All Saints’, Dorval
September 1, 2024
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.”
This is perhaps the only passage in the Revised Common Lectionary that makes more sense when read in the Southern Hemisphere, because here above the 45th northern parallel, it is most definitely not spring. It’s a beautiful time of year, no question – but the flowers have been appearing on the earth for months now, and there’s never really a time, in Quebec, when one can categorically state that the rain is over and gone.
As an introduction to the Season of Creation, however, this excerpt from the Song of Songs makes considerable sense. The Season of Creation is a new addition to the liturgical year, which has been spearheaded by the Orthodox churches and is now being adopted widely, across many denominations around the world. It runs from today, September 1 – designated by the Orthodox as the Feast of Creation – through October 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, the nature-loving saint in whose name we bless our pets on that weekend every year.
The Song of Songs is a short book, densely packed with some of the most extraordinary poetry in the Bible. It has been allegorized and spiritualized extensively in both the Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions, but it is fundamentally a love song – and highly descriptive and explicit one. The young lovers in the Song of Songs are enjoying each other in every way imaginable, and they are not shy about expressing their desire. As one can see from this short passage, this desire is very often expressed through metaphors drawn from nature.
A few verses after the end of today’s reading, the young man says to the young woman, “O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face,” and the woman replies, “turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young stag on the cleft mountains.” The young lovers’ bodies emerge from and merge back into the landscape and the wildlife; they are intoxicated with the beauty of God’s world and the dizzy excitement of being alive, young, and in love in the spring.
The theme of this year’s Season of Creation is “To hope and act with Creation.” In this age of climate change, that feels like – and is – a very serious charge and undertaking.
But if there’s anything that the last fifty years of attempts to save the environment have shown us, it’s that guilt, fear, and seriousness are actually far from the best ways to motivate human beings to act. We are much more motivated by joy and desire than by a sense of grim obligation. And so perhaps we have something to learn from the Song of Songs’ carefree young lovers, about the nature of our relationship to God’s good Creation. We need to fall in love, to be ravished, to be enchanted.
The risk, of course, of falling in love, is that you will have your heart broken. So instead we protect ourselves, behind layers of denial and distance and defeatism. We resist the song of Creation. We stay in our comfortable, electrically lighted spaces and get our transcendent moments from recordings and screens. We rationalize carrying on with business as usual because what else are we supposed to do?
The lovers in the Song of Songs can teach us the spiritual value of abandoning ourselves, of drinking in the experience of nature and the romance of the present moment, even knowing that the moment will inevitably pass and that there may well be deep grief when this beloved person or landscape is changed, or gone entirely.
The simple fact that the Song of Songs is in the Bible at all, is a profound statement about the nature of our human existence and our relationship with God. Its celebration of earthly beauty and physical love makes it clear that God cares about our bodies, their pleasures as well as their pains; that our desires and their gratification are God-given and good.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that anything goes when it comes to our love lives. We may have dispensed with the cruel and shaming standards of the past; we no longer ostracize single parents or force gay people into the closet, but discernment and care around our relationships are still essential.
I wonder whether this is another place where the Song of Songs has something to teach us. What if we modeled our love for each other on the natural world – on its beauty and wildness, its interconnectedness and mystery? What if we understood purity as the clarity of a mountain lake, and commitment as the intentions of a migrating bird? What if we remembered that our bodies are part of nature, and vice versa, and that everything we do with them reflects our beliefs about Creation and its Creator?
To open ourselves to such love, whether of a fellow human being or of God’s beautiful and wounded Creation, risks heartbreak. And yet, it is the only way to live with truth and forthrightness, rather than cocooning ourselves in protective falsehoods.
When I think of the theme, “To hope and act with Creation,” the verse that comes to mind is from the fourth chapter of the first letter to the Thessalonians: “But [we do] not grieve as others do who have no hope.”
Our relationship with our mother the Earth will not – cannot – remain in the primal, pastoral innocence of the couple in the Song of Songs, anymore than they would be able to retain that innocence if they got married and spent sixty years together. There will be grief, there will be loss, there will be times of difficulty and conflict and even despair. But we do not grieve as others do who have no hope. God promises the redemption of all our sin and suffering, and God promises that the new creation will include all of Creation, not just humanity.
That is not, of course, a comforting assurance that everything will be fine no matter what we do. It is, rather, a liberating reassurance that it is not ultimately up to us to save the world, but that whatever contribution we do make to that salvation is nevertheless essential.
Let us follow the example of the Song of Songs’ young lovers, throwing ourselves into love and into nature with wide-open hearts. Let us use the beauty and joy that we find there as inspiration to work to safeguard the precious gift of God’s Creation through the challenges and heartbreak to come. And let us not grieve as others do who have no hope, because God promises to make all things new.
Amen.
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