Readings
6
Reading Like Lovers
When my wife and I were courting (“dating” if you like, although we preferred the elegant overtones of the more old-fashioned word), we lived at opposite ends of the British Isles. I was in my final year of study at Aberystwyth University, on the west Wales coast, and she was finishing her masters degree at Dundee, way up on the east coast of Scotland. In those distant days before the advent of cell phones and e-mail, and with little money available to afford travel, we relied a great deal on the Royal Mail to keep our relationship alive.
A few days ago I went down into the basement, opened one of the ragged cardboard boxes we use for storage, and pulled out two battered and scratched biscuit tins. Inside were all the letters Sally sent me during the year or so we lived apart—we wrote to one another almost every day, so the letters number in the hundreds. They are bundled together in fairly random order, and each one represents only her half of our long-distance correspondence. It’s hard now to piece together the lines of conversation. After more than twenty years, I have trouble putting faces to some of the names. The news she shares about friends is like some garbled code, depending on my understanding of jokes or incidents long forgotten. Occasionally small items fall out of the envelope—a lock of hair, when she had her long ponytail trimmed off, a picture postcard, some clipping from a newspaper. It’s an odd experience reading these letters now, as though I were an archaeologist unearthing the earliest layers of our friendship and finding them far more mysterious than I expected.
I suppose if I had enough time I could order them by dates, tease out the storylines, track down the details of individuals, catalogue the odd enclosures, piece together the whole story again. It might be fun. Perhaps, one day, my future grandchildren might do just that. To them, the mystery of their ancestor’s lives might present a challenging puzzle, a fascinating riddle of family history to be unraveled on rainy evenings. But I have more pleasure just holding the letters and remembering what they represent. They call up memories and emotions from which my marriage grew and flourished. I enjoy reading these letters, but not analyzing them. They remind me of the length and depth of our love for one another, the ever-lengthening story we have woven together.
I’m content to let others come and be theorists with these letters. I read them as a lover. It would be impossible to come to them any other way.
Prayerful and Empty
How can we learn to come to the Bible in this way, as lovers and not simply theorists? As we come to Scripture, there are at least four attitudes we can choose to adopt which will help draw us more deeply into the presence of God as we read.
First, we can choose to read prayerfully. In my home we always say grace before every meal. In fact, we usually sing grace together, often quite loudly and enthusiastically! This practice has helped us to recognize the presence of God among us as we eat, and to come to the table with a great deal more gratitude, even for those meals that have turned out to be less gourmet delight and more burned offering (usually the dishes I have cooked). It is possible to practice the same discipline with Scripture. I have worshiped in churches where the readers always pray before opening the Bible; in some liturgical churches there is an elaborate ritual of blessings, prayers, processions and incense waving before a single word is read. This helps the congregation to be attentive—not only to the words being read but to God present in those words.
We can choose, as individuals, to adopt a similar discipline, developing the habit of turning our hearts toward God every single time we pick up the Bible. The Bible itself provides a number of marvelous prayers we might use. For example:
Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely. (Song 2:14)
Open my eyes, so that I may behold
wondrous things out of your law. (Ps 119:18)
Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. (1 Sam 3:9)
Learning to begin in this way is a first step toward prayerful reading, but not the whole story. It is also important to remain in an attitude of prayer as we continue to read, keeping ourselves oriented toward God speaking to us through the Bible, rather than allowing ourselves to get caught up in our own thoughts, concerns and clever reflections. When I’m reading the Bible, I usually have a pencil in hand to underline passages that strike me for any reason (sometimes they seem particularly important, or they puzzle me, or perhaps I simply enjoy the way they are worded). I find it a helpful practice to pause every time I scratch my pencil across the page, and look for a way to allow that striking moment to become a prayerful moment. This ensures that my study and learning develop into conversation and open listening. Over time, those underlinings are becoming a shorthand journal of my journey with God.
