Chapter One
The Self WhatMattersMos_ornament.jpg
"I have a suspicion there must be more to me than I even know."
Your desire for a full and fulfilling life begins with your resisting the
definitions and labels others place on you to define who you are and their
attempt to tell you what you ought to want. The moment comes when you have to
decide for yourself who you are and what your own desires and fantasies are. You
also have to figure out what it will take to turn your fantasies into reality
and whether you've got what it takes.
If defining who you are, knowing where you end and where others begin, and
figuring out a way to find the time and energy to accomplish the goals you've
set out for yourself sound impossible to you, then beware of giving yourself
away to love. Falling in love, as exhilarating as it feels in the beginning, can
cost a woman large chunks of herself if she isn't attentive to its snares. In
the male-dominated world in which the Shulammite lived, women were raised to
believe that they had to acquiesce in order to be loved; men were raised to
believe that to love was to possess, control, and know better than those they
love what was best for them. Such thinking still lingers in our modern society.
The tragedy in our upbringing is that men have been allowed to mistake our
caring for them as proof of our inherent weakness and our wish for harmony as
evidence of our submission. Conversely, women have been raised to mistake
domination for love and lust for intimacy. Blending your heart and hopes with
another and negotiating your way through a land mine of assumptions and
expectations while bartering to keep a piece of you that you recognize takes pit
bull tenacity. Who has that much energy? Most women don't, in light of all the
other obligations they are juggling. Small wonder that many acquiesce to the
pressure to give in and give up on their own passions in order to achieve
"harmony."
Odd, isn't it? A man falls in love and everyone cranes to see the woman who has
agreed to soften his edges. His status does not change, not substantially
anyway. He remains his own man, or is certainly expected to do so. A woman falls
in love, however, and both her image and status change. She goes from "Miss" to
"Mrs.," and folks immediately begin to defer to the man to whom she is attached.
She is no longer "Shula the Shulammite," but "Mrs. Solomon," or the woman who
has been seen cavorting around town with Solomon. Whatever dreams and desires
she had of her own are expected to be neatly folded into her husband's ambitions
once she marries or falls in love. Attention shifts from her dreams to his
dreams. She is expected to gladly redirect whatever passions she once poured
into her ambitions, her hobbies, and her career, and throw herself into helping
him become the man he dreams of becoming. Love adds to his possibilities for the
future because he has a wife to help him get where he's going, whereas it can
turn a woman into an appendage or, more likely, someone's property if she's not
careful.
You would think, for example, that it's a common enough practice for a married
woman to retain her last name that no one would bother to look up when my
husband and I introduce ourselves by our own given last name, his last name
being one thing and mine being another. But it isn't so. The woman at the
laundry where I've taken my clothes for fourteen years still shakes her head
when I correct her and remind her that my last name is not that of my husband.
Even worse, friends who've known me for twenty-five years, who've met my husband
only once, and only briefly, insist upon introducing me by my husband's name
even though they've never heard me refer to myself as anything other than
"Renita Weems." Recall the outrage expressed in the media when a certain Hillary
Rodham Clinton insisted upon retaining "Rodham" as part of her official name.
It's no wonder then that the book containing the Shulammite's poem is called
"The Song of Solomon." Look closely and you'll notice that the book's title all
but turns the Shulammite into someone other than who she was. The superscription
to the book (literally translated as "The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's")
gives the impression that King Solomon had something to do with the sensual
poems found within. Probably appended to the book by a later editor, the book's
title threatens to overshadow the value of the Shulammite's poetry. She was not
one of the lovesick women in Solomon's harem. But that's who later audiences
thought of when they stumbled across her steamy poetry. In fact, from medieval
times until not that long ago it was universally believed that not only is
Solomon the one the poet is in a froth over, but that the Queen of Sheba of 2
Kings 11 is the lusty woman who first whispered the poems in Solomon's ear upon
meeting him sometime around 950 BCE. Why the Queen of Sheba? Ancient
interpreters saw in the poet's self-assertion, "I am black and beautiful .,"
an indication that the woman was from a faraway land, like the Queen of
Sheba, somewhere like Arabia or Africa. In fact, a long history of ancient
artwork and writings pair Solomon and Sheba together as lovers, seeing in the
poetry of Song of Solomon a testimony of a steamy love affair that went on
between the two. Imagine the Queen of Sheba leaning over and whispering in
Solomon's ear:
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm
For love is stronger than Death,
Passion more relentless than Sheol.
