Category Archives: Bible Study

“Arise, Come, My Love… My Dove”

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 Altarpiece depicts the Mother of God holding Christ while treading the serpent underfoot in St. Jürgen church in Gettorf (Schleswig-Holstein). In Genesis, God tells the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel” (Genesis 3: 14 – 15). Christians have always understood this promise to be made not to Eve, but to the new Eve, the Virgin Mary.
“He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.” Scripture scholars over the years have debated regarding the word “he.”  Should it be translated he or she or even they? In other words, the he is generally understood to refer to the Messiah but can also be understood to refer to Mary and to the descendants of Mary, as well; i.e., Christ and the Church.

“Arise, come my love, my beautiful one, my dove” (Song of Songs 2:13-14).

“The bride hears this command,” St. Gregory of Nyssa explains, “and she is empowered by the word; she arises, advances, comes close, becomes beautiful, is called a dove. Now, how can you see a beautiful image in a mirror unless something beautiful has come near the mirror? So it is with the mirror of human nature: it cannot become beautiful until it draws near to the Beautiful and is transformed by the divine Beauty.”

The bride in the Song of Songs becomes beautiful because she comes close to the bridegroom, who is Beauty itself. Or, she has embraced the Beauty which has come close to her. The movement is twofold: bride and groom approach each other and the groom proclaims his desire for his beautiful bride, who becomes beautiful because she is close to him.

But this beauty is not a static presence. The bride becomes more beautiful the closer she is to the groom and the longer she remains there but if she were to pull away, her beauty would fade just as the reflection in the mirror fades if what is reflected is taken away. Her beauty is constantly growing or shriveling, intense and intensifying or fading and faded.

Many of us have heard the quote from Dostoevsky’s book The Idiot that “beauty will save the world”…. But we do need to read the whole conversation in the book to get the fuller picture, for this statement is soon followed by the question, “But what is beauty?” just as Pilate asked, “What is truth?”

St. Gregory tells us, “When our human nature lay fallen upon the earth, it looked towards the serpent and reflected it. But now our nature has arisen and looks toward the Beautiful, turning its back on sin and reflecting the Beauty which it faces. For now it looks at that archetypal Beauty… turning towards the light, it has been made into the image of light and within this light it has taken on the lovely form of the dove–I mean the Dove that symbolizes the presence of the Holy Spirit.”

Human nature has turned its back on the serpent and now reflects the divine Beauty, radiant and filled with light. The bride, now the beautiful one because of of the Beauty she reflects, is also the place where the Dove can be found.

“Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes….”

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This image of the Mother of God, “Health/Salvation of the Roman People,” dates from the 6th century and is kept in a chapel of the St. Mary Major basilica in Rome. The Mother of God is frequently identified with the bride in the Song of Songs; just as this image is reputed to bring health and salvation to those who venerate it, the fragrance which the bride shares with her companions also brings health and salvation.

“Even though one may gather every perfume and every flower of fragrance from all the different meadows of virtue and is able to make one’s whole life fragrant with the scent of all these virtuous actions … still one could not look steadily upon the Bridegroom, the Word of God, any more than one could look directly at the sun.”

St. Gregory of Nyssa is commenting on a verse from the Song of Songs:

“Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
    your name is like perfume poured out.” (Song of Songs 1:3)

St. Gregory goes on to quote St. Paul the Apostle, who said that he was “the good fragrance of Christ” (2 Cor. 2:15). St. Gregory points out that the apostle “inhaled the fragrance of that inaccessible and transcendent grace, offering himself to others as a kind of incense for them to partake of according to their ability….” St. Gregory urges us to treasure this fragrance in our hearts, as the bride does in the Song of Songs. The bride makes a sachet of this fragrant perfume and keeps it between her breasts; the warmth of her heart enables all her actions to spread the beautiful scent of the perfume.

Some manuscripts specify that this perfume is frankincense or myrrh. In the medical theory of the ancient world, these scents strengthened and energized certain animals but acted as poison to others. The effect of these scents on humans, however, was the result of human choice: a person could choose to be energized and invigorated by the scent or to be weakened and debilitated by the scent.

The choice is up to us.

“Daughters of Jerusalem:” the Children of Our Lady

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Mary, the Mother of God, nurtures and is nurtured in glory by her Beloved, her Son; the eight angels reveal the mystery of the Eighth Day, the glorious Kingdom of God, which is manifest in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. At the altar, we enter into the eschatological reality of the Paschal Mystery, as we worship together— one Body of Christ, in heaven and on earth.

“Is he your Son, O Virgin of virgins? Is he your beloved, O most beautiful of women? ‘Clearly so… he is my Son, O daughters of Jerusalem (Song of Songs 5:9, 16). My beloved is love itself… and is found in whosoever is born of him.'”

In one of his sermons for the Nativity of the Mother of God, St. Guerric of Igny places these words from the Song of Songs on the lips of the Virgin Mary when he–the preacher–asks the Virgin to tell the congregation listening to the sermon about her Beloved, who is her Son. In this sermon, the “daughters of Jerusalem” are the monks and visitors listening to the sermon. These daughters of Jerusalem are also claimed as children of the Virgin as well: St. Guerric preaches that “she desires to form her Only-begotten in all those who are her children by adoption…. she nurtures them every day until they reach the stature of the perfect man, the maturity of her Son [Ephesians 4:13], whom she brought forth once and for all.” All those in whom love is found are members of her Son and thus her children by adoption and she nurtures them to share more completely in that Love which took flesh in her womb.

Just as St. Paul labored to give birth to Christ in his spiritual children (Galatians 4:19), the Mother of God is the mother of all those in whom Christ is born. “She herself, like the Church of which she is the type, is the mother of all who are reborn to life,” St. Guerric preached. What Mary gives the world, clothed with flesh, the Church gives us clothed with words, bread, wine, water, and oil. As the daughters of Jerusalem, we–no less than those who heard St. Guerric first preach his sermons–are privileged to nurture Love within us and among us as children of Mary, members of her Only-begotten.

St. Guerric of Igny (died 1157) was a scholar who became a disciple of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and took monastic vows to remain in St. Bernard’s community. But in 1138 St. Guerric was sent by St. Bernard to be the second abbot at the new monastery of Igny, near Rheims. As abbot there, St. Guerric became famous for the sermons he preached. His sermons for Advent-Christmas-Epiphany-Purification are especially stunning. Find translations of his sermons here.