Second, we can choose to read with empty hands. It is always tempting to come to the Bible with an agenda. We might read to confirm our theological system or to find arguments to challenge someone else’s ideas. Perhaps we read to find guidance for life, to seek answers to our big questions, to solve our pressing dilemmas. Certainly many of us will have favorite stories, poems, verses or sayings we turn to again and again, usually because we are confident before we read that we know what they will say to us. None of this is necessarily wrong—but all these ways of reading place us in control and blunt the capacity of the Bible to shock us, to surprise us, to derail us. The problem is, of course, that our agenda may not be God’s agenda.
To read with empty hands means setting aside our agenda and developing an interior silence. To paraphrase the prayer quoted earlier, it means that rather than saying, “Speak, Lord—about this pressing matter,” we will pray, “Speak, Lord—about whatever you desire—for your servant is listening.” Without this silence we may technically be reading the Word of God in Scripture, but since we are trying to determine in advance what that Word will say, it is much harder for us to hear the living voice of God speaking through that Word.
This is one of the reasons Christians through the ages have always recommended a varied diet of reading that ranges across the whole of Scripture. Churches will often follow lectionaries or work through different books of the Bible in course. Individuals might use a daily reading plan or a Bible divided into dated passages for every day. I am far too disorganized to follow a reading plan properly; I often mislay the reading scheme or get confused when I miss a day. So I simply work my way through different books of the Bible, writing the date alongside a passage whenever I begin to read, and marking the margin wherever I finish so I know where to pick up next time. After a while, it becomes clear which books I have not read in a while. I also begin to notice which passages keep drawing my attention; that helps me understand my own agenda more clearly, and so I become a little more able to set it aside and come to Scripture with empty hands.
Humble and Expectant
Third, we can choose to read in humility, which means reading with a readiness to be obedient. We can find it difficult to understand the relationship between obedience and love, since in our society they often seem to be diametric opposites. Since the Romantic movement in the eighteenth century, our culture has tended to define love in terms of emotion: it is the feelings I have within myself that signal the possibility that this person is my potential soul mate, that form the basis for a developing intimacy, that, in the end, will bind me to my lover. And, of course, should those feelings wane at any point (as they inevitably will), this can be taken as a sign that love has died, that the relationship is over and it is time for me to move on. Obedience and submission seem to be the very antithesis of love defined in this way: they imply a commitment to continue to live and walk together regardless of the state of my feelings, and to accept a relationship in which my fulfillment, joy and pleasure are not paramount.
This, though, is precisely how love is defined in Scripture. The words of the Shema, found in Deuteronomy 6:4-5, are still recited daily by devout Jews, and were quoted by Jesus as part of his summation of the law: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” But what exactly is the nature of that love? Is it the feelings God stirs up within us, a reaching out to him of our bubbling emotions? Not according to the verses that surround the statement. “Fear the Lord your God all the days of your life,” says Moses immediately before reciting the Shema, “and keep all his decrees and his commandments that I am commanding you” (v. 2). In the same spirit he follows the great call to love by reminding the Hebrews to “keep these words I am commanding you today in your heart”—which was less a recommendation that they be memorized, and more a summons to incarnate them from the innermost part of our being. Love is committed and responsive: “If you love me,” said Jesus, “you will keep my commandments” (Jn 14:15). The true lover of God is not the one who comes to Scripture looking for an inspirational rush, but the one who comes ready to listen attentively and act accordingly.
Paradoxically, however, reading obediently does not always mean simply doing whatever the text tells us to do. When Jesus says to “pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44), there is little doubt that this is exactly what he expects us to do: the obedient heart will seek to respond appropriately. On the other hand, Jesus also says to the rich young ruler: “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Lk 18:22). As we saw in chapter one, that call struck both Antony of Egypt and Francis of Assisi very directly, and they responded with wholehearted and literal obedience. But there are good reasons for thinking that this is not Jesus’ call to each person who seeks to follow him faithfully; even his original disciples were not all called to such radical self-
renunciation. So a humble and obedient reading of this call requires not only listening to the words themselves but also being attentive to the voice of the Spirit present in the words; the Spirit helps us discern how we should live in response to Scripture, as Jesus said: “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything” (Jn 14:26).
