The Song of the Bride

Yesterday I was listening to a song by Ruth Hughes (now Ruth Hughes Finlay; see inset above) from her 1976 L.P. Awake North Wind, a song paraphrasing Psalm 104. I remember buying the album from her personally, showing up at the side door of her Scarborough home.  She was a part of a charismatic group to which I then belonged; we were a tight-knit family so it wasn’t hard to find out where she lived.  I remember in particular telling her that her voice sounded “anointed” (that’s how we talked back then).  Being a modest person, she just stared and said nothing. 

       After all these years it is still my favourite record album.  I probably wouldn’t describe her voice as “anointed” now.  Now I just listen and say “wow”. 

       In particular, I keep on returning to her rendition of Psalm 104 which you can listen to here.  For years I couldn’t figure out why the song was so haunting, how it was that it somehow snuck past all your defenses and transported you to a different place, a place of sweet sunshine and peace, a field next door to paradise, but recently I think I finally figured it out.  In Ruth’s rendition the psalmist is thinking about the Lord in the same dreamy way that a beloved daydreams about her lover, thinking of him, longing for him.  (The word “lover” in our culture has become irredeemably sexualized; here I use the word simply to mean “the one who loves you”.)    

You can almost see the singer lying in a field and thinking of the Lord, asking herself and no one in particular, “Who lays the beams of His chambers in the sea, who makes the clouds His chariots running free?  Who walks upon the wings of the wind, who makes His angels spirits, His ministers a flaming fire?  Who lays the foundations of the earth that it should not be removed forever and ever?  I will sing unto the Lord as long as I shall live.  My meditation of Him shall be sweet and I will be glad in the Lord forever and ever.”  This dreamy sort of meditation is what someone does when they’re in love. 

And it is not the first time I heard this sort of musical expression of devotion.  In a very old Christian 1977 album entitled The Courts of the King we find a paraphrase of my favourite psalm, Psalm 84.  It was sung by Nedra Talley Ross, originally of the Ronettes.  In the song she confesses, “A day in Your presence is far better to me than gold or living my whole life somewhere else.  And I would rather be a doorkeeper in Your fold than to take my fate upon myself.  You are my sun and my shield, You are my lover from the start and the highway to Your city runs through my heart”.  Again we seem the same almost dreamy devotion to God.

A single song about God as lover might be a one-off; two might be a coincidence, but when other songs say the same, we might be onto something.  Such a song is Prince Song by the Christian group The Second Chapter of Acts.  In explaining the song, its writer Annie Herring explained it as referring to Jesus our Prince of Peace and to the Church as His bride.  Annie sung, “My sleep is over, I’ve been touched by His fire that burns from His eyes and lifts me higher and higher. I’ll live forever with Him right by my side.  He’s coming again, on a white horse He’ll ride.  He’ll clothe me and crown me and He’ll make me His bride.” 

Again we see the (non-sexual) use of the term lover.  What does all this mean?  It means that the interpreters who insisted on seeing in the Song of Solomon a vision of the mutual love between God and His people, between Christ and His Church, were not wrong.  The marital love between bride and bridegroom which is the foundation of sexual love and of marriage is rooted in the primordial love of God for His creation.  God’s love is the original, the prototype; human love is the derivative, the expression of divine eternal love in the realm of the physical and the created. 

God is the lover; we are the beloved.  God is the seeker; we are the sought.  He is the bridegroom; we are His bride. As a wise man once observed, in the vocabulary of the mystics, the soul is always feminine regardless of one’s gender for God He is the wooer and we are the wooed.  He is the one seeking and the human soul is the one sought.  He does the seeking, not us.  If we seem to be seeking God, that is only because He has already found us.

I suggest that this gives us one of the keys to understand true Christian spirituality.  It is easy— perhaps fatally easy— to build our relationship with the Lord upon obedience, upon the dictates of conscience, upon a sense of duty, upon the Law.  All of this is good for we need to obey, to follow our conscience, to do our duty, to fulfil the Law.  But the heart of our relationship with God is not built upon these and these are not the ties that bind us to the heart of God.  Love is.

The question therefore is:  do you love God as a bride loves her bridegroom?  At the risk making the question sexualized or sentimentalized we ask:  are you in love with Christ? 

This was the issue for the apostles.  When Christ’s words in John 6 about the necessity of eating His flesh and drinking His blood caused most of His hearers to be offended and to leave Him, He asked the Twelve if they also wanted to abandon Him.  Peter spoke on behalf of all the hearts in love with the Lord: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You only have the words of eternal life”.  It was as Peter would later write to Gentile converts describing the essence of the Faith: “Without having seen Him, you love Him” (1 Peter 1:8). 

It is also what St. Anthony the Great meant when he said, “I no longer fear God; I love Him.”  And it is why such akathists as that to “our sweetest Lord Jesus” were written.  Note: not “our most glorious Lord Jesus” or “the mightiest Lord Jesus” but “our sweetest Lord Jesus”.  In that Akathist as in the aphorism of St. Anthony we hear the voice of the bride.

I suggest that without this love for the Lord which finds its closest human equivalent in the love of a bride for her bridegroom, no real Christian growth is possible.  The presence of this love separates— well, if not “the men from the boys” then certainly the nominal Christians from the martyrs.  If we are to grow in our faith, if we are to press on to know the Lord (see Hosea 6:3) there must beat in our heart this love, the love that a bride has for her bridegroom.  We must be in love with the Lord.  That is what drove the martyrs into the arena of death, singing for joy.

And that is perhaps why the Book of Revelation, the book of martyrdom par excellence, ends in the same way as the Song of Solomon.  The latter book ends with the beloved calling out longingly to her lover, asking him to return to her: “Make haste, my beloved! Be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountains of spices!” (Songs 8:14).  The Apocalypse (and the Bible) end in the same way, with the Church, the bride of Christ, calling for the Lord to return and inviting the world to come to Him: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come!’” (Revelation 22:17). In both we hear the voice of the bride, calling to her lover, her bridegroom, the one who loves with a deathless love.  The songs sampled above, whatever their musical quality or timelessness, are our songs.  For they are the songs of the bride.