Its arrows are of fire, a mighty flame ablaze.
Mighty waters cannot quench Love,
nor can torrents sweep it away.
If one offered all his wealth for love,
he would be laughed to scorn .
(8:6-7)
The belief has been that any woman bold enough to confess her red-hot passion
had to be someone along the lines of the hundreds of women King Solomon,
according to legend, kept in his harem (I Kings 11:1-8). The king's reputation
as a Casanova among women, bedmate as he was to seven hundred wives and three
hundred concubines, made him a popular subject of folk tales and folk music. No
doubt, plenty of speculation and tales arose about the kind of women who fell
for men like Solomon. Gullible. Needy. Desperate. Weak. Loose. A stalker. Any
woman bold enough to talk openly about her passion in polite company, like the
Shulammite, had to be a harlot. If not a harlot, then she was certainly the kind
of woman who falls prey to philanderers and gigolos. She was a goner. A floozy.
Another strike against our heroine is the fact that there's no explicit mention
besides one oblique reference (about Solomon's wedding day) in 3:11 to marriage
and marrying. There's no indication that the Shulammite and her lover are
married to each other or to other people. Wow!! Eight chapters teeming with
lust, love, sex, and passion in the middle of the Bible-and not once does the
heroine or her beloved talk about marriage as a way to seal their love and as
the institution in which they might properly express their pent-up sexual
frustration. Is the book a pamphlet in the Bible that condones sex outside of
marriage? I doubt it.
There's sure to be those reading What Matters Most who will take great exception
to my choice to concentrate on a literal rather than figurative reading of the
contents of Song of Solomon. Why not follow the Church's lead and read the
book's contents as a spiritual allegory where the dark headstrong woman and
shepherd lover transform into Israel and God, or the Church and Christ. That way
we can safely dispense with the Song's racy sexual overtones. Reading the book
as an allegory, a pictorial representation of an otherwise abstract or lofty
teaching, is the way generations of interpreters have scrambled to explain how
the book made its way into the Bible. But the truth is that those who sat down
and decided which books would make the cut into the Bible and which ones should
be tossed did not bother to leave any guidelines to help us understand the
standards they applied. None of us knows for sure what they had in mind when
they voted in favor of a book like Song of Solomon, which doesn't even bother to
mention God by name. The fact that the book traces its inspiration back to one
of Israel's wisest and most revered kings, Solomon, no doubt was a factor in
their decision.
One thing for certain is those who championed Song of Solomon's inclusion must
be admired. They worked overtime to persuade the stuffy officials deciding such
things in their day of the similarities between erotic desire and a healthy
spirituality. The notion that an erotic passion is akin in some important ways
to spiritual anticipation was an idea whose time had come. Marrying off the
lovers would permanently alter their lust and make it ill suited to capturing
the longing that fuels the spiritual journey. The notion that love is a form of
death-death to a former self and death to a certain way of being in the
world-was irresistibly reasonable to those who pondered the argument. You can
never return to your former self once you've loved. The funny thing about
romance is that it awakens you to fresh realities and simultaneously dulls you
to some others.
For years I was admittedly reluctant to devote any research to the lovestruck
woman in Song of Solomon. The image of a love-starved woman pining away for
romance was the exact opposite of what I felt contemporary women should draw
inspiration from. The media has seen to it that there is no shortage of sexually
provocative bimbo female characters to draw from television sitcoms. Why add to
the harem of images of love-starved women that are popular in our culture, I
reasoned. Excavating the life of a woman in Scripture who potentially fed into
popular notions of women as "dolls, babes, and bimbos" was not the way I wanted
to spend my passions.
