the invitation

BEFORE WE BEGIN

Over the next six weeks we are going to read one of the oldest, most beautiful, and most argued-over books ever gathered into Scripture. We are going to read it carefully, and honestly. And we are going to let it open a door, into desire, the body, love, marriage, intimacy, and what it means to be a whole sexual person.

For many of you, this may be one of the first times anyone has spoken about sex and sexuality with you directly, as an adult, without flinching. For others, you have carried these questions a long time. Either way, you are welcome here, exactly as you are.

Let me say one thing before anything else. You get to take as much or as little from this study as you want. I am not here to hand you a rulebook. I am not here to tell you what to believe about your own body, or your own moral understanding of sex and sexuality. I am here to teach, and to help you discover what you believe, and why. In a real sense, that is the whole point of the Song of Songs. It is a book meant to illuminate and expand who you are.

THE SCANDAL OF THE BOOK

There is a strange fact about the Song of Songs that most people never learn, and it is the perfect place to begin.

For nearly two thousand years, this small book has unsettled the very people entrusted to guard it. It has been guarded, hidden, spiritualized, and occasionally nearly discarded, and it has also been called the holiest book in all of Scripture. Both of those things are true at once. That tension is not a problem to be solved. It is the doorway into everything we are about to do.

Consider a few facts about how it has been treated:

• Ancient Jewish tradition held that a person should not read it until the age of thirty.
• Origen, one of the most brilliant minds of the early church, wrote a great commentary on it, and also warned that the spiritually immature should not read it at all.
• It is the only book in the Bible that never once mentions the name of God.
• And it is, plainly read, a frank and unembarrassed love poem between two people who desire each other completely.

So what kind of book earns that much caution, and that much reverence, at the same time?

A love poem. One so honest about desire and the body that the guardians of the tradition never quite knew where to set it down.

And yet Rabbi Aqiba, among the most revered voices in all of Judaism, declared:

Hold those two things together. The book that made people most nervous is the book a great teacher called the innermost sanctuary. The most embodied, most sensual book in Scripture was named the holiest of the holy.

THE SCANDAL OF SEXUALITY

The scandal is not only in an ancient book. It lives in our own histories, our own homes, our own bodies.

Every person in this room learned about sex somehow. And how we first learned shapes us far more than we realize. Some of us were handed information early and clearly. Some of us learned through silence, and silence is its own kind of teaching, the message that this was not to be spoken of. Some of us learned through images, or through a friend, or a screen. And some of us learned through experiences we did not choose, experiences that were confusing, or frightening, or violating. There is a wide and tender range in this room right now, and I want to honor all of it.

(Space for the story shared in this session, and for what it stirs in you.)

WHO AM I, AND WHY I TEACH THIS

The Song of Songs opens by naming its author: "Solomon's Song of Songs" (1:1). The book tells you who is speaking before it says anything else. So I will follow its lead and tell you who I am, because you deserve to know who is asking for your trust over these six weeks.

I was raised inside purity culture, in the eighties and nineties. The rings, the pledges, the retreats. I believed what they taught me. That my body was something to guard. That my future hung on staying pure. That my worth rode on it. My home added one twist. My mother taught sexual education, so I never lacked the facts. I grew up with the science of the body in one hand and the fear of it in the other.

I also absorbed the lie underneath all of it. That what you do and who you are are the same thing. Get the act wrong, and you were wrong, all the way down. It took me years to see how false that is. Unlearning it is part of what set me free.

I went on to teach human sexuality as a professor, and to sit with people as a sexuality counselor. I have taught the Song of Songs since 2008. I trained pastors and church leaders, and I never took that lightly. I was also never good at handing out rules, and it got me into trouble. I was called too honest, too direct. But people did not need another list. They needed the truth, and someone unafraid to say it.

Underneath the teaching, I carried a contradiction. My first marriage struggled, and where it struggled most was here, in intimacy. We looked for help. And in those rooms, I was often the one told the problem was me. That my wanting was too much. I spent my days telling people their desire was a gift, then drove home and heard that mine was a defect. So I made a quiet peace with it. I decided the freedom I kept describing to everyone else was simply not meant for me.

That marriage eventually ended. It is a longer story, and not only mine to tell. Around then I shelved a finished version of this very study, because I could not teach on love while my own was breaking. I thought I had disqualified myself. I see it differently now. This book is not afraid of longing, or failure, or the places love fractures. It holds all of it. My own fracture, and the healing after, is the very thing that lets me teach this with more compassion and far less certainty.

I am not in practice today. These days Chani and I keep a table where people can be honest, whatever they are walking through. Leaving purity culture behind. A life that did not turn out the way it was promised. An affair. Coming out, or loving a child who is. We do not hand out rulebooks. We make a safe place, and we teach. That is why I built this study. I almost missed the very thing I spent my life describing. I do not want you to.

I come at this material from three directions, and I will keep returning to all three:

• Historically, because human beings have wrestled with sex and the sacred for millennia, and their wisdom is worth inheriting.
• Theologically, because I believe deeply, and I believe our faith has something true and freeing to say about the body.
• Humanistically, because I care about actual people and their actual lives, not abstractions, and not rules for the sake of rules.

WHERE I STAND

Every teacher carries biases. The honest ones name them. So let me put mine on the table now, so you can weigh everything I say against them. Take what is useful. Leave what is not.

I grew up inside purity culture. I know it from the inside, not as a critic looking in.

A word on that term, because not everyone will know it. "Purity culture" refers to a movement that swept through American evangelical Christianity in the 1980s and 1990s. It emphasized sexual abstinence before marriage as the central measure of a young person's virtue. It came with purity pledges, purity rings, father-daughter purity balls, and enormously popular books urging young people to "kiss dating goodbye." Its intentions were often sincere, to protect the young. But its method leaned heavily on fear, shame, and the idea that one's worth was tied to remaining sexually "pure." Many of us who grew up in it are still untangling what it taught us.

