Dear Friends,
Let me repeat the invitation to morning tea at the manse next Sunday (15 Sept) – delivered in the style of the Song of Songs!
“Arise, my loves, my fair ones,
and come to the Manse next Sunday with food for morning tea,
for now the winter is past,
Aron has mowed the lawn,
the flowers appear on the earth,
and the time for eating and drinking and talking has come!”
Yes! Please stay after church! Take the time to catch up – or connect with someone new! If you can bring a plate of goodies to share that would be wonderful. (You can drop these at the manse on your way into church – just open the back gate and put them on the table on the porch – and shut the gate again so the dogs don’t escape!)
I appreciated the comments I referred to last Sunday about the Song of Songs from composer David Lang because I have always found ‘praise and adoration’ a challenging part of prayer.
Several years ago, the morning prayer group (that meets for 30 minutes each weekday at 8am. Anyone is welcome to join in – on any day! Use the Zoom link HERE and the password is ‘Currie’) was using the A.C.T.S. mnemonic for our prayer time together: A stands for adoration, C for confession, T for thanksgiving and S for supplication. Thanksgiving and supplication came very naturally. Confession was harder – especially in a group – but it got easier over time as we learned to trust one another and recognized we were all faulty human beings. Adoration, however, was the hardest. What exactly did adoration of God consist of? How was it different from thanksgiving? Perhaps what makes it hard for us is the degree of openness, of vulnerability, that is required to adore someone!
And this is why the Songs of Songs is instructive for us, David Lang says. In his remarkable musical composition, Just (After Song of Songs), he takes the two main voices in the book, a man and a woman, and lists everything each individual refers to as owning. The statements of male ownership are introduced with, ‘just your [blank]’, and the statements of female ownership with, ‘and my [blank]’, and the rare instances of shared ownership he writes as ‘our [blank]’. He explains, “One thing that has always interested me about the text is that the man and the woman in the Song of Songs have attributes, they notice things about each other, they own things, they have features that are desirable. In a love between people this would be no surprise. In a love between Man and God, however, that might mean that in this text are clues to the nature of God’s own attributes, and a record of how they might attract us…. The Song of Songs is a metaphor for our passion for the Eternal.”
What are God’s own attributes that we find attractive? Can we list some of those? Can we find some in the text we relate to or in our own experience of God? Maybe we can only list one or two, at first, but if we keep at it, we might be able to write our own Song of Songs – our own version of the Holy of Holies!
Grace and peace,
Belinda