We continue with Part III in our series of reflections on the Song of Songs based on John Paul II’s theology of the body (TOB).

The Song of Songs demonstrates the integral relationship of the sexual and the sacred. It is a classic blunder of “religious” people (in fact, a heretical error) to think one must reject sexuality to reach the holy and the sacred. What we must reject is only the distortion of sexuality, not sexuality itself. The erotic poetry of the Song of Songs evokes all that is true, good, and beautiful about sexual love as God created it to be “in the beginning” – before sin distorted it.

In the beginning, man and woman experienced sexual desire as nothing but the desire to love as God loves, in God’s image. This is what enabled them to be “naked without shame” (Gen 2:25). Adam’s fascination with Eve – “At last, you are the one! You are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (see Gen 2:23) – serves as a precursor to the Song of Songs. John Paul II observed that what “was barely expressed in the second chapter of Genesis...in just a few simple and essential words is developed here in full dialogue” (TOB 108:5).

In the Song, a wonder, admiration, and fascination similar to Adam’s runs “in a peaceful and even wave from the beginning to the end of the poem” (TOB 108:5). And just like Genesis, the “point of departure as well as the point of arrival for this fascination—reciprocal wonder and admiration—are in fact the bride’s femininity and the bridegroom’s masculinity, in the direct experience of their visibility.” The body reveals the person and the body summons them to love. Thus, their words of love are “concentrated on the ‘body’” (TOB 108:6).

Fascination with the human body in its masculinity and femininity—often considered innately prurient—is here, in the Bible’s Song of Songs, a means “for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16), that is, for training in love. Lust has certainly distorted our vision and our sentiments. Yet, when we tap into that deep well of human desire and fascination that remains beyond the distortions of lust, we discover that our attraction to the body is God-given. And, behold, it is very good (see Gen 1:31).

Sin and lust do not define us. Throughout the TOB, John Paul II insists that the heritage of our hearts “is deeper than the sinfulness inherited.” And the good news is that Christ came to “re-activate that deepest inheritance and give it real power in human life” (TOB 46:6). The lovers in the Song witness beautifully to the God-given glory of sexual attraction, desire, and union.

Of course attraction to the body in an integral sense must always be and always is attraction to a person. It is a vision of another person not only with the eyes but with the heart. A look determines the heart within the one who looks, and it determines whether or not he sees the heart of the person at whom he looks. To the degree that one’s heart is pure, so is his look. And to the degree that a person looks with purity of heart, he sees not just a body, but somebody.

In the inspired duet of this Song, the lovers not only “look” at each other. They see each other. Their attraction towards the other’s body is an attraction toward the other person. And seeing the other person, they do not use the person as an object of egoistic gratification. Rather, as John Paul says, this attraction which lingers directly and immediately on the body generates love in the inner impulse of the heart (see TOB 108:6).

How can we ensure that our attraction to the body inspires love and not mere lust? As we continue our reflections on the Song of Songs in future columns, John Paul II will give us some keen insights.