So when I question that framework, understand that I am not mocking a world I never lived. I lived it. And I have spent years thinking my way through it, and beyond it.

Here is how I would describe my approach now. It is not legalistic. It is not bound by evangelicalism. It is deeply historical, theological, and humanistic. I hold my faith seriously, and I hold my conclusions with open hands.

And here is where I have landed:

• Knowledge does not lead to behavior. Knowledge leads to informed behavior. The old fear, that teaching people about sex will simply make them run out and do it, is not supported by the evidence. Awareness and knowledge produce more thoughtful decisions, not fewer.
• Much of what we inherited was a fear-based faith. A theology built on denial. But denial is a poor foundation, because the God of the Scriptures is not fearful of the world He made.
• You are not damaged goods. No sexual history places a person beyond love, growth, or redemption. A sexual mistake is not a different, worse category of human failing.
• My aim is to help you decide what you believe, and why. I am entirely at peace if you land somewhere more conservative than I do. I am at peace with your disagreement. What I am not at peace with is you never being given the chance to think it through as an adult.
• We hold all of this from a humble posture. I do not have every answer. No one does. I will hold my positions firmly enough to teach them, and loosely enough to keep learning. I will not perform a certainty I do not possess.

WHAT SEXUALITY ACTUALLY IS

Before we go a step further, I want to give you the single most important distinction in this entire study. Everything else rests on it, and almost everyone who raised you believed the opposite.

That line is often attributed to Anna Freud. I have to be honest with you, the way I intend to be honest on every page: I have never been able to verify that she actually said it. It floats around on her name the way half the good quotes do, with no real source underneath. So I will not pin it on her. I will simply tell you that whoever first said it was right, and I have taught the idea for twenty years because it is one of the truest sentences I know.

Sex is a behavior. Sexuality is an identity. One is a thing you do with your body. The other is a thing you are in your bones. And that difference is not a technicality. It changes everything.

Because you can teach a behavior in an afternoon, and people have tried, badly, with their diagrams and their warnings. You cannot teach an identity that way. An identity is not installed from the outside. It is discovered, from the inside, over a lifetime.

Your sexuality sits closer to the center of who you are than your job, your politics, or even your theology. It is one of the deepest places you ever find out what you actually want, what you actually fear, how you connect to another human being, and who you actually are. And most of us were handed almost nothing true about it.

RIGHT BELIEF NEVER MADE YOU WHOLE

I want to give you two words now that will name a frustration many of you have carried for years without language for it.

Orthodoxy means right belief. Orthopraxy means right practice. Right thinking, and right doing. I picked these up years ago reading Richard Rohr, the Franciscan writer who spent a career arguing that the church fell in love with orthodoxy and quietly forgot that the whole point was supposed to be orthopraxy, the practice, the living, the actual doing of the thing rather than the endless policing of what people believed about it.

Almost all of the religious and cultural training most of us received about sex was obsessed with orthodoxy. It worked tirelessly to get us to believe the correct things. And it made a silent promise underneath: that if you simply believed the right things and followed the right rules, a whole and satisfying life, including a whole and satisfying erotic life, would follow automatically, like a reward dispensed for correct answers.

It does not work that way. It never has. Right belief, by itself, has never once made anyone whole.

You can hold every approved belief about sex and still lie awake at two in the morning beside the person you married, lonely, unseen, and untouched, silently certain that something is broken in you. And when right belief fails to deliver the life it quietly promised, most people do the most natural and most tragic thing. They assume the defect is in them.

The defect was never in you. The defect was in the design of what you were taught. They handed you orthodoxy and called it the whole thing. They never gave you the orthopraxy, the skills, the honesty, the language, the lived and practiced experience of becoming whole. This study is my attempt to finally put the orthopraxy back. We will still think carefully. But we are here to practice becoming whole, not merely to believe the right things about it.

INTO THE LIGHT

If you take only one thing from this first session, I want it to be this. It may be the most important principle we cover, and everything else grows out of it.

Healthy sexuality is lived in the light. Broken sexuality hides in the dark.

Let me start by dismantling a false divide you were probably handed without realizing it: the idea that life splits neatly into the sacred and the secular. The sacred is church, prayer, the spirit, the "high" things. The secular is the body, money, sex, the "low" things. And your sexuality, in that map, got filed firmly under secular, the worldly part of you, the part with no business near the holy.

That divide is a lie, and the Song of Songs is its refutation. Here is a book, at the very center of Scripture, that takes the most supposedly "secular" thing imaginable, two bodies wanting each other, and places it in the Holy of Holies. There is no wall between your sexuality and the sacred. Your body is not the secular basement of an otherwise spiritual house. It is part of the sanctuary.

Now here is why the light matters so much. Fear and shame cannot survive in the light. They require darkness to live. The researcher Brené Brown, who has spent her career studying shame, puts it precisely: "If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment." Secrecy. Silence. Judgment. That is the exact recipe most of us were handed for our sexuality. Keep it secret. Stay silent. And judge, harshly, anyone who does not.

And what does that darkness produce? Look honestly at the state of things. Consider how often the loudest voices condemning sexuality turn out to be living secret, broken sexual lives of their own. This is one of the oldest and saddest patterns there is. Augustine, who shaped so much of the church's fear of sex, was writing out of his own tormented history, in a real sense writing his private struggle into public doctrine. And the pattern did not end with him. Very often, what a person rages against most loudly in public is the very thing consuming them in private. That is not an accident. It is what happens when sexuality is forced into the dark. It does not disappear. It festers, and it eventually comes out sideways, and someone gets hurt.

The alternative is not more rules. It is light. It is the willingness to bring the truth of our sexuality, our desires, our questions, our failures, our wounds, up out of the dark and into an honest place where it can finally be seen, named, and healed. That is what this room is for. Not to expose you. To let you, safely, and at your own pace, stop living the most intimate part of yourself in the dark.

