The Song of Songs is traditionally tied to Solomon and was sung in Israel as love poetry — explicit, embodied, unembarrassed. The rabbis read it at Passover and called it the holy of holies of the Writings, because they heard in it the voice of the LORD courting his people out of Egypt and into the land. The Christian tradition heard the same voice calling the soul, and the church, out of winter into resurrection. Both readings rest on the literal one: a real lover speaks to a real beloved, and the speech is summons. Arise. Come away. The poem assumes the reader knows what it is to be wanted.

From the writers we read together

George MacDonald

Scottish minister and novelist (1824-1905), C.S. Lewis' acknowledged master

MacDonald preached relentlessly that God is not content to leave us in the cold. His sermons return again and again to the figure of a Father who will not let his children sleep through their lives — who comes to the door of the cellar where they are hiding and calls them up into the light. The voice in Song of Songs 2 is, for MacDonald, the same voice. Winter is real. The rain has been long. But the lover does not visit the beloved in her winter and sit down with her there forever; he calls her out of it. Grace, in MacDonald's reading, is never only comfort. It is always also summons.

What presses on the reader is the tenderness of the imperative. The verb is a command, but the surrounding words are my love, my beautiful one, my dove. MacDonald insisted that the severity and the sweetness of God are one thing, not two — that the call to rise is itself the proof of being loved. If you have been wintering, the question this passage asks is not whether you feel ready. The flowers do not consult the ground. The fig tree is not asked. The voice that says anasta over you today is the same voice that will say it over your grave.