The Song of Solomon and the will of God .....

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"The will, the desire of the Lover
is simply the beloved herself in her freedom :
God just wants US.
And the calling of the Lover is simply to love :
the glory and the misery of the love affair
is the master image for the understanding of our vocation.
We are bidden not to some fairy-tale marriage
in which all is settled
but to a seeking and not finding,
to the burning sense of loss in possession
which only lovers know.

"Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth,
where thou feedest .....
why should I be as one that turneth aside the flocks of thy companions?
..... Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples :
for I am sick with love."

The will of God is not a list of stops for us to make to pick up
mouthwash, razor blades, and a pound of chopped chuck on the way home.
It is his longing that we will take the risk
of being nothing but ourselves,
desperately in love.
It is not a neatly arranged series of appointments
in a tidy office - but a life of bad dreams,
minor triumphs, and major disasters -
of things that we did not have in mind at all,
and the pre-occupations that miss each other in the dark.

"By night on my bed I sought him who my soul loveth :
I sought him but found him not.
I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets,
in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth :
I sought him but found him not."

Might it not be, then, that it is by bearing for love
the uncertainty of what we are to do,
that we come closest to his deepest will for us?
In our fuss to succeed, to get a good grade on a series of tests
we think he has proposed,
we miss the main point of the affair:
that we already ARE the beloved.
We, long ago, wound God's clock for good!

"Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse;
thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes,
with one chain of thy neck .....
Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah,
comely as Jerusalem,
terrible as an army with banners."

It is our thirst for success
and our fear of the freedom that he wills for us
that keep us the poor lovers we are.
If the cross teaches us anything,
it should be that the cup doesn't pass from us,
and that agony, bloody sweat, and the pain of being forsaken
on a dark afternoon are the true marks of having said,
Thy Will Be Done.
He is no less lost in this affair than we are.
What really matters for us both, though,
is not the lostness, not the doubt, not the fragile,
mortgaged substance of our house -
only
the love as strong as death
that has set us as a seal
upon each other's hearts."
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Excerpt from "The Romance of the Word" by Robert Capon
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