ACCEPTANCE, NOT REJECTION

There is a reason shame needs the dark, and it goes to the deepest thing about us. Brené Brown defines shame as "the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging." Read that again. Shame is, at its root, the fear of disconnection, the fear that if the truth about us were known, we would be pushed out, cut off, rejected.

That is the engine underneath so much of our sexual pain. Not the acts themselves, but the terror that our desires, our history, or our bodies make us unacceptable. Unlovable. Rejectable.

Human beings are wired for belonging. We are, at our core, built to be accepted, to be part of the group, to be held rather than cast out. And when it comes to sexuality, most of us were handed the opposite of acceptance. We were handed a running audit of the ways we fell short, a sense that acceptance was conditional and always one confession away from being revoked.

Here is what the research and the counseling room both confirm: people do not heal in an atmosphere of rejection. They heal in an atmosphere of acceptance. Shame, judgment, and fear do not produce growth. They produce hiding. It is acceptance, being seen in full and not turned away, that gives a person the safety to finally tell the truth, and it is telling the truth that finally lets the healing begin.

So I want to be clear about what kind of space this is. This is not a place where you earn acceptance by getting it right. You are accepted here at the start, as you are, with your whole history and every unspoken question. That is not me lowering a standard. It is me naming the only soil in which real growth has ever actually happened.

REBUILDING DESIRE

There is one more thing you need to understand about the water we have been swimming in, and it may be the most surprising.

We were not only taught to fear desire. In a real sense, we were taught to aim for its absence. The sex therapist David Schnarch, one of the most important voices in the field, observed that "for most of Western civilization, low sexual desire has been considered a goal rather than a problem." Sit with that. For centuries, the ideal was not a person alive with healthy longing. It was a person who had successfully minimized desire, who wanted less, who had gotten their appetites safely under control.

If you absorbed that, and nearly all of us did, then desire itself started to feel suspect. Something to manage, apologize for, or extinguish. Many people arrive in adulthood, or in a long marriage, genuinely disconnected from their own wanting, and then wonder why intimacy feels flat, dutiful, or dead.

So let me tell you plainly what a large part of this study is actually for. It is not about restraining desire. It is about rebuilding it. Reawakening it. Learning that healthy desire is not the enemy of a good life or a faithful one, but one of its richest signs. The Song of Songs will be our teacher in this, because from its very first lines it does the thing we were trained not to do: it celebrates wanting. It treats longing as beautiful, not dangerous.

Over these six weeks we are going to help you find your desire again, understand it, and stop being afraid of it. That is not a detour from the sacred. As this whole book insists, it may be one of the truest paths to it.

YOU ARE NOT THE FIRST

Now I want to place all of this in a much larger human story. Because the honest truth is this: what we are doing in this room is not new, and it is not strange. It is ancient, and it is nearly universal.

Across the great cultures of the world, human beings have celebrated desire and the body as worthy of art, of teaching, of reverence. The discomfort many of us inherited is not the human norm. It is the exception. Let me show you.

India , carved into the temple itself. At Khajuraho, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, stands a group of Hindu temples built in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Their outer walls are covered with intricate carvings of mithuna, couples entwined in love. This is not vandalism, and it is not hidden. It is on a house of worship. In the Hindu framework, kama, desire, is one of the four legitimate aims of a human life, standing alongside duty, prosperity, and spiritual liberation.

Japan , printed, and used to teach. During the Edo period, from 1600 to 1868, Japanese artists created a celebrated genre of erotic woodblock prints known as shunga, literally "spring pictures." Some of the most revered artists in Japanese history produced them, Hokusai among them. And these were not shameful objects hidden away. They were art, and they were openly used to educate young couples about intimacy. Imagine being handed, not silence, but something beautiful, and the words: this is for you.

Greece and Rome , painted in plain view. In Pompeii, sealed under ash in 79 CE, archaeologists uncovered erotic frescoes on the walls of homes and public buildings. Greek pottery from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE is rich with sexual imagery. For these cultures, the body and its pleasures were simply part of ordinary life, depicted openly rather than concealed.

And the Hebrews , sung in words. Here is the connection that ties it all together. Ancient Hebrew culture did not carve erotica into its temples or paint it onto its pottery. Its tradition largely avoided visual images altogether. So where did the Hebrew celebration of healthy sexuality go? It went into language. It went into poetry. It went into a book.

The Song of Songs is the Hebrew equivalent of the temple carving, the woodblock print, the fresco. It is the same deep human impulse, to honor desire as good and to make it beautiful, expressed in the medium the Hebrews trusted most: the sung and written word.

So when anyone suggests that speaking openly and reverently about sex is somehow modern, or crude, or unspiritual, you may gently tell them the truth. It is one of the oldest and most sacred things human beings have ever done. You are not the first. You are joining a long and honorable line.

THE SONG IN GOOD COMPANY

There is a worry some people carry into this book: that something this frankly sexual must be an accident in Scripture, an outlier, an embarrassment best hurried past. It is neither an accident nor an outlier. The Song belongs to a rich and recognizable ancient tradition of sacred love poetry, and knowing that tradition only confirms what the Song has always been.

The Song did not fall from the sky in isolation. Consider the company it keeps.

Ancient Egyptian love poetry (c. 1300 to 1100 BCE). Around the time the Song took shape, Egyptian scribes were composing love poems that read strikingly like it. In collections such as the Papyrus Chester Beatty and Papyrus Harris 500, the lovers call one another "brother" and "sister," just as the Song does. They ache with lovesickness. They meet in gardens. And the woman speaks her own desire boldly, exactly as she does in the opening lines of the Song. This is the strongest scholarly parallel, explored in depth by Michael V. Fox in The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (1985).

Mesopotamian sacred-marriage poetry. Older still are the Sumerian hymns celebrating the love of the goddess Inanna and her beloved Dumuzi, frankly erotic, filled with garden and fertility imagery, with the woman again speaking her longing openly. Here the love poem was woven directly into worship.

