Romantic Love as an Echo of Divine Love

Song 1:2-4 (ESV)
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your love is better than wine;
[3] your anointing oils are fragrant;
your name is oil poured out;
therefore virgins love you.
[4] Draw me after you; let us run.
The king has brought me into his chambers.

Others
We will exult and rejoice in you;
we will extol your love more than wine;
rightly do they love you.

From The Problem of Pain (C.S. Lewis)

~~"There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all... Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling... of that something which you were born desiring... All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it... echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest... you would know it. We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul... If we lose this, we lose all.

"Your soul has a curious shape... made to fit a particular swelling in... Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you—you, the individual... Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's... God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it.... (Problem of Pain)


Lewis understands the common thread in all the books one reads, in all the stories and all the experiences that leave a person desiring something unreachable, something unexplainable, in short, ineffable.

Love in the best of human relationships (i.e., marriage) is but the echo of God’s love woven in the fabric of his creation. In the Song of Solomon the portrayal of human romance, is but the reflection or shadow of a more perfect love – a holy pursuit and wooing of the beloved. This is why the Gospel is the story of God’s love in reaching down into time and history to bring to final consummation the greatest romance. I see this is the way to read the Song of Solomon in its fullest meaning. Not as the medieval commentators who spurned the gift of human love, nor in the modern overly sensual version – for both are off the mark. It is reading the one in light of the other. We who are bought by the price of Christ’s blood (the bride’s price) now wait the arrival of the wedding feast. Then the bridegroom will come and say, "Arise my beloved, arise."