Last, we can choose to read expectantly. When Moses approached the burning bush, he said to himself, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up” (Ex 3:3). He knew he was coming into the presence of something extraordinary—even though he had no idea exactly what it was. His mind and heart were open. This is the perfect way to begin reading the Bible.
The Bible itself recounts a tremendous example of such an open-hearted reading of Scripture. After the dramatic events of Belshazzar’s feast—when the ghostly hand wrote its message of doom on the wall and the Babylonian kingdom fell into the hands of the Persians—Daniel found himself absorbed in reading from the prophetic books of Scripture. “I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the Lord to the prophet Jeremiah, must be fulfilled for the devastation of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years” (Dan 9:2). At this moment Daniel may well have faced the temptation to read as a theorist, as countless others have done since. He could have carefully compared historical accounts and calculated dates, allowing him to predict the exact time of Jerusalem’s restoration. He might then have been able to locate this within a wider framework of Israelite chronology, past and future, integrating the message of the prophets into a sweeping theological history from earthly creation to heavenly consummation. Then Daniel could have presented himself as one who had mastered the interpretation of God’s intentions in history: one who knows the future.
Instead, Daniel allows his heart to be struck. He surveyed the scale of the catastrophe outlined by Jeremiah: the downfall of Judah, the sacking of the temple and seventy years of exile in a godless land. And all this because of the people’s betrayal of their covenant relationship with God. Overwhelmed, Daniel falls to his knees in contrition. “Ah Lord, great and awesome God,” he prays with tears, “we have sinned and done wrong, acted wickedly and rebelled. . . . Righteousness is on your side, O Lord, but open shame, as at this day, falls on us, the people of Judah. . . . O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, listen and act and do not delay!” (see Dan 9:4-19 for the whole prayer). And then, unexpectedly, Daniel receives a response—an angelic visitation. “While I was speaking in prayer, the man Gabriel, whom I had seen before in a vision, came to me in swift flight at the time of the evening sacrifice” (Dan 9:21).
Daniel came to Scripture expectantly, and so his reading led naturally to prayer, and from prayer to an experience of divine presence. It is possible for us to come to the Bible in the same spirit: not looking for brilliant insights, new knowledge or confirmation of our already entrenched opinions, but seeking instead the Author’s presence and fully anticipating that he will come to meet us.
Here, then, is our starting point for a fresh reading of Scripture. Not resisting the insights of the scholars, but at the same time refusing to read merely as theorists. Not denying the liberal conviction that the Bible presents us with a window into the past, an opportunity to share the inspiring experiences of previous generations; nor denying the conservative conviction that Scripture can be a nourishing well of propositions, a deep spring of eternal truth with timeless relevance. But determined to push beyond this, to read as lovers, to approach the Bible as an opportunity for encounter, as the medium of the divine kiss, as a way into presence.
Readings
As we continue reading through the Song of Songs, come to each of these texts in the way described in this chapter. This is a particularly easy text to read as a lover; practicing with these passages will prepare your heart to approach some of the more challenging passages of Scripture (like Leviticus!).
Prepare yourself to read prayerfully, open to the presence of God being made known through this poetry. Come with empty hands, with a willingness to let God set the pace. Be humble and alert to his calling on your life. And, of course, be expectant—as you read, God is with you. Who knows where this reading might lead?
Day 1
Song of Songs 4:9–5:1
(You have ravished my heart)
Day 2
Song of Songs 5:2-8
(I am faint with love)
Day 3
Song of Songs 5:9–6:3
(This is my beloved)
Day 4
Song of Songs 6:4-13
(Turn away your eyes)
Day 5
Song of Songs 7:1-9
(How fair and pleasant
you are!)
Day 6
Song of Songs 7:10–8:4
(I am my beloved’s)
Day 7
Song of Songs 8:5-14
(love is strong as death)