Lover and Beloved in The Song of Songs

Saturday, May 9, 2026

Sunday

God is the infinity of love; therefore our love for each other is an incarnate manifestation of that infinite love, which is incarnate in our love for each other. The Song of Songs expresses this love song of the heart. —James Finley

Monday

If the Song of Songs has nothing to do with the story of God and Israel after all, then there is nowhere to turn to hear one partner say, “I love you,” and the other answer right back, “Yes, yes; I love you, too.” For this is the only place in the Bible where there is a dialogue of love. —Ellen F. Davis

Tuesday

Through his sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux is trying to reestablish the radicality of God’s infinite love, which is infinitely in love with us in our brokenness. —James Finley

Wednesday

Hidden like a jewel at the heart of the Bible, the Song of Songs waits for us to take it up again and so enter with other faithful people in a song that never ends. —Stephanie Paulsell

Thursday

Bernard of Clairvaux saw nuptial love, portrayed in the Song of Songs, as the supreme love. It’s like when spouses love and give themselves to each other, the infinite love of God infinitely gives God’s self to us. —James Finley

Friday

Every spiritual tradition on the planet seems to have some version of the Song of Songs. The language of romantic love describes and evokes the soul’s relationship with the divine more accurately than any descriptive theological language ever could.

—Mirabai Starr

Week Eighteen Practice

The Thread that Never Breaks

James Finley describes how the dance of union and separation experienced by lovers can be a reflection of how we experience our relationship with God.

In married love, two people deeply in love experience moments of loving oneness with each other, and say in that moment of loving oneness, “We are one.”

But in realizing they’re one, they don’t cease to be two. If they would cease to be two, they couldn’t be there to know that they’re one! The trick is that they don’t live by the twoness; they live by the oneness.

However, in living in the oneness, they realize that the oneness permeates the messy details of the twoness. There isn’t a distinction that says, “Over here is oneness, and over there is twoness.” It’s the alchemy of the endless interplay of the oneness of the two who are one. I think love’s nature is like that.

It doesn’t really matter if we’re married, single, or celibate. We can all experience this. My sense is that God says to us, “It may be true that the thread of your constancy, your ability to be aware of my oneness with you, often breaks. But know that no matter how often it breaks from your end, it never breaks from my end.

Furthermore, when it breaks from your end and you can’t find me, I’m infinitely present as love in your inability to find me. Your inability to find me is me, because the fact that you long for me, even though you can’t find me, bears witness to your longing for me.

Therefore, every time the thread breaks from your end, know that it will reawaken your desire to lean into and renew the thread that never breaks from mine.”

The rhythms of oneness and separation are reflected in death, married love, or people in love. The love and the oneness permeate both endlessly and unexplainably. I think that’s love’s rhythm.