I'm willing to admit now that my prejudices against the woman in Song of Solomon
were fueled somewhat by my own ambivalence about love and identity. I admit now
that I was guilty of doing the very thing I've been arguing throughout the
chapter not to do. I was looking at the Shulammite through the eyes of everyone
else (ancient interpreters and contemporary pundits). I hadn't bothered trying
to see her through her own eyes and testimony. I was dismissing a woman's
genuine search for intimacy as simply a pathetic story about trying to get laid.
The social and theological value of her testimony completely escaped me. It took
me some time to appreciate that, unlike so many other stories in the Bible
centering around the male search for self, the Shulammite was not extolling
solitude, individuality, separation, and aloneness as the sole path for
encountering God. Our poet doesn't hurl laws and oracles at us to shame us for
our wanting affection and our craving to be touched. She identifies with her
readers by tapping into our desire for intimacy, crooning about our desire for
experiences that take us outside ourselves, and reminding us of our need to be
connected. Hers is a story about a woman who discovers God and herself not
through abandoning her family (as did the disciples of Jesus), or refraining
from marriage (as did many of the prophets of Israel), or withdrawing for
extended periods of prayer and exceptional study (as did Elijah, Huldah, Paul,
and others). Everything she discovers about God and herself she learns from the
messy lessons that come with risking intimacy: the nicks and bruises that come
with living in the shaky bonds of mutuality and love; and the egg that cracks
over your head whenever you set out trying to have a love life and make a name
for yourself at the same time.
When the time came to sit down and write this, my fifth book on women's
spiritual growth and inner wisdom, I had in mind every woman I'd ever
encountered who drew a blank when asked to describe what she felt passionate
enough about to risk things precious to her in order to pursue it. I thought
about every woman who answered honestly in saying, "I don't know what my
passions are." There were also those who couldn't bring themselves to admit they
didn't know and tried gallantly to name things that ignited them. Most ended up
pointing to the amount of time and energy they poured into their families, the
effort they put into their friendships, and the long hours they devoted to work
as evidence of their commitments. But there's a difference between the life
energy we devote to sustaining other people's dreams, and the life energy we
invest in keeping our own soul alive and stimulated. As one woman aptly put it
after her family, friends, and work list was completed, "I love my life and all
the people in it, but I have a suspicion there must be more to me than I even
know." She's right. There is more to all of us than even we know.
Falling in love awakens something in a woman that's nearly impossible to put
back to sleep once it's been roused. It has a similar effect on girls, which is
why a teenage daughter in love sends a mother into hysterics. Which probably
explains why the poet cautions, "I adjure you daughters of Jerusalem that you do
not awaken love until it's time" (2:7; 3:5; 8:4). Love, even the pretense of it,
can reduce a confident, self-assured woman who runs a department of employees to
a babbling indecisive girl. Compare the strong, confident woman in Song of
Solomon 1:5-7 who knows who she is and what she wants to the simpering,
heartsick figure in 5:2-6 who can't decide whether to answer his knock or not,
go after him when he leaves her or not. If love can make oatmeal of a woman with
experience under her belt, imagine what it can do to a young girl who lacks the
spiritual muscle it takes to bear up under its vicissitudes. It can leave a
young girl tearing her hair and heart out when she hasn't enough experience to
know how to negotiate its demands nor to know her true worth.
When you're fifteen, a romantic breakup feels irrecoverable. You tell yourself
that you won't survive the heartbreak and that nothing else could possibly be
worse than the awful pain you're in right now. At thirty-five, you know you'll
survive this breakup, although a part of you doesn't want to because nothing
will make you happier than to make him hurt as bad as you're hurting right now,
even though you know better. Still you wonder whether he knows how much pain
you're in right now and imagine summoning the courage to go to his place, knock
on his door, then hurl every item he ever bought you in his face and storm away.
But you know better, and wonder how long you can cling to the possibility that
he'll come to his senses and come back to you before you feel like an idiot even
to yourself. At fifty, you collapse to the floor in sobs when he decides that
you're not the one he wants to spend the second half of his life with.
Continues.
