How the Song of Solomon, the Song of Songs, got into the Bible is a mystery to me. It is a beautiful, erotic, lyrical celebration of human love, explicit in descriptions of the beloved and the acts of loving. I never did buy my preacher’s analogy of our love for God being like the love in this book. “Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of a master hand.” Doesn’t sound like Godly love to me. I have noticed that preachers do not as a rule preach from this book. Expounding on rounded thighs and navels and bellies and breasts could be a problem for a G- rated sermon, I suppose.
Our Puritan and Calvinist religious mothers and fathers must have squirmed when they read this book. Or maybe they were able to do the Gnostic thing and disembody the images, make them more “spiritual”. It would have been difficult but it is easier, more comfortable sometimes to live in our heads than our bodies. What a pity!
Solomon must have tried to describe most of his fabled thousand wives( at least sixty queens, eighty concubines and maidens without number) in this book. Some are dark, some are fair, some are radiant and ruddy. Some have necks like towers and others have noses like the tower of Lebanon. Loving and being loved is celebrated in this little book.
This book does not tell us how to live with the one we love, though, and that is much more difficult than singing songs about lips, thighs and necks. How I wish Solomon in all his wisdom had given us some help that process. I guess when you are king and have minions galore as well as many wives, your problems are a bit different from mine when it comes to living with someone, loving them day in and day out.
Michael and I are celebrating our thirty ninth anniversary this year. Our friends Mahan and Janice are celebrating the fiftieth year of their marriage. Many of my friends have been married a long time and I have noticed a few things about these relationships that are interesting.
The first paradox... You grow to be more like each other and more like yourself at the same time. In our partners we often find the irritating differences are our growing edges. One person’s need for structure bumps up against the other’s need for spontaneity. One who loves ballet marries a football fan. One who needs verbal expressions of love marries someone who struggles to verbalize feelings. What seems to be an irritant can grow a pearl... the pearl of insight and change that leads to a deeper level of loving. At the same time I am changing in ways that meet my loved one’s needs, I also can change to become more truly who I was created to be. It is not an either-or process. It is both and. By learning to love each other’s differences (not just “accept” them), affirming and expressing our own unique gifts, we become a new creation. We can be like the two oak trees growing side by side in our yard. The branches blend together, both trees lean slightly towards each other, and they are stronger in winter winds because they are side by side, separate but connected.
The second paradox... These couples know when to hold them and when to fold them. Nobody lives with someone else without conflict or disagreement, anger or despair. It comes with the territory. Couples who live with love know how to figure out what is worth fighting for, what is worth fighting over and what is worth letting go. And most of the time, most of what we fight for or over is not really worth it. Letting go of the need to be right, the need to do it your way can lead to a safe place where anger and conflict can be creative, not destructive.
Living in love with another person is one way we can learn how to love God here on earth, to be transformed by the power of love, to staying the course. The prayer of Saint Francis is my model prayer for this kind of loving. Today I will pray this prayer as I live with Michael into our new/old marriage becoming one yet still two.Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life. Amen.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Peter Pan and Captain Hook...
He was Peter Pan and Captain Hook dressed in worn overalls and a baseball cap. Children were drawn to him like moths to light. Gentle work roughened hands held babies tenderly and his face would crinkle in pure joy. Little children would stand in fascinated fear as he told stories of the Booger Man. As the oldest brother to five other children, he became a babysitter as a young child himself. He helped raise my father and they were brothers in spirit as well as the flesh.
His whole life was lived in one state, in one county, on the farm where he was born. Forced to drop out of school to be a farmhand for his father, he spent his work life farming shares with that same father. He married while in his teens to escape an abusive home. He and Burma Lou lived on the edge of the family farm in a small board and batten house, four rooms, an outhouse and a well. The front yard was packed earth, swept weekly with homemade yard brooms. A garden in the back supplied a year’s worth of vegetables for canning and freezing. Burma Lou, his wife, sewed clothes, cooked like a southern chef and triumphed over their hardscrabble times. They raised four children in that modest home, two who went to college.
I remember watching him hold a thin paper bent between two fingers as he poured Prince Albert tobacco into the crease, licked the edge of the paper and rolled his own cigarette. My first work in tobacco was with Uncle Harold. After hard days cropping, handing, stringing and hanging the tobacco in the tall barns, he would spend the nights keeping the fire at a constant temperature to cure the golden leaves. The wood fire had to be tended constantly to ensure the barn heated evenly and maintained the proper heat. I can see him in my memory hunkered down on his haunches, poking the fire, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, working through the long nights to bring the crop in. It was a matter of the family’s economic life or death. Mistakes were very costly.
