Fencing Bear at Prayer

"I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys." "You are beautiful, my beloved, and there is no spot in you. Your lips drip honeycomb; milk and honey are under your tongue; the fragrance of your unguents is above all spices. For now the winter has passed, the rain has gone and departed; the flowers have appeared; the flowering vines give out a sweet smell, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land: Arise make haste, my beloved; come forth from Lebanon, come, you will be crowned." --Antiphons for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Cf. Song of Songs 6:9, 6:3, 2:1, 4:7, 4:11, 4:10, 2:11-13, 2:10, and 4:8.

Pure prayer--that is, prayer at its most essential--is preparing the soul to be ravished by God knowing that God loves you and desires to give you nothing but the greatest pleasure. O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth! For your love is better than wine. It is making the bed, smoothing the coverlet and positioning the pillows carefully, so as to prepare a place where you may come together in love. Our couch is green ; the beams of our house are cedar, our rafters are pine. It is lighting candles and incense to give the room warmth and scent. What is that coming up from the wilderness, like a column of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all the fragrant powders of the merchant? Behold, it is the litter of Solomon ! It is cleaning your teeth and brushing your hair, so that you may appear as fresh and clean as possible for your lover. Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that h...

I am, to put it mildly, in something of a dilemma. Here I've been, keeping this blog for a little over two years, not entirely secretly (at least, not to myself) in the hope that somehow, if I wrote about it honestly and openly enough, I might undergo something like a spiritual journey, ending in enlightenment or, at the very least, awakening, much as Elizabeth Gilbert herself describes in Eat, Pray, Love . Well, as I am sure some of you have already guessed, something huge has happened to me over the past six weeks that I am all-too-willing to class as a major spiritual event (I don't know how to categorize it otherwise), perhaps even the transformation that I had been hoping for, but--irony of ironies-- I can't talk about it here on my blog! I really don't know what to do now. Even hinting at the source of my awakening could be problematic, although it is possible that hinting in the way that I am now could be even worse. Oh, there are so many things that I want...

Here's something else I don't understand: why should men, who presumably want to feel loved by God just as much as women do, necessarily imagine God as masculine or male ("He") unless they imagine themselves as men loved (erotically) by a man or (as in the tradition of commentary on the Song of Songs) as a woman ( sponsa ) loved by her bridegroom ( sponsus )? I've tried for years to get my head round this, particularly after spending far too much of my time in college reading feminist theologians like Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether , who seemed convinced that having images of God as Father was almost by definition a Bad Thing because, you know, the only reason that all those men over the millennia imagined God as Male was to oppress women. How , exactly? If men are imagining God as male because they want an Authority Figure, doesn't this mean that they are imagining a God that will oppress them, too? Or is it just that they wouldn't take orders...

It seems presumptuous. I couldn't possibly ask. No, there is no way that the Song of Songs, God's song of love to his people, the song of the soul and the Church, the song of Christ and Mary's love, could possibly be written for me. About me. Have anything to do with me. Such love is not for the likes of me, so dumpy and inelegant, self-conscious and inept. Others, yes, of course: God loves everyone, just not me. But still this song, this song of love, could not possibly have anything to do with me. Why am I so certain about this? It's not that I feel particularly sinful, no more than I imagine others must feel. Okay, yes, I do feel sinful, but that is still no reason not to believe that God loves me. God is merciful, God wants to love me. God loves me no matter what. No, I'm really having a hard time believing this. Nobody loves like that; there's always a catch. Do I really believe that? I'm not sure there's a catch in my love for my ...

Here it is: Trust that God loves you. Are you there yet? Maybe a little more instruction will help: Trust that the Really Real is not only benign, but passionately, crazily in love with His creation, so much so that He has bound Himself in covenant to His creatures, asking only that they love Him in return. I don't know about you, but I'm having real problems with this exercise. Not that I don't believe--intellectually, at least--that it's true; okay, maybe I don't. It's so much easier to fall back on a kind of resigned atheism, along the lines of "It would be nice if all this stuff about God were true, but I don't really see the evidence; plus, after all, there's still so much suffering and evil in the world. Either God doesn't care or it's all just random and absurd." Nor does the excellent book that I'm reading right now--Andrew Greeley's The Sinai Myth (1972)--get me out of this morass. In fact, in many ways, it h...

Every so often, unpredictably and in no particular order, I reread the whole of Dorothy L. Sayers' series of Lord Peter Wimsey novels. I cannot remember ever intending, once I had read them all, to sit down and systematically read them all through again. It's just that, suddenly, I'm in the mood for one of them in particular--this time I think it was The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), the last time I think it was Murder Must Advertise (1933)--and, gradually, over a week or three, I make my way through the lot. This is not the way I tend to reread, say, Elizabeth Peters' or Terry Pratchetts' novels. With theirs, I tend to start at the beginning and read all the way through to the end (although, in the case of Pratchett's books, I may do this in lots--first the witches, then the guards, then Death & Susan, then the wizards), but with Sayers' stories, the compulsion to read is somewhat different and I'm never really sure, until I get ...