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You Can't
Explain Love....
by the Rev. Rich Smith
February 11, 2007
Song of Songs 2:10-13
One of my favorite classic Peanuts cartoons depicts a
conversation between Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty. They are
sitting under a tree one day, when she asks him, "Explain love to me,
Chuck!"
"You can't explain love," he responds. "I can show you a painting or
read you a poem, but you can't explain love."
"Try, Chuck, try!" she begs.
"Oh, all right... Let's say I happen to see this gorgeous girl walk
by...."
"Why does she have to be gorgeous, Chuck? Why can't she be a plain girl
with a big nose?"
"Well, okay. Let's say I see this girl walk by who has a great big nose
and...."
"I didn't say a GREAT BIG NOSE, Chuck!!!"
So Charlie Brown sighs and says, "You not only can't explain love.
Actually, you can't even talk about it!"
Well, I'm not inclined to explain love either, and I’m even going to
talk about it for that long, for after all, love is a mystery better
celebrated and experienced than analyzed, which is why poets and
artists and composers are better suited for the task. But for a few
minutes, let’s dance around the edges a bit and see if we can’t at
least appreciate the mystery.
Charlie Brown’s futile attempts to find love by winning the heart of
the Little Red Haired Girl remind me of Samuel Johnson speaking about
“the triumph of hope over experience.” He was actually referring to a
friend’s second marriage. But this phrase pretty much describes Charlie
Brown’s life – from trying every year to kick the football that Lucy
held and then always pulled away at the last second, to attempting to
win a baseball game, to his yearning that the girl of his dreams would
notice him. The triumph of hope over experience. Each of us has
something in our lives like this – like being a fan of the Chicago
Cubs, or trout fishing, or playing the lottery. Well, the lottery, says
Garrison Keillor, is really just a tax on people who are bad at math –
but our lives are filled with unrequited yearnings, dreams we cannot
let go – and it’s not just stubbornness on our part that keeps us at
it. We are driven by something deeper, some passion that is part of who
we are, whether it be a passion to be loved, or a hunger and thirst for
righteousness, or, like Jesus, realize the reign of God on earth..
Valentines Day may be that way for some, a triumph of hope over
experience, like it was for Charlie Brown. It is interesting to note
that romantic love is not what the "Feast of Saint Valentine"
originally commemorated. In the old liturgical calendar, it was one of
the "lesser feasts", marking the martyrdom of two little known persons
who were each given the name of St. Valentine, each of whom died in
service to the Lord on February 14, 269 AD. Not much is known about
them, though legend has it that one of the Valentines was a priest; he
disobeyed the orders of the Emperor Claudius by performing weddings for
soldiers. Claudius believed that if a soldier’s passions were
compromised by love of a woman, he would not be a very effective
soldier. (Maybe that’s why astronauts shouldn’t be married?) Valentine
felt love trumped war, and so he did the weddings and for that, paid a
price. While in jail awaiting execution, he would smuggle notes out to
his friends, which he signed “Your Valentine.” This was some 1,800
years before the Hallmark Co. was founded. But it wasn't until the
Middle Ages that the Feast of St. Valentine came to be associate with
romantic love, most likely because of the widely held belief that in
the second half of the second month the birds began to look for mates.
And so human courtship rituals were "in season" as well, and it all
became associated with Valentine’s Day.
Now, the book of the Bible most closely associated with romantic love
is the Song of Songs, sometimes called the Song of Solomon. (Actually,
it’s the only book that deals with that theme!) I suggest you read it
this Wednesday with someone you love... It was likely written sometime
after the reign of Solomon, but his name got attached to it to give it
some credibility – a custom in biblical times – like calling the first
five books of the Bible the Books of Moses, or the Psalms of David, or
the Gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – when none of these people
were really responsible. Solomon was by legend a great lover, having
some 700 wives and perhaps 300 concubine. Probably an exaggeration, but
in keeping with his reputation. But in truth, the Song of Songs is the
voice of a woman, the only book in the Bible with that distinction, and
one of two in the Hebrew scriptures that doesn’t mention God! It
consists of eight chapters of quite earthy and explicit love poems,
unlike anything else in the Bible, and one wonders how it made it into
the Bible at all.
When I was in college, and taking my first Bible survey course, the
Professor stood up on the first day of class and announced: “Your
assignment for the semester is to read the entire Bible – except the
Song of Solomon. But when you find out what it’s about, you’ll read it
anyway!” Which of course is what everyone did, that very night.
