The Love You Seek

June 2nd, 2010 by Robert McDowell

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
—Theodore Roethke

The love you seek is an all-encompassing sharing of equals. If you desire relationships that embody surrender to this ideal and worship of your beloved, then your story is your true path to getting there. When you succeed in connecting on every level with yourself, you become heroic. Only then will you achieve complete surrender and worshipful union with your beloved. And in that ecstasy, you will find that you are story and poetry. “Everything wants to be hallowed,” writes Martin Buber, “everything wants to come to God through us…”

After making love, after liberating each other’s holiness, we savor and are grateful for the moment of intimacy we’re living in. We rejoice in memory and we dream of connected moments to come. Our moments, memories, and dreams become stories and poems that commemorate, celebrate, and evoke divine connection. In these moments we become and live an intense and evolved life practice that can heal our wounded globe.

Speaking practically, what does that look like? Well, it can look like this.

How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter!
The joints of thy thighs are like jewels,
the work of the hands of a cunning workman.
Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor:
thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.
Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools
in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower
of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.
Thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head
like purple; the king is held in the galleries.
How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!
This thy stature is like to a palm tree,
and thy breasts to clusters of grapes. I said, I will go up
to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof:
now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine,
and the smell of thy nose like apples;
And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved,
that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep
to speak. I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me. Come,
my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves. The mandrakes give a smell,
and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old,
which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved.

These are lines between a bride and bridegroom from Chapter 7 of the Old Testament’s Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon. The Song of Songs is ecstatic give-and-take, a dialogue of ever-escalating passion between a man and a woman as they move through the stages of courtship and marriage. Traditional allegorical interpretation holds that the man and woman represent God and Israel, or, in Christianity, God and the church. However, the literal meaning of this enduring poem-song is undeniable. Its 117 verses gift us with some of the most tender and erotic poetry ever written.

They also provide powerful support for my belief that sex, language, love, and spirituality are forever entwined. Mystics of every religion have always known this simple truth—that spirituality bereft of language and drained of love and sex is no longer spirituality at all.

In her bestselling book, Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about her gratitude for those seekers who return from the center of the heart “with a report for the rest of us that God is an experience of supreme love.” A love like this is impossible without the language of poetry and story. It cannot exist without a spiritual quest. It cannot breathe without the poetry and story-sharing that is sex.

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