Ah, the Song of Solomon, a long love poem that somehow found its way into the Bible: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine, your annointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out; therefore the maidens love you... I compare you my love to a mare among Pharaoh's chariots. Your cheeks are comely with ornaments, your neck with strings of jewels. We will make you ornaments of gold, studded with silver...Ah, you are beautiful; your eyes are doves. Ah, you are beautiful, my beloved, truly lovely."
Song of Solomon seems to beg for an explanation, which usually takes the form that it is a metaphor for Yahweh and Israel. But to me, that seems like a pretty willful reading in. You could as easily say this just wandered in here by mistake. What if you take this more on face value. This is a love poem, filled with a strong sense of the erotic, of response to the physical qualities of the lovers: mouth, eyes, teeth, temples, skin. The poem keeps changing perspective, from the woman's to the man's perspective, back and forth. It is a poem of mutual desire.
So this poem of desire is in the Bible. Just there. You can put all sorts of extra levels of symbolic content on the words, but you have to let the poem be what it is. Accepting the words as they are, it seems to me that one has to conclude My conclusion is that this desire is part of the story of God and people. Love and desire between people is an aspect of what is holy in the world.
Accepting this poem into the Bible opens up the possibility that all sorts of sensory experience are to be valued as part of holiness in the world--without an obligation to translate them into codified theological messages. My wife in one of her posts pointed out the importance of attentitiveness to Eros, and the Song of Solomon is filled with that attention to detail. So that attentitiveness is holy too. And the intensity of the relationship, and its mutuality. The Song of Solomon puts it in the Bible, so you have to accept it as part of the Christian message.
You could treat the Song of Solomon as a side show, a short book in the Old Testament, and focus on all of the aspects of Paul and others that suggest self-denial in such things. But that gets close to the idea that Song of Solomon is a mistake, or that you have to strip away the words and replace them with correspondences to something that seems more like talk about God. But that's picking and choosing, no? If you're going to accept Song of Solomon as a legitimate part of the Bible, why not go whole hog. There is no reason not to treat the short book as a linchpin, the starting point for understanding the relationship between your physical experience and life and your spiritual life, and the way the two are interwoven, not separated.
Susan Sontag said "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Christianity is big on hermenuetics, of texts and even of the natural world and experience. I think Christianity can use an erotics of God's word and God's creation, powerfully tuning into the sensation of words, things, people, and experiences. The existence of the Song of Solomon suggests that is part of the deal.
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