When pastors leave the pulpit on Sunday, we don’t, overnight, turn into humanists on Monday. Our Sunday prayers and preaching don’t recede into serving as only a vague and wispy background for the “real” work of helping people.
Nor do we, during the week, collar all the people we meet and lead them to the altar to “get right with God.”
There are some, of course, who do go to one of these extremes; who apart from their pulpits, having left all biblical ballast behind, plunge with great good will into the sea of human need; or who apart from their pulpits are incapacitated for any work at all except that of repeating snatches of their Sunday sermon to whomever they might meet. Biblical pastoral work, though, is not permitted to disfigure ministry with such extremes.
Pastoral work refuses to specialize in earthly or heavenly, human or divine. The pastor is given a catholic cosmos to work in, not a sectarian back-forty. But how do we build a smooth, coherent bridge from Sunday at eleven o’clock to Wednesday at five o’clock?
The great pivot on which all pastoral work turns is the act of salvation. We walk into the pulpit each week and proclaim the act of salvation. When we walk out of it, though, Our job isn’t over. We are now assigned the task of developing everyday relationships in such a way that salvation characterizes all the details of ordinary life; so that what is believed in the heart is expressed in the bedroom and kitchen, in the board room and factory, and on the sidewalk and highway. In addition to inviting persons to receive salvation, we train them in mature discipleship, so that what is believed gets worked out in daily life.
In the long centuries of pastoral practice, the work of providing direction in prayer has been considered of paramount importance in helping people keep the great truth of salvation working in the complex realities of everyday life. And the biblical book most used in this work through these centuries is the Song of Songs.
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The most immediate striking feature of the Song of Songs is its eroticism: it is a collection of romantic love lyrics in which sexuality is pervasive and explicit. This feature is so striking that some modern readers see nothing else. For instance, Wesley Fuerst writes of “the erotic language and exclusively sexual interest and content of the Song.” Theophile Meek is unequivocal: “. . . it is purely secular in character, with no apparent theological, religious, or moral attributes. God never once appears in it.”
But if the most striking feature to certain modern exegetes of the Song is its eroticism, the most striking feature in its use in Israel and the church is its devotionalism-a place to learn to pray. For as far back as we have any evidence, both Jews and Christians have read it as a description of the devotional life, the life of meditation and prayer. Rabbi Akiba said, “For all the world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” Origen’s twelve-volume commentary (third century) set the pattern for interpretation, and was followed by most interpreters up to modern times. Bernard of Clairvaux (thirteenth century) preached eighty-six sermons on the Song, and barely went beyond the second chapter! Hannah Hurnard (twentieth century), a missionary in Palestine, wrote two volumes of meditation on the Song, which have enriched the prayer life of many.
It is the fashion nowadays to be scornful of these expositions, to assume these people spiritualized the Song because they were prudish. But those who find the Song as a guide to prayer do not deny the sexual nature of the language. Rather, they find that sex and religion are intricately interwoven because both deal with the basic elements of intimacy and ecstasy. People who pray have never, says Philip Reiff, “avoided the use of sexual imagery. On the contrary, in the Christian tradition, erotic language was freely used to represent a vivid imagery of ways in which the inward man reverses the object of his interest and reaches out toward Cod.” The ancients did not read the Song devotionally simply because they were embarassed by its sexuality, but because they understood sexuality in sacramental ways; namely, that everything, (including, most emphatically, sexuality) is created by God as a means of drawing us into personal exchanges of grace. They were not afraid of sex; they were bold with God.
My own feeling is that no book of the Bible has been so badly served by its modern interpreters (unless it is the Revelation). They have trod their way through the text like flat-footed Philistines. They have taken it apart and flattened it out in explanations that are about as interesting as a sex education chart in an eighth grade hygiene class. They have assumed that the long centuries of the book’s interpretation in allegorical, typological, and devotional expositions have been pious attempts to cover up explicit sexuality with a veneer of devotion. These assumptions, and they recur throughout the scholarly literature, are breezy arrogance.
Going against this stream, I have been much encouraged in growing and persisting in prayer, and in giving direction to others in prayer, by immersing myself in the Song of Songs, following the practice of my pastoral predecessors in soulcraft.
