The God Who Calls Me "Beautiful"

How beautiful you are, my darling!  Oh how beautiful!  (Song of Songs 1:15)

How easy to approach God as an object of study.  How easy to try to fit him into calculations made about a happy life.  How easy to make theories about him.  Perhaps all of these impersonal approaches come from my conception of God as a distant being, far-removed from me and my life.  He may be near in proximity, but not near in concern or love.

Perhaps I do not yearn enough for God because I do not see that he is yearning for me.  In the Song of Songs, the lover can be likened to God and the beloved an individual soul.  It is disturbing to see God humbling himself to the status of a “wooer.”  He sings over me songs of passion.  He yearns for me more than a lover for a beloved.

It’s not surprising that such an interpretation of the Song seems somehow “below” God.  I have read in a book that one man cannot sing worship songs about how “beautiful” God is because he feels that such love is somehow “beneath” God.  No doubt the usual state of love between lovers is beneath God as it is beneath people, but the fault lies not with romantic love, but with the misuse of it.

I think the reluctance to attribute such a “low” love to God comes from more than just its misuse.  I think that the yearning, longing God is not one that I typically imagine.  I want God to be aloof because I want to be aloof.  I want God to remain “above” such behavior because I want to be above it.  God accepts worship; he does not give it.  These feelings keep me from succumbing to the God who calls me “beautiful.”

Lord, I want your love to be a fragrance that rises from the deepest parts of me.  My understanding and acceptance of your love is what deepens and drives my worship and love for you.  Save me from remaining aloof to your yearning love.  Amen.

This misunderstanding of God as “too good” for this lowly romantic love influences how I worship, but also how I read the Bible.  As I worship God, as I read his word, I want to know him more than study him.  “Theorists  explain the offerings, but lovers become one.”  (The Fire of the Word, Chris Webb, 68)