This song has been rolling around in my mind for awhile now, and then hanging out mostly under wraps. There are times when you wonder if what you’ve created is really for public consumption.

But...this finally is making a public debut. The story is this, when I took a Mystics course through seminary I agreed to write songs for all the readings of mystics I did, and the grandaddy of them all (so to speak) in mystical writing is the Song of Solomon.

The mystics, and particularly the early church fathers, were pretty sure that Song of Solomon couldn’t really be about sex. They go to great lengths to state that it is, in fact, an allegory about us and God. I don’t doubt that it is about us and God. But I also don’t doubt at all that this is about sex. If it was indeed written by Solomon, it is good to remember that he is reported to have at least a 1000 women uhmmm...available to him.

I read Song of Solomon and heard Barry White. The recording you are hearing is my best attempt, granted I am not black or sexy, to present the Song of Solomon in the style of Barry White. The lyrics are all directly from the book (with the exception of “you know what I mean” and “your coconuts are delicious”, which is a paraphrase of sorts).

Why we as God’s people will insist on acting as if all the good things we encounter and enjoy here and now are somehow wicked or misguided I will never know. That we have to twist anything biblical that refers to here and now, of God forbid, sex, to mean something “deeper” and “more pure” is both comical and tragic. Maybe, just maybe, God thinks good sex is a good idea.

Maybe, God in God’s wisdom, said that things were pretty darn good the way God made them, and God was serious. Maybe sex happened before the fall and isn’t our depravity at work, but is the intimacy that God intended for us.

In the end, we ought to know better than to try to make the Bible say what it doesn’t, or at least have the sense to accept that the author might have really meant what they wrote. Rather than trying to clean up scripture and make it pretty, maybe we should let it speak in all it’s fullness and grit and even eroticism.

 

Thanks to those who helped with this project, who for now, will remain nameless in order to protect their “innocence”.