Desire [Proper 17B]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Song of Songs 2:8-13
Desire
It was the desperate longing in his hushed voice that she
desired to hear. It was the way in which
his body held her gaze as he bounded over the hills, driven, she knew, by a
burning desire to be close…a longing for her embrace, for her touch. It was that moment their eyes met through the
lattice; it was just a look but she felt it in her body and soul, if that makes
sense. It was as if that look were more like
a thing, or maybe even a seismic event.
She dreamt of that moment and in her dreams her desire was more powerful
than any distance that threatened to keep them apart. She burned with desire: the ache of longing,
the thrill of hope.
You don’t plan for this, but it is there, tied up in what
means to be human. It is hidden
somewhere inside – like heart or stomach.
But more like a flame – a thing that burns from the inside out. It feels both dangerous and essential. As if when the light of desire goes out you might
just die but also as if the flame might consume you, eat you alive.
I’m not sure I can tell you anything about desire that you don’t
already know. Anyway words can’t truly capture
something so deeply embedded, so primal.
Desire is less explained than experienced. And though the eyes cannot see it, there are
few things in the universe more beautiful than flames that meet, mutual desires
that join two into one. Into the embrace
of mystery. Into intimate
complexity. I would ask from where this
flame comes but I am convinced that it is as old as breath, life,
Creation. Desire grows in gardens.
Which is where we find it today; we find desire in a garden, embodied
by young lovers, expressed in ancient poetry – poetry that disregards the
artificial boundaries we try to establish between secular and sacred, human and
divine. But more alarmingly perhaps, we
find this desire, the desire of young lovers, in the Bible, in this book sometimes
called the Song of Solomon, sometimes called Song of Songs. As far as biblical books go, it is a rather
unique book. Unlike most sacred texts, it
does not once explicitly mention God.
Instead it is filled with (brace yourselves) poetic descriptions of
sensual and sexual desire. It is a book
much more focused on erotic human love than on theological argument – which is
precisely why this book has historically made the Church very, very
uncomfortable.
Somehow the same religion that proclaims the scandalous
doctrine of an embodied God, a fleshy God who makes fleshy things, is weirded
out by human bodies. We proclaim Jesus as
being as fully human as divine, but do not like to think of him doing certain
human things, having certain human desires; it feels impious to imagine that
human of a human Jesus. We say that we
believe in the Incarnation and in the goodness of Creation, but also we, as a
Church, have a long history of making people feel guilty and ashamed for being
bodies and experiencing natural things like sexual desire.
And yet the Holy Spirit inspired an entire book about human desiring
human – dripping with sensual beauty and sexual imagination. We read from it in church today, although
admittedly one of the tamer passages.
But that should tell us something. We are not souls burdened with these
embarrassing bodies. We are humans, living
in this world both as spirit and flesh, blessed with the miraculous ability to
experience joy and ecstasy in both realms, blessed the miraculous ability to
provoke the same joy and ecstasy in those we love.
We were created to be human – not as a temporary medical condition
but as a destiny. We were created with
needs and hungers – those things that ensure our survival. We were created with burning desires –
desires that drive us towards joy, hope, and love. We were created human – an inseparable mix of
flesh and spirit - and called good by our Creator.
God created us to burn with desire. Desire dates all the way back to the
garden. Not the garden in which the two
lovers of Song of Songs court each other – a more ancient garden: the Garden of
Eden. It is the thing God put in us
meant to close the distance; it is meant to draw us closer to another – a flame
that means to find another flame, a flame that means to make a larger fire. Because there is something about human
desire, about the desire two people have for each other, that pushes us beyond
isolation, that crumbles the walls we build, that leads us into a place of deep
vulnerability. Desire urges us to
express our love with wild abandon – it allows love to escape us body, heart,
mind, and soul.
God lit the fire. It
is a gift – one that must be handled with great care, of course, as all fires
must, but a gift nonetheless. In the
Garden, God decided that it was not good for a person to live in
isolation. To build human community, to
ensure human relationship, God created desire – and let it burn.
And that desire, the desire that draws us to each other,
opens up to even deeper desire, a desire to fall in love with our Creator. That is in us too. Just as physical hunger and thirst give us
the language for our spiritual longing – as the psalmist sings, “As the deer
pants for the water-brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God.” – so does desire
give us a way to make sense of our deep longing for an unseen God. St. Augustine expresses this beautifully in
his Confessions: “[O God,] You
called, and cried out to me and [for the first time I could hear]; you shone
forth upon me and you scattered my blindness: You breathed fragrance, and I
drew in my breath and I now pant for you: I tasted and I hunger and thirst; you
touched me, and I burned for Your peace.”[1]
We are sensual beings and so the language we have is
sensual. And that can seem strange when
talking about God – so unable to be grasped.
But God created us as sensual beings, created in the image of a sensual
God. God could have loved us from a
distance, did not have to get those divine hands dirty. But God gets close, always has. Genesis tells us that God created Adam with
dirt, carefully formed him by hand, and then cradled his head, pressed holy
lips against his lifeless face, like a kiss, and breathed into him. Not by requirement but by choice.
We are products of God’s deep desire: to be in loving relationship,
to experience intimacy, even physical intimacy.
God wants to be close to us, wants to draw our flame to the flame that
burns bright in the sacred heart. Just
as we are driven by the flame of desire, so is God. And perhaps that is yet another way in which
we are created in God’s image. We, like
our God, experience desire and long to be desired.
We too often think of God as being distant, unaffected, above
the naked exposure to which desire makes us so vulnerable. And yet in the Sacrament, we experience a God
who becomes as vulnerable as a young lover, who courts us, who desires us, who
longs to draw us near.
On the altar, God offers us body. God’s desire for us made explicit, a first
move to which God longs for us to respond.
On the altar God is present, exposed, vulnerable, before our deepest
hunger. Our sensual God longing to be
seen, touched, tasted – to become one with us so that we can be one with God. Our God longs to be close to us. Our God burns with desire.
We are creatures of that desire and the objects of that
desire. God keeps finding ways to
incarnate this world, to be close to us, so that we might be drawn ever closer
to God: our flame melting into God’s, the fire ever growing larger, hotter,
brighter, a desire that can never be satisfied.
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