Girl Boss Self-empowerment and the Song of Songs

Rachel Zegler, God bless her, seems to be the gift that keeps on giving.  She has become almost involuntarily the face of girl boss self-empowerment, the modern woman who denounces patriarchy (that nebulous foe), derides the notion of fulfillment through finding true love and its first kiss, and discovers her destiny through self-empowerment.  Which is presumably easier to do with access to Hollywood fame and money.

       I have already written about the new Snow White remake with its hostility to the original 1937 film and the appreciation of the original film on the part of old Jesus People like myself.  Here I would like to focus more upon an alternative to the Snow Woke disdain for finding fulfillment through true love:  an alternative given its classic formulation in the Song of Songs (a detailed commentary on which can be found here).

       The Song of Songs is really all about true love, despite its graphic and repeated references to anatomical details.  We see this in the lover’s request that his beloved put him like a seal over her heart, “for love is as strong as death, jealousy is as severe as Sheol. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of Yahweh.  Many waters cannot quench love, nor will rivers drown it” (Song 8:6-7).   

Significantly, this collection of erotic songs begins with what one might describe as love’s first kiss, for in the very first verse the bride cries out, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth”.  Love’s first kiss indeed! 

The point is not the sex, but delight in the beloved.  Of course such delight finds physical and sexual expression and fulfillment, but only an idiot or a pornographer could fail to see the essence here is not in raw sex, but in longing and love.

Every person who has ever really been in love knows this.  Even C. S. Lewis, almost a life-long bachelor, knew this.  In his classic The Four Loves Lewis wrote about true love.  A man in love, he avers, has “a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved, with her in her totality. A man in this state really hasn’t the leisure to think of sex.  He is too busy thinking of a person.  The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself.  He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, ‘To go on thinking of her.’”  To a man in this state, sex with the person would be a fulfillment of true desire, but (and here’s the point) it would have to be sex with the person he was in love with.  Sex as a mere physical experience wouldn’t do.

This reality must be appreciated to really understand the imagery of the Song of Songs.  What the bride wants is not kisses, but kisses from mouth of her beloved, her true love.  She wants not foreplay, but love’s first kiss.

This experience of love is why, I boldly suggest, why all young girls really want to find their Prince Charming and why (if they will quietly admit it) the men want to be Prince Charming to the woman they love.  They want to be her knight in shining armor, someone worthy of her love.  They want to be able to open their shirt and let her see the large red letter “S” against a background of blue and reveal to her that he really is Superman.  Admitting this of course involves being emotionally vulnerable, which is perhaps why so few men will admit to it.  But it remains a fact even so, patriarchy’s hidden and well-guarded secret.

It all comes out, of course, in love poetry.  Poets in love are forever talking about chains—not to bind the beloved, but to bind themselves to the beloved.  The chains are not actual chains but are promises—in the West, the promises exchanged at the wedding ceremony.  Consider, for example, an old version of the promise every bridegroom used to make to his bride:  “With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship [i.e. honour] and with all my worldly goods I thee endow, in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost”.  Note for a moment:  “with my body I thee worship”.  He wants to give her everything—his body and everything he owns.  Here is the timeless desire of the man, liturgically expressed, to be Prince Charming to his Snow White.

Out of such love comes new life, for everyone that falls in love feels newly alive, like someone awakening for the first time from a long sleep.  A song of Mary Chapin Carpenter expressed this well.  In her song “The Better to Dream of You”, she sang, “Everything that came before us wore me out and weighed me down.  You raised me up like a Gospel chorus, rock steady on solid ground. Like an old-time tent revival, I felt my heart come back alive.  No preacher, baby, no Bible—just this love to testify.”

Note again:  like Snow White in the sleep of death, she felt her heart come back alive.  Her Prince Charming felt the same thing, as I can confidently testify, for this is what true love does and why its first kiss brings life.

This true love outlasts the hormones and sexual ardor of youth.  Such ardor is designed to be the explosion that starts the engine of love, but the engine continues to run on and purr even after the initial ignition and explosion.  Its final goal may sometimes be seen among the elderly. 

Fr. Alexander Schmemann saw it in the city of Paris.  In his For the Life of the World, he wrote “once, in the light and warmth of an autumn afternoon, this writer saw on the bench of a public square, in a poor Parisian suburb, an old and poor couple. They were sitting hand in hand, in silence, enjoying the pale light, the last warmth of the season.  In silence: all words had been said, all passion exhausted, all storms at peace. The whole of life was behind in this silent unity of hands. Present—and ready for eternity, ripe for joy.”

This is what the Song of Songs leads to; this is the vision proffered by such fairy tales as Snow White.  This is also the rationale and goal of marital chastity and fidelity for, as the Song of Songs said, “jealousy is as severe as Sheol. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of Yahweh”.  What is the woke vision of the girl boss and the promise of self-empowerment beside this?

The bride in the Song of Songs is not concerned with patriarchy, but with her lover.  And her lover in the Song of Songs knows that patriarchal power has no place in their love.  He does not want to oppress her or enchain her.  Rather he wants to don the chains himself, binding himself to her with promises of fidelity and devotion, to go on thinking of her, to worship her with his body and his life.  He wants to live a long life with her and finally hold her hand in silence watching the warm sun set in the west.

We perhaps owe to Ms. Zegler a debt of gratitude for making the basic choices before us stark and clear.  It could be that in an era of that gave us such television shows as “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory” such chastity and true love are rare and Prince Charming cannot be expected to make an appearance on the online dating sites.  But one should not despair.  Those who know the Lord have read the Song of Songs and perhaps are brave enough to take a different path than the one embodied by Ms. Zegler.  In Scripture and in fairy tale and deep in the human heart, the true vision remains.