The wasf. The Song's famous head-to-toe descriptions of the beloved's body match a poetic form found across the Semitic world, later named in Arabic the wasf, a poem that praises the body part by part. The Song is a master of the form.

What does all of this mean for us? Two things.

First, the Song is not naive and not accidental. It is a sophisticated, mature example of a genre humanity had been refining for over a thousand years. It knew exactly what it was.

Second, and this is the heart of it: the Hebrews took this ancient tradition of love poetry and placed it within their Scripture. Other cultures made sacred erotic art. Israel bound its version into the holy text, sang it, and eventually crowned it the Holy of Holies. They looked at the most universal of human songs and declared: this, too, belongs among the sacred things.

WHOSE SONG IS IT?

Every serious reading of a text begins with a few honest questions. Who wrote it? When? For whom? And where does it belong among the other sacred writings? The Song rewards these questions richly, and the answers are more interesting, and more debated, than most people realize.

"Solomon's Song of Songs." The book's first line ties it to Solomon, Israel's legendary king, the son of David, remembered as the wisest man of his age and, not incidentally, a man of enormous romantic appetite (the tradition credits him with seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines). Solomon's name carries two things at once: unmatched wisdom, and unmatched experience of love and its excesses. To attach a great love poem to Solomon is to say: this is the wisdom of love, from the one who knew its heights and its costs.

But here is where honesty matters, and where I will not pretend to a certainty scholars do not share. The little Hebrew phrase behind "Solomon's Song" (asher li-Shlomo) is genuinely ambiguous. That small word li can mean "by," but it can just as easily mean "for," "about," "dedicated to," or "in the tradition of." So the superscription may mean Solomon wrote it, or that it was written for him, or about him, or simply in his grand poetic tradition.

Did Solomon actually write it? Most modern scholars think not, and their reasons are worth understanding rather than fearing. The Hebrew of the Song contains later linguistic fingerprints, including Aramaic influence and at least one clearly Persian loanword, pardes (the word behind our "paradise"), meaning a walled garden or orchard. Persian words point to a time after the Babylonian exile, centuries after Solomon lived. So many scholars date the Song, at least in its final form, to the post-exilic period, roughly the fifth to third centuries BCE, as a masterwork of Israelite love poetry gathered under Solomon's name.

Does that unsettle the book's authority? Not in the least. Attaching a work to a revered figure was a common and honorable practice in the ancient world, a way of placing a poem within a stream of wisdom. Whether Solomon held the pen or not, the Song was received, treasured, and canonized as the greatest of songs. What matters for us is not the signature. It is the wisdom.

THE WOMAN AT THE CENTER

Now I want to tell you about the person who actually carries this book. Because the Song of Songs does something almost unheard of in ancient literature, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

The central figure of the Song is a woman. And it is her voice, more than any other, that we hear.

Stop and consider how extraordinary that is. This is a text from the ancient Near East, a world in which the written word belonged overwhelmingly to men. Laws, chronicles, prayers, poems, the surviving voices are almost entirely male. And here, preserved in the heart of Scripture, is a great poem in which a woman speaks first, speaks most, and speaks with complete authority over her own desire.

She opens the book. Before we hear from the man, before we hear from anyone, we hear her: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth." She is not waiting to be chosen. She is not silent. She names what she wants, pursues her beloved through the city streets, praises his body as openly as he praises hers, and calls him to her without apology. Scholars have put it simply: she is the pursuer as much as the pursued. The emotional center of gravity in this entire book is a woman's longing, a woman's voice, a woman's agency.

her longing is the engine of the whole song

This is part of why the Song matters so much for how we think about sexuality. In a religious history that too often silenced women, or treated their desire as dangerous, here is a book at the very center of the canon where a woman's desire is not only permitted but celebrated, held up as beautiful, wise, and holy.

Who was she? Later she is called "the Shulammite" (6:13), most likely meaning a woman from the village of Shunem, in the north of Israel. The text presents her not as a queen or a noblewoman but, it seems, as a young woman of ordinary origins, a worker in the vineyards. This is a love song not about palace royalty, but about the dignity and glory of very human love, and it places a working woman's voice, desire, and body at the sacred center. We will meet her defiant declaration about her own body, "dark am I, and lovely," when we read the opening of the poem together in a moment.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

For two thousand years, readers have approached the Song in three basic ways. It is worth knowing all three, because you have almost certainly absorbed one of them without being told its name.

1. The allegorical reading. The Song is understood as pure symbol. Jewish tradition first read it as a portrait of God's love for Israel. Early Christians read it as the love between Christ, the bridegroom, and the Church, the bride. In this approach, the physical descriptions are never truly about the body. Every image points elsewhere, to something spiritual.

2. The typical reading. A hybrid view, prominent from around the thirteenth century and still common in more conservative settings. Yes, it grants, this is a love poem, but its real purpose is to point beyond itself to the divine romance. Read the physical quickly, and move on to the "real" meaning.

3. The literal reading. The Song is what it plainly appears to be: human love poetry, celebrating desire between two people, and given to us as Scripture. This is where most modern scholarship lands. It is worth noting that one of the earliest teachers to read it this way, Theodore of Mopsuestia, was condemned for it. For much of history, reading this book as what it obviously is could get a person branded a heretic.

Where do we stand in this study? We will read the Song primarily through the literal lens, as a genuine, God-given celebration of human love and desire. And we will still honor its sacred dimension, the way human intimacy can open onto something greater, without ever using "the sacred" as a tool to erase the body. Because that erasure is precisely the wound so many of us are here to heal.

One more thing about our method. We are going to walk through this book in order, the way it was written, letting each movement of the poem lead to the next, rather than skipping to the parts we find comfortable. When the poem opens a subject, we will follow it, and we will bring in other passages of Scripture that illuminate what the Song is showing us. But we will let the Song set the path. Great teachers of this book have always insisted on that discipline, and it protects us from making the text say only what we already thought.

