfilment. Being together in this community gives us the
courage not only to open our hearts to that desire, but to act on it, to take
our own steps on Jesus’ path of the love of God and neighbor. But we aren’t just relying on each other—we are
listening to the voice of our Beloved, who calls, “Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away!”
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