Comments on Canticle of Canticles and Isaiah

Comments on Canticle of Canticles, Isaiah

Biblical Literacy, pages 161-172

April 29. 2012

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book An Altar in the World, encourages practices of prayer and meditation that are NOT abstract and in some ideal place, but are feeling the dirt between your toes and hearing the birds sing and relishing every gritty detail about being on this earth.

Eckhart Tolle, in The Power of Now, encourages meditation that goes into the body.  He advises such techniques as listening to the silence between sounds, or following the sound of a bell into silence, or following your breathing into the body.  The idea, of course, is to quiet the mind and the ego so that there is space for the present, the now, and the divine.

The Canticle of Canticle is a perfect book for getting into the body.  There is a whole history of interpretations of this book, from the first time it was acknowledged as part of Scripture.  Interpreters were quick to create an allegorical and a mystical interpretation, to get away from its flagrant eroticism and so to interpret it as a dialogue between God and Israel or between Christ and the Church.  After all, there is a biblical history of understanding God’s relationship with humans as similar to the relationship between a bride and a bridegroom.   --Because, whenever we say ‘love,’ we are raising implications of romantic, physical love. 

Barbara Brown Taylor has a shocking passage about this (p. 38).  She relates a conversation with a fellow minister about attraction and spiritual intimacy with God.  The union with God is very, very similar on our human level to that between a husband and wife, with that idealized sexual love in this marvelous book called the Canticle of Canticles.
 

It may be a relief to turn the page from the Canticle and arrive in the Bible at the Prophet Isaiah, except that he, too, acknowledges our fleshly humanness, even in writing these lines which Christians have long understood as referring to Jesus and his Mother:  “…the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” (7:14).    Sex is how we continue to live, to populate the world, and to experience one of the greatest pleasures and closeness this world has to offer.  Isaiah could be considered implying that it is the way the divine enters the world. 

The mystics, the enlightened contemplatives, acknowledged this and were able to integrate it into their spirituality.  They could look at a picture of St. Teresa of Avila in ecstasy and understand the physicality of it without being thrown.  They had come to a place where the physical and the divine were no longer opposites.  They could imagine God as spouse, lover, embracing, kissing and becoming one.   They could hold us, as Isaiah did, to the necessity of seeking, holding, and loving God. 

Comments on Proverbs, Ecclesiastes

Comments on Proverbs, Ecclesiastes

Biblical Literacy, pages 152-161

April 22. 2012

These two books offer many temptations: for example, to discuss the pros and cons of spanking as a form of discipline; or to expound on the dangers of taking every word of Scripture literally as if it were addressed to us in 2012 directly by God; or to take Proverbs at least as a rule book, as if we were a CPA and got the tax book dumped in our laps with the injunction: “Learn this and you won’t be penalized.”

Some cultures have a lot of proverbs. German is certainly one of them. I still remember a few, such as “Arbeit macht das Leben suess” (“Work makes life sweet”) which comes perilously close to the saying over Auschwitz in Poland and other concentration camps: “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes one free”). Surely the placing of this proverb is an example of how a positive sounding sentence can be converted into something ideologically and morally perverse.

Can you live your life by proverbs? What can you do with a proverb such as “The early bird catches the worm?” It surely states a truth that can be used to educate, say, a young person who insists on sleeping in every morning and coming late to school?

The structure of the book of Proverbs seems to indicate that their purpose WAS education, either as passages of instruction or as one or two-line statements. A father is addressing a child; an elder a young initiate. The book fits right in with Rev. Richard Rohr’s contemporary writings on the first half and the second half of life.

In the first half of life, we all need rules and discipline. Without training and structure, the rest of our life is a mess. We have no foundation to stand on, to jump from. In the second half of life, we have less need of rules. Hopefully, we can come to some of the wisdom we read about in these two books of the Bible.

One question educators ask is whether wisdom is transferable. Information can be passed on; facts learned; skills acquired. But wisdom? Can quoting a proverb to someone have a positive effect? Or do we have to have the experience to lead us to say when we hear a proverb: Yes! That’s right! I know that to be true. But surely there’s no harm in trying one out—to try getting up early to see if the old proverb is true for us, or whether another hour of sleep makes us much more efficient.

Generations and generations have believed in passing along wisdom and virtue to the young. The old McGuffey Readers were full of stories with a moral. The morality plays were the same, and when novels were first written, people were scandalized when the good guys didn’t win. Some of us would like to find a way back to that culture—when values seemed shared by the majority and bad behavior was uniformly condemned instead of justified by a kind of unstated proverb: If everyone does it, it must be okay. Or: it’s okay if you don’t get caught.

The Old Testament is certainly not valueless. The stories make it clear that there are consequences for actions and that bad behavior does not go unpunished.

But all of this can’t distract us from Jesus’ message in these Sundays after Easter: God loves us. He knows we’re not perfect. He gives the same wages to those who start late. He is the paradigm of one who knows how to forgive. And He ends up being our true Wisdom!

Comments on the Psalms

Comments on Psalms 22, 23, 51, 88, 131, 137

Biblical Literacy, pages 142-152

April 15. 2012

It is fitting that after Lent and Easter, we allow ourselves to attend the concert of songs which are the Psalms. We read the story of the Passion of Jesus from Mark’s Gospel this year, and echoes of Psalm 22 rang in our ears when the soldiers divided his garments and especially when Jesus began to pray the first verse of this psalm in his agony: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This verse has come to be known as the “Fourth Word” from the Cross, although for Mark and Matthew it is the ONLY word.

John has references to Psalms 69 and 34 in his account of the Passion, both referring to thirst.

These references confirm Dr. Beal’s point that “The Psalms give voice to the tremendous depth and breadth of human experience… “( p. 144). The Alleluias of Easter are there, too, and great hope, confidence and joy. If we were to “sing to the Lord a new song” every day, some people would use the psalms, picking one that matches their life situation, their need, their fear, or their heart’s being full of thanksgiving and joy.

The psalms have not lost their popularity. Although some books of the bible are read and preached about infrequently, something of the Psalms usually finds its way into worship every Sunday. When the Cleveland Ecumenical Institute scheduled a four week course on the Psalms taught by Rabbi Roger Klein, forty people signed up, and we had to close the enrollment because of lack of space! A priest came to hear the Jewish interpretation of the Psalms. Rabbi Klein brought with him the original Hebrew text, intending to use the original language at times to enlighten the understanding of the translation.

Dr. Beal chooses just 6 psalms to include in his book on Biblical Literacy. They are good choices. What mood do they evoke? In 1926, Archibald MacLeish wrote a poem about the nature of poetry, and concluded it with a line that used to be famous: “A poem should not mean, but be!” It was a modernist statement, wanting poems to be like little gems which we could hold up to the light and see the intricacy and ingenuity of their structures as if we were seeing all the colors of the rainbow, dazzling us with their beauty.

That MacLeish quote, however, doesn’t seem to apply to the Psalms at all, and never has. As Dr. Beal points out, they do have intriguing parallel structures, and contain lots of imagery, symbols and analogies. But they are not read for their beauty. Many people might comment on the beauty of a Psalm 23, perhaps the most popular among the 150 songs, but people who know that psalm have held on to its verses with their fingernails when their lives seemed destined to drown in the shadows of this life’s darkest valleys.

The Resurrection convinces believers that we can get THROUGH those dark times, and come out with a “new song” on our lips, perhaps that from Psalm 149: “Sing to the Lord a new song of praise…For the Lord loves his people/and he adorns the lowly with victory…Alleluia.”