LET US READ IT TOGETHER

Before we teach a word of it, let us put the text in our mouths. Read this aloud, slowly. Notice the three voices. She speaks most. He answers. And a chorus of friends chimes in. Listen for who wants, who reaches, who praises.

Now let us walk back through it, slowly, from the very first line.

THE GREATEST SONG

The book tells you what it is in its very first breath. Not "a song." The Song of Songs. In Hebrew, that construction is how you say the greatest of all. The Holy of Holies is the holiest place. The King of Kings is the highest king. And this, out of the more than a thousand songs the tradition credits to Solomon, is called the Song. The greatest of them all.

And what is the greatest song about? It is about love, desire, and two people finding each other. Hold that. Of everything a king could write his masterpiece about, the tradition placed this crown on a love poem. That alone should tell you how seriously Scripture takes the thing we were so often taught to be nervous about.

A quick honest word before we go further. Scholars still debate the basics of this book, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Who wrote it, and when. Whether the name "Solomon" means he wrote it, or that it was written for him, or simply in his grand tradition. Whether it is one unified drama or a gathered anthology of love poems. Good, faithful people land in different places on all of that, and none of it changes what the book plainly is. So we will read it as what it obviously is, a great song of human love given to us as Scripture, and where the experts genuinely disagree, I will tell you.

We will not spend long on the question of who actually held the pen. Some of it may be Solomon's, some gathered in his tradition. What matters is the wisdom, and the wisdom starts now, in the second verse, in a woman's voice.

THE FIRST WORD IS WANT

The very first voice in the greatest song ever written is a woman saying what she wants. Not asking permission. Not waiting to be chosen. Naming her desire, out loud, without apology.

Sit with how quietly radical that is. In a world that spent centuries telling women their desire was dangerous, shameful, or simply absent, the Bible opens its love poem with a woman's wanting, and calls it beautiful.

And notice what she reaches for. Not sex, first. A kiss. The most intimate thing. In the film Pretty Woman, the one act the character will not sell is a kiss on the mouth, because a kiss is too intimate, too personal, too much like actually being known. The Song opens on exactly that. She wants the most intimate thing first.

Why a kiss? Because a kiss shares breath.

Here is something worth slowing down for. In Hebrew, the word for breath, wind, and spirit is one and the same word, ruach. In Genesis 2:7, God forms the human from dust and breathes into him the breath of life, and the man becomes a living being. Breath is life, all through Scripture. "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord" (Psalm 150:6). When Jesus commissions his followers, "he breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20:22).

Now think about what a kiss actually is. Two people, sharing breath. Sharing ruach. It is one of the most life-giving things two human beings can do, and the Song knows it. This is not a small peck. It is the mingling of two lives at the place where breath comes and goes. She is not asking merely to be touched. She is asking to share life. Intimacy, not just function. Closeness, not just release.

In my house, when my kids were small, we had little kisses and big kisses, the quick peck, and the real one. My son Sully, when he wanted the real thing, would ask for the big one. I have never forgotten it, because it names something true. There is a kiss that is a transaction and a kiss that is a communion, and most of us can feel the difference in our bodies. Even in the middle of a hard season, my wife and I learned that sometimes the truest thing one of us could say was not a word at all. It was, just kiss me. Share breath again. Come back to life.

And here is the quiet grief in it. Many long-married couples keep having sex but slowly stop kissing. They keep the function and lose the life-giving part. The Song calls us back to the kiss. Back to shared breath. Back to life.

DESIRE IS NOT THE ENEMY

Stay on that second half of the verse. Her love is better than wine. It is delightful. It is a pleasure to be celebrated, not a danger to be managed. The Song assumes something most of us were taught to doubt, that desire itself is good.

Here is what most of us were handed instead. Desire is the problem. Desire is what you resist, outrun, apologize for. The holiest person, we were taught, is the one who wants the least. That teaching did not fall out of the sky. It has a history, and it is worth naming, because when you see where an idea came from, it loosens its grip on you.

Where "desire is dangerous" came from

We talked about Augustine last time. He was not alone. A whole stream of the early church treated desire itself, even in marriage, as something to escape.

• Jerome (c. 347 to 420), who gave us the Latin Bible, taught that virginity was the "life of angels" and marriage a distant second. He read Paul's line "it is good for a man not to touch a woman" and concluded, flatly, that if it is good not to touch, then it is bad to touch. Sex, to Jerome, was at best a concession, never a delight.
• The Encratites (2nd century), whose very name meant "self-control," taught that fulfilling sexual desire was itself a sin, and forbade marriage entirely.
• The Manichaeans (3rd century onward), who saw the physical world, and the body's desires, as evil matter to be transcended. Augustine spent nine years among them before his conversion, and never fully shook the instinct that the body was the problem. The historian Peter Brown traced this whole development in his landmark study The Body and Society, showing how the early church, breathing the air of a Greco-Roman world that already prized spirit over flesh, slowly made sexual renunciation the mark of the holiest life. This was not the plain teaching of Scripture. It was a current of the surrounding culture that got baptized and handed down as if it were the faith itself.

For centuries, that instinct hardened into doctrine, and it still echoes in the pulpits some of us grew up under. But hear this clearly. That stream is not the whole river. It is one tradition, and a distorted one, and the Song of Songs was in the Bible the entire time, quietly refusing it.

There is a line from the therapist David Schnarch that I have never been able to shake, because it names the whole tragedy in a sentence. "For most of Western civilization low sexual desire has been considered a goal rather than a problem. Since the early days of Christianity people's self-worth was measured by their ability to destroy their sexual desire with their mind. Sex was not a sin if done without desire" (Schnarch, Passionate Marriage, 1997). Read that again. We built a spirituality where the ideal was to feel nothing. The Song was in the canon the whole time, saying the opposite.