One looming difficulty in the life of prayer, for which the Song has provided me with much help, is the recurrent experience that though prayer is easy to begin, it is difficult to develop. In the act of salvation we are placed in a position of intimacy with God. Logically, we ought to feel secure in love; our prayer should be spontaneous and flowing. But actual experience does not run on the rails of this theological logic. In the living out of salvation, there are hindrances and interferences. I do not feel a continuous, uninterrupted oneness with God. These difficulties are expressed in several passages in the Song, most notably in 3:1-4:
Upon my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer.
“I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves.” I sought him, but found him not.
The watchmen found me, as they went about in the city.
“Have you seen him whom my soul loves?”
Scarcely had I passed them, when I found him whom my soul loves.
I held him, and would not let him go until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.
The accounts of saints who tell of the “dark nights” of the soul are familiar. Their search for God seems endless and futile, but it is broken into by moments of ecstasy when they find (or are found by) the one they sought. This longing and frustration is clearly understood by persons in love. For the beloved is a mystery: there is “otherness” that we can never completely fathom or chart. We search for the clue, we ask questions of the “watchmen.” But we don’t know. The coming together of two uniquely created persons is not instinctual and automatic as in the coupling of animals. Sex is not only the means for the reproduction of the species, it is an aspect of knowing (the biblical word for sexual intercourse). Where there is knowing, there is previously that which is not known: areas of ignorance and mystery in both body and spirit.
There are recurrent elements of quest in the life of the spirit: there is longing and there is search. “Whither has your beloved gone, O fairest among women?” (6:1). But the longing is not meandering, nor the search fumbling-there is direction and there is goal: “My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to pasture his flock in the gardens, and to gather lilies.” (6:2). If he is not with me at the moment, if I do not feel his touch, or experience his presence, I know that the absence is for my good, and that there will be a reunion which I will enjoy. The appetites that God has created in us lead to the satisfactions he has promised.
Pastoral work acknowledges the difficulty and the pain of the quest and shares it. It does not attribute the agony of longing to a neurosis; it does not search for a cause in moral deficiency; it does not try to “cure” it by working for an adaptive adjustment to “reality”; it does not offer a quick course in map-reading. It honors the quest. The difficult, painful moments of unfulfilled longing are integral to the nature of intimate relationships.
It is not the pastor’s job to simplify the spiritual life (“beware the terrible simplifiers” wrote Burkhardt, to devise common-denominator formulas, to smooth out the path of discipleship. Some difficulties are inherent in the way of prayer. To deny them, minimize them or offer shortcuts through them is to, in fact, divert the person from true growth. It is the pastor’s task, rather, to be companion to persons who are in the midst of difficulty, to acknowledge the difficulty and thereby give it significance, to converse and pray with them through the time so that the loneliness is lightened-somewhat, and hope is maintained-somehow.
The simplifiers, however well-intentioned they are, are the bane of good pastoral work. The spate of inspirational testimonial religious writing, which seems to find such a ready market in the Christian community, is an instance of such well-intentioned simplification that results in later complications. The stories are not honest. They are written under the direction of a marketoriented editor, not to tell the truth of Christian conversion and growth, but to tell the one part of the truth that will appeal to the element of spiritual sloth in every Christian who wants to skip the hard parts of discipleship. Such books are reminiscent of the self-confessed method of Liberace, perhaps the most popular pianist in the world. “My whole trick,” he says, “is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tschaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggles. Naturally, I condense. I have to know just how many notes my audience will stand for. If there’s time left over, I fill in with a lot of runs up and down the keyboard!”
Persons who read these wonderful stories, in which everything works out so smoothly and with such grand results, conclude that they must be going about the Christian faith all wrong, since they still have many nights when “I sought him, but found him not,” and they experience frequent episodes in which they go about the city streets asking the bewildered question, “Have you seen him whom my soul loves?” They read these simplified versions of spiritual accomplishment, with all the dark nights left out and all the unanswered questions excised, and are sure they are not praying in the right way or with the correct formula. They come to the pastor and say, “I guess I’m not a Christian after all.” But the Bible does not tell the story of prayer in such ways. In the Bible, even in moments of clear and ecstatic revelation, “some doubted” (Matthew 28:17).
