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The Erotic Dimension of Mystical Spirituality (or, Why Do Mystics Love the Song of Songs?)
Almost from the beginning of the Christian era, mystics and saints and theologians and spiritual teachers have reflected on one of the most beautiful and poetic of the “wisdom writings” in the Bible to explore the mystery of the love of God and how that love seeks intimacy with us, God’s human creatures. I am referring to the Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon or the Canticle of Canticles. It’s not so much a “book” as a poem or extended lyric; it’s short — only 8 chapters and barely over 100 verses long; my Catholic Prayer Bible has about 2000 pages, and the Song of Songs takes up less than nine of those. It’s one of only two books in the Bible that never directly mentions God at all. Instead, on the surface, it is a love poem — and a deeply sensual, subtly erotic love poem at that. So why, of all the spiritual and philosophical riches in scripture, would this be the book that the mystics and other God-seekers turn to, again and again?
The simple answer might make some people uncomfortable, but it needs to be said: we need to understand the fullness of human love — even including the passion and physical intimacy of romantic love — if we truly wish to explore the mysteries of God’s love. God’s love is bigger than all earthly love, like the entire spectrum of light extends beyond the rainbow of human vision. But if we want to appreciate the splendor and mystery of light, we ought to begin, at least, by embracing all the light that we mortals can comprehend, and then from there we can try to extend our understanding of light into the “hidden” regions of infrared and ultraviolet rays.
I say “hidden” because they remain hidden from our eyes, not because they are beyond the mind of God!
Truly, infrared and ultraviolet light are mystical in the arcane meaning of the word: such light is beyond our normal comprehension, and only become known to us by the special technologies that make them “visible” in a way. When I was a child, there was a time when blacklights were popular, at least among the hippies and flower children: a device which emits ultraviolet light, invisible to the naked human eye, but some items (like petroleum jelly, tonic water and oddly enough, urine) are fluorescent: that absorb ultraviolet light…