Other people knew better

While parts of the church were teaching people to want less, other traditions, including older parts of our own, were celebrating the body as good.

• The Jewish tradition never lost it. In Judaism, marital sex is a mitzvah, a sacred obligation, and not merely for children. The concept of onah, rooted in Exodus 21:10 and detailed in the Mishnah, makes a husband's provision of sexual pleasure to his wife a religious duty, with an expected frequency and everything. The tradition specifically honors intimacy on the Sabbath, the holiest day, as part of its joy. The people who first sang this Song understood. The body is not the enemy of the holy. The body is where the holy shows up.
• Japan printed shunga, "spring pictures," and used them to teach and delight married couples, treating sex as natural and even auspicious.
• India carved embracing lovers into the temple walls at Khajuraho, desire literally built into a house of worship.

We are not the first people to wrestle with this. But we may be among the first to be handed only the fearful version and told it was the whole of the faith. It was not.

Your body is not a mistake

So what does Scripture actually say about these bodies of ours? It says they are wonders.

In Genesis, God makes human beings bodily, male and female, looks at everything including their naked bodies, and calls it "very good" (Genesis 1:31). Before the fall, "the man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame" (Genesis 2:25). Shame is the intruder in that story. The body, and its desires, came first, and they were called good.

Your desire is real. It is written into your biology, your chemistry, your nervous system. It is not a spiritual failure to overcome. It is part of how you were made, on purpose.

THE BODY WAKES UP

Watch what the poem does next. It does not stay abstract. It comes alive through the body, through the senses. First taste, in the wine of verse 2. Now smell, in the fragrance of verse 3. Soon touch, in the kiss, and sight, when they begin to praise each other's faces. The Song is a fully embodied poem. His presence lights up all of her senses. She is not having a spiritual experience instead of a physical one. The physical is the doorway.

The senses really do bind us

This is not just poetry. Scent, it turns out, carries real information between human beings. In a famous study, Claus Wedekind (1995) had women smell shirts worn by different men and found they were drawn to the scent of men whose immune-system genes differed from their own, an unconscious biological pull toward a good match. I once watched a version of this play out in a room. A woman who had been married more than a decade came up, blindfolded, and picked her husband out of a lineup of men by scent alone. No sight, no sound, just breath and skin. She found him in seconds. Her body knew him. The science is subtle, scent shapes attraction more than it lets you pick a stranger from a lineup, but the deep truth holds. We come to know each other through the body, through smell, through touch, in ways beneath conscious thought.

And touch itself bonds us. Physical affection, holding, kissing, sex, releases oxytocin, the hormone of trust and attachment, calming the nervous system and knitting two people together over time. This is the biology under the poetry. When the Song lingers in the senses, it is describing something real. This is how lovers actually know each other, in the flesh, over years.

And here is the warning

Many couples, over time, slowly stop. They keep the sex but drop the kiss. They stop lingering, stop noticing the fragrance, stop touching outside the bedroom. They rush to function and lose the poetry, and the bond quietly starves. Research on long relationships consistently finds that affectionate touch and attentiveness are among the strongest predictors of satisfaction, and among the first things couples abandon.

I once had a man in his late sixties tell me, with tears, that he would give up every orgasm for the rest of his life if his wife would simply desire him again. Sit with that. At the end of a long life, what he ached for was not release. It was to be wanted. That is the thing that starves when we stop tending it. And it is the thing the Song refuses to let die.

So a hard question, and not only for marriages. What are we, as families, as churches, as a culture, actually doing to teach people to cultivate romance, pursuit, desire, and praise? Mostly we teach the rules and skip the cultivation. We tell people what not to do and never show them how to keep a fire lit. The Song does the opposite. It is a master class in staying awake to each other. It calls us back to the whole body, unhurried, alive.

DESIRE IS MUTUAL

That is not a woman being pursued. That is a woman pursuing. "Take me away. Let us hurry." Across this book she initiates, seeks him in the streets, calls him to the garden, and, remarkably, hers is the dominant voice in the entire poem. The biblical scholar Phyllis Trible pointed out just how unprecedented this is. In a text from a world where the written word belonged overwhelmingly to men, it is a woman who opens the book, speaks the most lines, and drives the story. Her desire is the engine of the whole thing.

This matters, because enormous harm has come from the lie that women do not, or should not, want. Our culture tells a lopsided story. Men crave sex, women crave love. Men pursue, women hold back. The Song of Songs does not know that story.

What the research actually says about women's desire

The sex educator and researcher Emily Nagoski, in Come As You Are (2015), overturned the old assumption that "normal" desire is spontaneous, which was really the man's model. Most women, she showed, experience responsive desire, desire that shows up in response to pleasure, safety, and context, rather than arriving out of nowhere. That is not brokenness. That is normal. Women who were taught that their slower-to-kindle, context-sensitive desire meant something was wrong with them were measured against the wrong yardstick their whole lives.

Nagoski's other great gift is the dual-control model. Your sexual response runs on an accelerator, all the things that turn you on, and a brake, all the things that turn you off, like stress, shame, resentment, exhaustion, feeling unsafe. Most people who think they have "low desire" do not have a weak accelerator. They have a foot standing on the brake. And here is the thing purity culture never told anyone. It spent years teaching people to slam the brake as hard as possible, and then acted shocked when the accelerator would not work on the wedding night. You cannot spend a decade training your body to associate desire with danger and then flip a switch. The brake is real, and for many of us it was installed on purpose.

There is a related finding worth naming, from researcher Meredith Chivers, called arousal non-concordance. The body and the felt sense of desire do not always agree. A body can show signs of arousal without the person wanting anything, and a person can want deeply while the body is slow to catch up. This matters enormously, because it means your body's response is not consent, and the absence of an instant physical response is not rejection. Two truths the church and the culture both badly needed.

