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Sensual

How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful! Your hair is like goats along the hills; your teeth are like shorn ewes that have been washed; your lips are like a crimson thread—so lovely; your cheeks are like pomegranate halves. (Song of Songs 4:1-3, abridged)

Sure, maybe it’s a poem about God. This poet wouldn’t be the first one to look at creation and imagine how it reflects characteristics of God: the wind as God’s whisper, the sunset as God’s smile, a sparkling stream as the glint in God’s eye.

It’s also possible, despite (or because of!) its location in the middle of the Bible, that it’s a poem of physical adoration, a celebration of human beauty, an unapologetic delight in the joys of sensuality. The poet gazes upon a beloved and cannot cease in adoration:

Oh my gosh, your eyes!
My goodness, your hair!
Be still my heart—your smile!

Then again, maybe it’s not either/or. To pause in delight, to celebrate a love (and to celebrate the Love of all loves), to be full of wonder, to be satisfied by the mutuality of adoration, to give thanks for the senses and sensualities that make life so acute—these too are gifts of the Creator. As the late Mary Oliver wrote about prayer: “Just pay attention … [this is] the doorway into thanks.”

Prayer: Thank you, O Love, for touch and affection. Thank you, O Life, for the flood of your beauty through all of my senses. Thank you, O Creator, for putting my spirit in flesh.

posted with the Daily Devotional

Bootstraps

God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. God determines the number of the stars, and gives to all of them their names. The Holy One lifts up the downtrodden, and casts the wicked to the ground. God covers the heavens with clouds, prepares rain for the earth, and makes grass grow on the hills. – Psalm 147:3-8 (abridged) 

I don’t know the names of all the stars, and I’ve never tried to count them. I’m content with trusting that God has done so. 

I cannot assemble the clouds or provoke them to rain. I make no claim to a green thumb, and I’m fortunate when a houseplant thrives despite my best efforts. It’s just as well that God sends rain to the grass and rivers to the sea. I certainly cannot. 

Yet I have nagging doubts about God’s capacity to cast down the wicked. (See how well wickedness is thriving in the world!) 

And I wonder whether God can be trusted with the brokenhearted, considering how many generations pass down the pain of unhealed wounds. 

It’s not complicated to praise God’s talents with nature. It’s harder to praise God’s abilities with people. Or maybe I just find it easier to praise God for the kind of work that I can’t control. Maybe I find it difficult to trust God with the kind of work I tell myself I should control. Rain falling, plants growing, seasons changing, rivers flowing—that’s clearly God’s work. But I think I should bind my own wounds so God doesn’t have to, and pull my own pieces together so the Holy One doesn’t waste time lifting me.  

Bootstraps really trip up my faith. Still I keep trying to use them. 

Prayer: Great is thy faithfulness, morning by morning. Merciful God, teach me my work and let me love you for yours. 

shared through the Daily Devotional

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