Tag Archives: Song of Songs

“Arise, Come, My Love… My Dove”

Posted on by
Reply
 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….”

Posted on by
Reply
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.

“I am dark and lovely:” Part 2

Posted on by
Reply
Our Lady of Montserrat at the Santa Maria de Montserrat monastery on the MontserratMountain in Catalonia, dates from the 12th century. The famed image once bore the inscription ”Nigra Sum Sed Formosa” (Latin: I am Black, but Beautiful). I had the privilege of visiting Our Lady in the church of Montserrat outside Barcelona many years ago; my children wanted to skip along the sheer edge of the mountaintop and protested when I insisted they step away from the edge: “Daddy won’t let us be light-hearted!”

“Do not gaze at me because I am swarthy, because the sun has scorched me,” protests the bride in the Song of Songs (1:5). St. Bernard of Clairvaux–in his sermons on the Song–interprets this swarthiness caused by the scorching sun, as the virtue that comes as the result of hard work and effort. It is also the swarthiness that “is caused by the heat of persecution…. the zeal for what is right…. to be on fire with fraternal love, to weep with those who weep, to rejoice with those who rejoice, to be weak with those who are weak.” St. Bernard tells us, Just like the burning sun therefore, the ardor of desire [for both God and neighbor] darkens her complexion while still a pilgrim in the body….”

She who loves God most ardently and is most burnt by her ardor for God and neighbor is identified by the tradition of the Church as Mary, the Mother of God. She is burnt by the burning sun but, like the burning bush, not consumed by the flame of the Divine. She is zealous for what is right while rejoicing and weeping with those who rejoice and weep. One of the most popular images of the Mother of God as swarthy lover of God is Our Lady of Montserrat.

The image is one of the Black Madonnas of Europe, hence its familiar Catalan name, La Moreneta (“the little dark-skinned one” or “the little dark one”). Believed by some to have been carved in Jerusalem in the early days of the Church, it is more likely a Romanesque sculpture in wood from the late 12th century.

Legend has it that the monastic community that developed on the mountain could not move the statue to construct the monastery, choosing to instead build around it. The statue’s sanctuary is located at the rear of the chapel, where an altar of gold surrounds the icon, and is now a site of pilgrimage.

The hymn to the Virgin of Montserrat, known as “el Virolai” and sung at noon each day by the Escolania de Montserratboys’ choir, begins with the words: “Rosa d’abril, Morena de la serra…” (Rose of April, dark-skinned lady of the mountain…). Therefore, this image of the Mother of God is sometimes also known as the “Rosa d’abril” as her feast is kept on April 27.