Journalist Peggy Orenstein, in Girls & Sex (2016), documented how girls are trained to prioritize everyone's pleasure but their own, and how reclaiming their own desire and agency is central to their wholeness. The point of all of it, and of the Song, is the same. Women desire. Women pursue. Women crave intimacy and pleasure and their partner's body, and the Bible's own love poem puts a woman's desire in the very first lines and never once apologizes for it.

The higher-desire and lower-desire partner

Here is how this actually shows up in a real relationship, and I taught this for years before Nagoski gave me better language for it. In nearly every couple there is a higher-desire partner and a lower-desire partner, an initiator and a responder. And the myth we were all handed, that men always want it and women never do, is simply false. Over the arc of a real relationship, couples flip back and forth. The roles move with seasons, stress, health, and hurt. The lower-desire partner is usually the responsive one, the one who warms up once things begin. Neither role is the broken one. The problem is never that two people want differently. The problem is when they cannot talk about wanting differently, when the gap becomes a scoreboard instead of a conversation.

Healthy desire, then, is a mutual thing. Not a hunter and a fortress. Two people, both awake, both reaching. And as we saw earlier, other traditions never lost this truth, that the body and its wanting are good; it was one narrow, fearful stream that tried to teach us otherwise. Next session, when the poem calls the lovers out into the springtime, we will pick up this thread again and ask what has happened to pursuit and courtship in our own moment, because that turns out to be one of the most urgent questions the Song raises for us now.

THE ROLE OF FRIENDS

Notice who speaks at the end of verse 4. It is not the lovers. It is a chorus, her friends, the "daughters of Jerusalem," and they will appear again and again through the book. This is the third voice in the Song, and it is not decoration.

Her community affirms him. And that matters, because friends see things we cannot see about our own relationships. Friends often recognize when a relationship has turned toxic long before the person inside it can admit it. There is real wisdom in asking, what do the people who love me actually say about the person I am with? How do they talk about us?

But there is a hard counsel here too, one I gave couples across years of sitting with them. Be careful what you tell your friends about your partner's failures. Here is why. Your spouse can wrong you, and you can forgive them, and your marriage can heal. But your friends, who love you fiercely and only ever heard your side in your worst moment, often never forget. You reconcile. They are still holding the grudge. So they keep the wound alive, reminding you of the very thing you were trying to heal. Guard the deepest, most broken parts of your intimate life closely. Share them with one or two truly safe people, not the whole circle.

And here is the beautiful side. The way we speak about our partner, in public, to others, shapes the relationship itself. When you praise your spouse to other people, you build something. When you run them down, get sarcastic, make them the punchline, you tear at the root. The woman in the Song brags on her lover to her friends. Her praise is part of what makes the love strong. Character, hers and his, is being spoken into being, out loud, in community.

For those of us taught that focusing on the physical was shallow, notice what the Song refuses to split. It is unashamedly physical, and it prizes character. When people are asked what they most want in a lasting partner, it is not looks that top the list. It is trustworthiness, steadiness, someone whose inside matches their outside. The Song holds both. A whole love wants the body and the character. Both. Together.

DARK, AND LOVELY

She compares her skin to the tents of Kedar, the famous black goat-hair tents of a nomadic desert tribe, tough, weather-beaten, and beautiful. In her culture, pale skin was the beauty standard. It meant a life of leisure, a woman kept indoors and cared for. Dark skin meant you labored, that you had been worked in the sun, that you belonged to the working class. So she is being looked down on for the evidence of her toil.

And notice why she is dark. "My mother's sons were angry with me and made me take care of the vineyards." Her own brothers put her to forced labor in someone else's field. The line that follows is one of the saddest and most important in the book. "My own vineyard I had to neglect." Her vineyard is her own self, her own body, her own life. She was so busy being used, tending everyone else's fields, that she had no time to tend her own.

Read that again and tell me it is not a description of half the people you know. Worked to exhaustion in fields they did not choose. Judged for the toll it took. So depleted from caring for everyone else that their own self, their own body, their own desire, went untended and overgrown.

And here is her defiance, and it is the beating heart of this whole study. Under all those judging stares, she refuses the shame. And listen closely to the word she uses, because most Bibles get it subtly wrong. Many translations read "dark, but lovely," or "dark, yet lovely," as if her darkness were a flaw she is lovely in spite of. But the Hebrew word joining them is the ordinary word for "and." She does not say dark but lovely, as if the two were at war. She says dark and lovely. Both. At once. With no apology and no excuse. The very thing she was told to be ashamed of, she names in the same breath as her beauty, and refuses to let anyone pry them apart. That is what healing sounds like. Not "I am acceptable in spite of the thing I was shamed for." "I am lovely, and that thing is part of me."

SHE GOES LOOKING

Even here, in a handful of quiet verses, the pattern holds. She is the one asking. She wants to know where to find him in the heat of the day, so she can be with him rather than wandering "like a veiled woman beside the flocks of your friends." She does not sit and wait to be found. She goes looking.

And the answer comes back gently, "if you do not know, most beautiful of women, follow the tracks of the flock" (1:8). No shame in her seeking. No rebuke for her boldness. She wants him, she says so, she moves toward him, and the poem treats all of that as good. Keep watching how often, in this book, the woman is the one on her feet.

A MARE AMONG PHARAOH'S CHARIOTS

Now he answers her, and his first image sounds strange to us. He compares her to a horse? But understand the picture. Pharaoh's chariots were pulled by stallions. To loose a single mare among ranks of war-stallions would stop an army cold. Every stallion's head turning, the whole formation thrown into helpless distraction. He is telling her, you are the one who stops everything. Every eye turns. No one can concentrate when you walk in. It is not a barnyard insult. It is him saying she is devastating, singular, impossible to ignore. Right after she has been shamed for her looks by others, he tells her she stops armies.

There is a small Hebrew wonder here too. The word for horse, sus, appears well over a hundred times in Scripture. But this is the only place the feminine form, susah, a mare, is used. One time in the whole Bible. The grammar itself is singling her out. She is the one of one.