In his youth, he was a rounder. Hard drinking, hard cussing, hard hands and voice often raised in anger, he was also soft spoken and hard working. The only job he ever had off the farm, a night watchman in his later years, provided a small Social Security check. He was never rich in money but always rich in other ways. He loved to laugh and especially loved to laugh at his practical jokes. One of his cousins lived nearby on a farm. It was his custom to check the rain gauge every morning. For two weeks, Uncle Harold would sneak over to his house at night and put a little water in the gauge. He delighted in describing his cousin Jaymond’s amazement at all the rain they were getting. Jaymond died and never knew what Uncle Harold had done. The rest of the county knew but Jaymond didn’t. In spite of hardship and pain, Uncle Harold knew life was to be enjoyed and he did.
His children and grandchildren, now his great-grandchildren, love him. He is rich in family ties. As he has stayed with Burma Lou through her long, slow descent into the darkness of Alzheimer’s, his family has gathered around helping the two of them to continue to live at home. This last time of travail has been the hardest work he has done but he has remained faithful. With the support of his children, he has been able to live the ending of his days on the same piece of ground that saw the beginning of his days.
And now, ninety years old, he is slipping away, spending his days suspended between the land of the living and glory land. He sleeps and wakes and sleeps again on the couch in the front room, slowly fading, his life ebbing as the new life of spring explodes around him. This is the old farmer’s last planting season and he won’t live to see the crop come in. But as long as I live I will remember his steadfastness, his laughter, his kindness to children and I will give thanks for his tough tender heart. Tell Daddy hello for me Uncle Harold when you see him. I love you both.
His whole life was lived in one state, in one county, on the farm where he was born. Forced to drop out of school to be a farmhand for his father, he spent his work life farming shares with that same father. He married while in his teens to escape an abusive home. He and Burma Lou lived on the edge of the family farm in a small board and batten house, four rooms, an outhouse and a well. The front yard was packed earth, swept weekly with homemade yard brooms. A garden in the back supplied a year’s worth of vegetables for canning and freezing. Burma Lou, his wife, sewed clothes, cooked like a southern chef and triumphed over their hardscrabble times. They raised four children in that modest home, two who went to college.
I remember watching him hold a thin paper bent between two fingers as he poured Prince Albert tobacco into the crease, licked the edge of the paper and rolled his own cigarette. My first work in tobacco was with Uncle Harold. After hard days cropping, handing, stringing and hanging the tobacco in the tall barns, he would spend the nights keeping the fire at a constant temperature to cure the golden leaves. The wood fire had to be tended constantly to ensure the barn heated evenly and maintained the proper heat. I can see him in my memory hunkered down on his haunches, poking the fire, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, working through the long nights to bring the crop in. It was a matter of the family’s economic life or death. Mistakes were very costly.
In his youth, he was a rounder. Hard drinking, hard cussing, hard hands and voice often raised in anger, he was also soft spoken and hard working. The only job he ever had off the farm, a night watchman in his later years, provided a small Social Security check. He was never rich in money but always rich in other ways. He loved to laugh and especially loved to laugh at his practical jokes. One of his cousins lived nearby on a farm. It was his custom to check the rain gauge every morning. For two weeks, Uncle Harold would sneak over to his house at night and put a little water in the gauge. He delighted in describing his cousin Jaymond’s amazement at all the rain they were getting. Jaymond died and never knew what Uncle Harold had done. The rest of the county knew but Jaymond didn’t. In spite of hardship and pain, Uncle Harold knew life was to be enjoyed and he did.
His children and grandchildren, now his great-grandchildren, love him. He is rich in family ties. As he has stayed with Burma Lou through her long, slow descent into the darkness of Alzheimer’s, his family has gathered around helping the two of them to continue to live at home. This last time of travail has been the hardest work he has done but he has remained faithful. With the support of his children, he has been able to live the ending of his days on the same piece of ground that saw the beginning of his days.