The religious establishment has always been a bit uneasy with the book,
and while you can’t really ban a part of the Bible, they tried to
supress its use. In the second century, its lyrics became such a
favorite in “bawdy quarters” that one Rabbi Aqiba proclaimed that “he
who trills his voice in chanting the Song of Songs in the banquet
house...has no part in the world to come.” I’m not sure how effective
that warning was, and Jews now customarily read the book at the end of
Passover, as a celebration of new life. Christians have often treated
it as a sort of allegory, about the love of Christ for the Church. Of
course when it was written, there was no Christ and no Church, and I
prefer to take it for what it is – an expression of human yearning, and
the celebration of the earthy and physical passion that is part of
being human. (One scholar even believes the book is counter-cultural,
in that it presents the voice of a woman who knows what she wants, and
who isn’t bound by all the customs and culturally defined rolls – that
would be another way to read it....)
The few verses that were read as our scripture lesson this morning are
about the only parts of the book that you can actually read in church,
without giving the service an “R” rating. For some reason, they show up
in the lectionary every third year on Labor Day weekend, a little late
to be extolling the beauty of a spring day. It may seem a bit
presumptuous to read them now, while we are still in the grip of winter
– and last year it snowed 14 inches on the Sunday I had planned to use
them. But perhaps this does represent the triumph of hope, for we do
know that spring will come, (”In the cold and snow of winter is a
spring that waits to be..”), something we need to be reminded of in
February! It is the yearning of the seed to sprout, of the bulb to send
up its shoots and flower, the dream of springtime, the longing for
fulfillment, the passion behind the life-force... I’ve read these words
at countless weddings, in all seasons, because, while they do present
an admittedly romantic view of love, they also speak the truth of it.
After all, when you are in love, the whole world does look rather like
a Garden of Eden, where the birds sing and the flowers bloom it's
always spring.
Of course we know that springtime does not last forever, that even in
the best of relationships there will be rough weather. But as biblical
scholar Renita Weems writes, “Song of Songs reminds us of what it means
to live one’s life with only one other individual. A (couple) pledge to
submit to each other and to expose (their) wounded selves to each other
to scrutiny and healing. We promise to allow our two lives to be melded
into one brand new life together. The man and woman in Song of Songs
remind us of how much passion, enthusiasm, and utter idealism it takes
to believe such things are even possible.... It is a metaphor for the
divine-human relationship because it captures best all the vicissitudes
of trying to live faithfully and spontaneously with the Other. It is
the closest bond possible for two human beings, one that teaches both
partners lessons about grace, forgiveness, constancy, and love. The
love poetry in Song of Songs reminds us of how crazy, how innocent, how
ardent is the passion that brings human beings together. But it also
reminds us of how preposterous, how unthinkable, how supernatural is
the actual union that takes place, often years after the ceremony is
over, when passion fades and true love has a chance to emerge.....
Physical attraction may draw the two together, but it will take
supernatural attraction to keep them together–in love. And while it is
true that (that) may prove the most unglamourous, exacting, and
excruciating work a person will ever undertake, it is also the most
extraordinary effort one can engage in. Behold, it is a mystery!” (New
Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 5, p. 401)
In other words, even a biblical scholar cannot really explain love! And
so let me leave you instead, not with an explanation, but with a story.
Garrison Keillor tells about a couple who wanted desperately to go to
Hawaii -- partly for romance, partly to escape the Minnesota winter,
and partly to be the first ones from Lake Wobegon ever go there. Daryl
and Marilyn Tollerud raised pigs. The operation was going well and they
had money in the bank. "But then Daryl said to Marilyn, No rather than
go this year, what we'll do is invest the money in building the herd,
get more feeder pigs, and next winter we go and take your parents too.
So they set about doing that. It was in January, he went out one
morning and twenty-four pigs had died of a virus. They were laying on
their backs in the sun with their little legs stuck straight up in the
air. Next morning there were forty-two more dead, and about sixty-eight
died two days after that. And that was their trip to Hawaii.
Thinking about Hawaii, Keillor concludes: "My people aren't paradise
people, but when God loves you, then everywhere is paradise enough. The
honeymooners walking along Wakiki Beach are in love, and yet they are
uneasy in paradise, not sure their love is good enough for paradise to
last. When Daryl and Marilyn saw their dead Hawaiian pigs on a cold
January morning, it was enough to break their hearts. If two of you
pick up sixty-eight little pig carcasses by their frozen legs and throw
them in the pickup and haul them to a landfill and bury them, and if
you don't get mad and blame each other, just do the job, and go to bed,
your pigs gone and your shirts lost, and turn toward the middle and lie
in each others arms, that's true love. Probably it will last because it
has endured so much already." (Leaving Home, p. 218)
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
1
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