I have a vulnerability hangover since yesterday’s writing. I get them if I’m vulnerable for too long, or in a really big way. You feel tender, exposed, like everyone saw the unedited version of you (and you guys literally do), and you feel like maybe some of it shouldn’t have been seen. It’s the kind of thing that pushes the edges of my comfort as an artist and a writer. It’s a truly 21st-century skill to be rejected and wrong publicly and then still show up the next day. For the record, I don’t think I’m wrong about anything YET, but I will be.

Song of Songs

I started reading the Song of Solomon (also known as Song of Songs) last night. It’s one of the only books of the Bible that is a book of poetry. A book about lovers, courtship, and marriage. It reads like Shakespeare, and you can hear the different voices, from male to female. They say one might be Solomon, the man whom God chose to build the First Temple in Jerusalem. Solomon later ruled over a unified Israel. The Shulammite Woman, though we don’t know her name, is the other voice.

It might be my favorite book in the Bible now. I’m a romantic. It’s easy to win me over. But I didn’t know they put poetry in the Bible. You could look at the entire text of the Bible as some form of poetry, but not like the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs is a uniquely beautiful, intimate, emotional, and spiritual text. An artist wrote that one.

It came to me yesterday, in my forever quest to understand my own heart. I notice, right now, when I need something, and I ask God for it, or I just continue in my work to seek, the right thing finds me, and pretty fast. When I realized it was there, this blueprint for love, this prose for divine union, sitting right under my nose, in my backpack, that I’ve been carrying with me, I just laughed. There are a lot of things I’ve been seeking explanation of, understanding, and answers for, that this big little book I’ve been carrying with me just has. If I were simply to pick it up, I might have exactly what I need.

Love is God’s kingdom

The Song of Songs shows us just how important art, poetry, and love are to God’s Kingdom. Love is God’s Kingdom. He gave us a love story to stand the test of time. He gave us designs for courtship and even how to keep love alive year after year. He gave us the idea that real love needs containment, containers. You hear about “crafting the best container” all the time in spiritual and healing spaces. But I had no idea it was a biblical concept. Of course, containers are pretty human, so it must have been in lots of traditions pre and post the Bible, but I just feel my heart expand, just a little bigger, every time I learn about something else that is so profoundly healing and necessary that is in the Bible first.

It reminds us that the heart needs a container to flourish. The heart is created with union in mind, for commitment by design. A seed can’t grow without soil. Marriage, commitment, a container for union, is that soil. We can’t, and we shouldn’t, even let the heart grow without it. If you put a seed with only some soil, its roots wouldn’t be able to expand. Its stalk wouldn’t stand up. You’d never see a flower.

I think we’ve lost, as a culture and society, so much reverence for commitment. Everyone’s scared to be like their parents. We were the generation that saw everyone’s parents start getting divorced by 3rd or 4th grade. Everyone’s hurting. It doesn’t feel easy for people to know how to give and receive love. Or even that commitment and marriage are the strongest containers for love. I think people will disagree about that even. I have never seen an open marriage work. I have never seen someone open their marriage without it being because one or both people were unhappy. I have seen people push the idea that it is totally acceptable to open your marriage to “get your needs met”. What an imbisolic way to live. What a peter-pan, I can’t give up the candy shop life.

Wife and husband are vocations. This isn’t a status symbol. This isn’t a trophy. This is a vocation of love and a commitment to bring God’s energy, the energy of love, here on earth.

I just made a very big statement. That I feel deeply in my womb, for which I don’t believe many people my age share with me. I worry that I’m at a place in my faith where few men will meet me. I trust that God will bring me a man who is following Him and whom I can surrender to and follow fully. Men have to lead this, too. I can’t. The feminine can’t. The masculine is the container. The divine container. You have to choose to lead into it. It’s a place of maturity and love. It’s king status.

I’m a mystic, don’t you know

There’s this fire I have about these concepts, too. It’s like love matched with anger. I’m taking it as purpose. It’s like being an activist for love. And no one gave me that role besides my own heart. I wish I had known earlier, for myself, for my little girl, that we could have been taken care of in a different way, in a heart-led way. In a way that would have chosen safety and the strongest container for love, early. When you have a big heart, I don’t think there’s any question that you need this. I’ve had to heal from closing my heart, to letting it get big, to realize this again.

And what a loss we are as a society to have lost sight of that. Understanding of that. Respect for that. Song of Songs begins with a marriage. He sees her and he says that one and they get married, lol. There is no love without the container. I’m reminded too that that’s why what I’m doing, being a mystic in the world, is needed in every lifetime. We have to keep coming back to these things over and over. Knowledge dies with generations, but why this stuff stands the test of time is because real truth hides in plain sight.

I think my soul is a Christian. Even if my mind wants us to be something cooler. I’m an activist for love, like Jesus was. I’m just a lover and I can’t help it. The mystics are always lovers, too. John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila. These were lovers, absolutely. They long for God with the intensity of a human lover, ache for communion, and to experience ecstasy in spiritual union. I guess not all Christians are lovers in the same way a mystic is—but the capacity is built into the faith: the invitation to fall in love with God through union so fully that it changes every other relationship, including with oneself, the world, and each other.

Love,
Val

UPDATE: NO LIVE STREAM THIS SUNDAY (8/17)
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