paul j. griffiths

When the Song of Songs’ lover says to his beloved, O my beloved, you are completely beautiful/there is no stain in you (4:7), his words are, precisely, figures of Christ’s words to the Church: he (the Song’s lover) is preparing to present his beloved to himself as the immaculata — giving her to herself as such by his love for and embrace of her, and in that way giving her as gift also to the world. One way to receive that gift is to read of its giving in the Song’s words. These verses, properly illuminated by reading them as scriptural words, have application not only to the Lord’s Israel-Church as such, immaculate and shining, burnished and pure, her lips dripping honeycomb as she opens them to the Lord’s kisses, but also to baptized Christian readers of the Song. In baptism you were made immaculate, stainless: the Church preserves this idea in the baptismal liturgy, representing it both verbally and by the dressing of the newly-baptized in the unstained white garments proper to those who are immaculate. If you are baptized, you have not, I take it, preserved your stainlessness since your baptism: your white garments are by now wrinkled and spotted and deeply (but not ineradicably) stained. But you once were stainless, like the Song’s beloved, and like the Church. And this is not the only application to you: the Lord’s praise of the Song’s beloved as completely beautiful and stainless (5:2) belongs to his delight in and desire for her; and that delight and desire applies to you, too, although of course in a derived and participated way. You can, then, take the words of these verses of the Song to heart as addressed directly to you. Even that is not all. Your own addresses to your beloved and his or hers to you participate in and figure those of the Lord to his beloved. Knowing that, seeing it, illuminates the sheer excess of your own delight in and desire for your beloved. That is as it is in its goodness and beauty (it is of course not only that, but also shattered and corrupt, violent and manipulative) because the Lord’s delight in and desire for you is as it is. In this, as in all things, you image, to the extent that you are undamaged, the Lord himself.