And now, ninety years old, he is slipping away, spending his days suspended between the land of the living and glory land. He sleeps and wakes and sleeps again on the couch in the front room, slowly fading, his life ebbing as the new life of spring explodes around him. This is the old farmer’s last planting season and he won’t live to see the crop come in. But as long as I live I will remember his steadfastness, his laughter, his kindness to children and I will give thanks for his tough tender heart. Tell Daddy hello for me Uncle Harold when you see him. I love you both.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
It ain't Paradise... but it's close
The pussy willow, violets and bloodroot have bloomed. Now the cranesbill geranium, spring beauty and money plant are having their turn. Trillium will come next. Spring flowers carpet the floor of the woods and the banks of the creeks at the farm. The crab apple trees that ring our house are in full bloom, sweet fragrance rising up to meet me as I work in the yard. I can hear the turkeys gobbling softly to each other in the woods, talking over the day. One turkey has separated from the flock and is walking the pastures alone. Deer pause in their grazing to watch us pass, not worried about their safety here at Sabbath Rest. The black snake family has come back to the shed now that it is warm and are living in one of the bins. The spring trio of new calves pause in their play to watch us as we walk by. The quail are back, flying up at a steep angle when flushed from the tall grass. Their Bob White song floats on the air again and makes me smile. Our poor ruined pond, now a muddy bog, still has spring peeper frogs that sing. The big turtle and the fish are long gone. The ducks and the crane no longer visit us. A careless developer sent a wall of red mud careening down a pristine stream and filled a twelve foot deep pond. Poorly enforced laws could not protect us or the animals that called that pond home.
Much of life on the farm is beautiful, lush, abundant, fruitful but Sabbath Rest Farm is not Eden. Thistles grow in the pasture grass. Animals kill one another. We find the leftovers of animal meals in our walks... feathers, bone, fur. Gullies wash and cut through the hillside as rain runs to the streams. The drought... This spring has been dry and we are already behind the normal amount of rainfall. Our vehicles raise a rooster tail of dust as we drive up our gravel road. The ground is hard, packed and dry. The Florida developer still is planning to put 168 units on the fifty acres next door. Careless construction is still allowed. The contrast between life as I think it should be and life as it really is can be startling and overwhelming at times.
And yet, my heart leaps up still at the sight of a fawn or the sound of Junie B’s nickering welcome. I hold my breath in suspended animation while I watch the big redorangepurplegold sunset and the silvercream moonrise. The Carolina Wren building a nest in my grapevine wreath for the third year in a row is busy and cheerful. Her good cheer spills over into my soul. I am grateful.
The thirty eighth and thirty ninth chapters of Job, God’s questions to Job, are a beautiful lyrical description of our world. The springs of the sea... the dwellings of light... the storehouses of the snow... the chains of the Pleiades... wisdom in the clouds... the waterskins of the heavens... the Behemoth and the Leviathan... the horse and the hawk... the ostrich and the eagle... It is our world for the span of our lives but it has been God’s world since the beginning of time. Like the Psalmist, I will rejoice and be glad in it. I will smell the crab apple blossom incense and my soul will rise up to meet my Creator. I will eat the tender asparagus shoots and give thanks for the abundance of the earth. I will sing praises with the turkeys and the quail. I will sit down in silence with the grazing deer and listen for the Lord to speak. It will be more than enough. Thanks be to God for this most amazing gift.
Much of life on the farm is beautiful, lush, abundant, fruitful but Sabbath Rest Farm is not Eden. Thistles grow in the pasture grass. Animals kill one another. We find the leftovers of animal meals in our walks... feathers, bone, fur. Gullies wash and cut through the hillside as rain runs to the streams. The drought... This spring has been dry and we are already behind the normal amount of rainfall. Our vehicles raise a rooster tail of dust as we drive up our gravel road. The ground is hard, packed and dry. The Florida developer still is planning to put 168 units on the fifty acres next door. Careless construction is still allowed. The contrast between life as I think it should be and life as it really is can be startling and overwhelming at times.
And yet, my heart leaps up still at the sight of a fawn or the sound of Junie B’s nickering welcome. I hold my breath in suspended animation while I watch the big redorangepurplegold sunset and the silvercream moonrise. The Carolina Wren building a nest in my grapevine wreath for the third year in a row is busy and cheerful. Her good cheer spills over into my soul. I am grateful.
The thirty eighth and thirty ninth chapters of Job, God’s questions to Job, are a beautiful lyrical description of our world. The springs of the sea... the dwellings of light... the storehouses of the snow... the chains of the Pleiades... wisdom in the clouds... the waterskins of the heavens... the Behemoth and the Leviathan... the horse and the hawk... the ostrich and the eagle... It is our world for the span of our lives but it has been God’s world since the beginning of time. Like the Psalmist, I will rejoice and be glad in it. I will smell the crab apple blossom incense and my soul will rise up to meet my Creator. I will eat the tender asparagus shoots and give thanks for the abundance of the earth. I will sing praises with the turkeys and the quail. I will sit down in silence with the grazing deer and listen for the Lord to speak. It will be more than enough. Thanks be to God for this most amazing gift.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