He goes on, "your cheeks are beautiful with earrings, your neck with strings of jewels" (1:10). He is dressing her in praise, naming her beauty piece by piece. This is what a good lover does. The world told her she was too dark, too worked, too much. He tells her she is the mare among the stallions. Praise is how we heal each other's shame.

MYRRH BETWEEN THE BREASTS, AND THE BODY MADE HOLY

Now she answers his praise with her own, and it is lush, and it is unmistakably sensual, and it is hers. A sachet of myrrh, a precious fragrant resin, worn on a cord so that it rests between her breasts, all night, close to her skin, warmed by her body. That is how near she wants him. Henna blossoms from En Gedi, a green oasis in the middle of a desert wilderness, means he is her burst of life and beauty in an otherwise barren place. Her love is a fragrance that fills the room, close, warm, alive against the body.

And here she uses a word worth marking. She calls him dodi, "my beloved," from the Hebrew dod. It can be translated "my lover." It is a word of frank erotic desire, a craving for physical closeness, and she will use it again and again through the book. We will do the full study of dod and dodim next session, when the poem turns fully to knowing. But hear it landing here first, in her mouth, unembarrassed.

Notice what Scripture is doing. It lets a woman describe wanting her lover against her skin, name her own breasts without a flinch, and it calls the whole thing holy. Sit with how different that is from what most of us were taught. Which brings us to something we have to do if we are going to read this book with any honesty.

We have to be able to say the words

The Song names the body without shame. Most of us never learned to. We were handed nicknames, "down there," "the private parts," as if the true words were dirty. So grown adults, even married ones, cannot say the real names of their own body to the person they sleep beside, and then we wonder why intimacy struggles. If you cannot name it, you cannot ask for it, protect it, or celebrate it. Naming is the beginning of honor. The Song names the body plainly, and so will we, because you cannot honor what you cannot even say.

And here is the theology underneath it, the one we keep returning to. "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14). When you actually understand how the body is made, down to the smallest design, you do not find something to be ashamed of. You find a wonder. The woman's body the Song is beginning to praise here, and the man's, are not accidents to be managed. They are the works of God, called very good.

We are only at the breasts and the fragrance for now. But mark this moment, because next session the poem turns and does something extraordinary. It walks the entire body, head to toe, and praises every inch of it out loud. That poem has a name, the wasf, and when we get there we will do what the church almost never does. We will look, honestly and reverently, at how these bodies are actually made, and let the design itself preach. For now, hold the principle the Song is establishing right here in chapter one. The body is not the enemy of the sacred. The body is where the sacred shows up.

THEY PRAISE EACH OTHER

Now the praise goes back and forth, each naming the other's beauty. He says, your eyes are doves, gentle and faithful, for doves mate for life, the window of the soul. She answers, you are handsome, you are charming, and our bed is green, alive, growing. He praises her. She praises him. Neither is passive.

This is the rhythm the whole book will build on. Two people who look at each other and say, out loud, what they see and love. Most relationships die for lack of exactly this. We stop saying it. We assume the other person knows. The Song never stops saying it. Praise is not flattery here. It is the daily oxygen of a living love.

AN ORDINARY WILDFLOWER

For centuries preachers made this line about Jesus, "the Rose of Sharon." Read in context, it is the woman describing herself, and it is humbler than it sounds. The rose of Sharon was most likely a common wildflower, a crocus or meadow bloom, the kind that carpets an ordinary field. She is not calling herself a rare orchid. She is saying, I am an ordinary wildflower, and, after everything she has been through, she still calls herself lovely.

And watch what he does. He immediately raises her higher. "Like a lily among thorns is my darling among the young women." You call yourself a common flower? Then every other woman is a thornbush by comparison. She names herself ordinary. He names her singular. That is what love does. It takes the ordinary and calls it precious, not by pretending she is something she is not, but by seeing her truly and delighting in her anyway.

HIS BANNER OVER ME IS LOVE

Now she is fully in it. She sits in his shade, tastes his fruit, is brought to the banquet hall, and there, over her, flies a banner. A banner was a military standard, the flag an army marched under, the thing that told you whose side you were on and whom you belonged to. She says, the flag flying over me, the thing that claims and covers me, is love. Not fear. Not shame. Not obligation. Not performance. Love.

A note for the honest reader, because this line is one of the few real puzzles in the chapter. The Hebrew word is degel, and "banner" is the traditional and most likely reading. But some scholars, Marvin Pope among them, connect it to an older Akkadian root meaning "to look" or "to glance," which would render the line "his glance toward me was love," the look in his eyes as he crossed the room. I lean on banner, and we will teach it that way, because it carries the whole picture of covering and belonging. But I want you to know the other reading exists, because it is beautiful too, and because I would rather hand you the honest uncertainty than a false confidence. Whether it is the flag over her or the look in his eyes, the thing arriving is the same. Love.

And then the tenderest picture in the chapter. "His left arm is under my head, and his right arm embraces me." She is held. Fully, securely, bodily held. This is what desire, rightly answered, feels like. Not conquest. Not control. A person wrapped safe in the arms of someone who wants them. That is the banner of love made flesh.

And that is where chapter two's first movement leaves her, and us. Held. Safe under a banner that says love, not fear, not obligation, not performance. Hold onto that picture, the arm under the head, the flag of love overhead, because in a later session we will have to talk honestly about what happens when the arms are withdrawn, when the banner over a marriage quietly changes. But not yet. For now, let the image stand as the Song means it to. This is what desire, answered, feels like. Being wanted, and held.

DO NOT AWAKEN LOVE

Three times in the Song (2:7, 3:5, 8:4) the woman turns to the younger, unmarried women and says this. It is one of the most important lines in the book, and one of the most abused.

So hear it as she meant it. There is no shame in the waiting, and no shame in the wanting. There is only the counsel not to rush the most powerful thing you will ever feel. Let it awaken in its time. And when it does, let it be real.