A second passage has similar features, but there is a difference in that the conclusion is not ecstasy, but pain:
I slept, but my heart was awake.
Hark! my beloved is knocking.
“Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one; for my head is wet with dew, my locks with the drops of the night.”
I had put off my garment, how could I put it on?
I had bathed my feet, how could I soil them?
My beloved put his hand to the latch, and my heart was thrilled within me.
I rose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt.
I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and gone.
My soul failed me when he spoke.
I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer.
The watchmen found me, as they went about in the city; they beat me, they wounded me, they took away my mantle, those watchmen of the walls.
In this passage, the beloved is sought by the lover, but having already retired to bed she is slow to respond. She wants her lover, but, after all, she has already disrobed and washed. Getting up would mean putting on clothes and getting her feet dirty again, making it necessary to repeat the whole routine of getting ready for bed. So she procrastinates. She delays. When she finally does get to the door, she finds her lover is gone. Panicked, she goes to look for him, calling and running through the streets. The watchmen find her and beat her, presumably for disturbing the peace in the night hours, and take away her coat so she will have to go home again to get warm.
This world is no friend to grace. Seeking for intimacy at any level-with God or with persons-is not a venture that gets the support of many people. Intimacy is not good for business. It is inefficient it lacks glamor. If love of God can be reduced to a ritualized hour of worship, if love of another can be reduced to an act of sexual intercourse, then routines are simple and the world can be run efficiently. But if we will not settle for the reduction of love to lust and of prayer to ritual, and will run through the streets asking for more, we will most certainly disturb the peace and be told to behave ourselves and go back to the homes and churches where we belong. If we refuse to join the cult of exhibitionists who do a soul strip-tease on cue, or the “flashers” who expose their psychic nudity as a diversion from long-term covenantal intimacy, we are dismissed as hopeless Puritans. Intimacy is no easy achievement. There is pain-longing, disappointment, and hurt. But if the costs are considerable, the rewards are magnificent, for in relationship with another and with the God who loves us, we are complete for the humanity in which we were created. We stutter and stumble, wander and digress, delay and procrastinate; but as we persist in prayer, we do learn to love even as we are loved, steadily and eternally, in Jesus Christ.
The pastoral implications of these passages are extensive, for every person in every parish is involved in the desires and the difficulties of intimacy. They experience them when they sit down to breakfast with other members of the family; they experience them when they go to work with other persons in the factory or business or shop; they experience them when they go to bed with a spouse; they experience them when they sit in a classroom in school or university. In every encounter there is the desire for closeness-the need to break through the defenses of sin, the need to be in touch with another. But there are also difficulties. Some difficulties derive from within with sheer laziness (“I had bathed my feet, how could I soil them?”); some difficulties come from deeply embedded neurotic responses that inhibit or prevent open relationships (“Do not gaze at me because I am swarthy, because the sun has scorched me”); and some difficulties are imposed by others (“they beat me, they wounded me, they took away my mantle”). The difficulties are of different sorts and cannot be dealt with by formulae or by generalizations. They require the personal, individual attention of pastoral conversation and prayer.
Three times in the Song there is the plea: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that you stir not up nor awaken love until it please” (2:7, 3:5, 8:4). Intimacy is, in both love and faith, full of tensions. When fulfillment is delayed, desire is bitter. Between falling in love and consummating love, between the promise and the fulfillment, between the boundaries, that is, that are defined by the salvation covenant, it is the task of persevering and patient prayer to keep love ardent and faith zealous.
Which is why prayer is the chief pastoral work in relation to a person’s desires for and difficulties with the intimacy that is made possible by salvation. Anything less or other than prayer fails to deal with either the ultimacy of the desires or the complexity of the difficulties. Prayer with and for persons centers the desire in God and puts the difficulties in perspective under God. Prayer is thus the language, par excellence, of salvation. Prayer is quintessential pastoral conversation that takes seriously the relationships that matter most, both human and divine. In prayer the desires are not talked about, they are expressed to God. In prayer the difficulties are not analyzed and studied, they are worked through with God. If the goal is intimacy, it will not be arrived at by teaching or therapy or public relations (although any of these ministries may provide assistance), but by dealing personally with those who count, with Creator and creature, in prayer.
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