As is often the case, I was enjoying my end of work day glass of wine while zoning on some tunes that my favorite radio station was spinning. Keep Talking by Pink Floyd came on and it got me day dreaming a bit about our divided and divisive society.

For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk [1]

We learned to talk. Language, communication, dialogue. Actions that involve one person interacting with another. To express and or exchange ideas with another by means of spoken words. A new age term for dating. Any way you cut the mustard, talking is what brings us together to share, develop and communicate our desires, fears, aches, pains and whatever else. It is what sets us apart from the animals. But have we? Set ourselves apart from the animals that is?

Our society has lost any vestige of meaningful civil and political discourse particularly when people disagree: polarization seems to be the name of the game. Why do we resort to hateful speech and mean-spirited Tweets? Or perhaps a little more telling: “Can I really sit at Thanksgiving dinner with ‘that’ uncle.” Many are forced into uncomfortable silence when even the closest of friends begin ranting. We struggle to find ways for  sincere conversation with those whose values we find repugnant. As the protests against systemic racism and privilege continue to unfold and another election cycle is upon us, there has never been a more important time to keep talking, but can we do so when we have lost connections with each other. In many ways, we are alone together because we have abdicated the ability to be intimate.

There is a perspective that just might help us to re-center and re-focus and recapture our desire for, and comfort with, intimacy: the ability to talk with one another. It’s an unusual choice by some standards, but I would argue (and do) that deep within the wisdom literature of the Bible lives a blueprint that God has provided for times such as these.

The Song of Songs, or as some may know it, The Song of Solomon, is not an easy book for most casual readers and has certainly challenged many of the ‘not so’ casual crowd of clerics and academia, myself included. Yet it is the greatest of all songs and that demands our attention as in some ways, the book may very well be as relevant, or more so, for us today, than at any time in the past. In the words of my one of my seminary professors, Dr. Carol Bechtel,  it is a book that shows the world and our youth “a more excellent way.” [2]

The note theologian, Ellen Davis, raises the challenge that “the cultivation of real intimacy is the greatest social and spiritual challenge of our time” [3] I concur. The centrality of electronic devices has led to a society that is increasingly isolated, hiding behind avatars that tolerate, and may indeed encourage, disconnection by promoting misconceptions, partial truths, language vagueness, and lack of accountability. Texting, email, and posting, allow us to present the self as we want to be: we can edit and delete, we can retouch our faces, our voices, and our bodies. We no longer have conversation: it’s too messy.

In the process, we are sacrificing living together, acting together, and creating community that engages and challenges, settling instead, for the quotidian comfort of imprecision in mere connection. Sheri Turkle, social psychologist and Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, makes this observation in a blog about reclaiming conversation:

At home, families sit in silence at the dinner table. We text (and shop and tweet) during class and while on dates. At work, executives email during meetings. We’re connected more than ever; not necessarily to one another, but to our keyboards and touch screens. We seek and find ways around real, face-to-face-conversation. We lack empathy and don’t know how to be alone – or truly together. [4]

Turkle’s comment advances a crucial point: we are foregoing our central calling to be in relationship and to love one another. Intimacy is one of the more important and blessed parts of the human condition. Ultimately, losing our ability for mutual conversation destroys the ability to discover each other, compromising our capacity to converse with ourselves and with God. We risk forfeiting prayer: a tragedy of immeasurable consequences.

Furthering Davis’s challenge, the Song illumines how much is still possible in the land ‘east of Eden.’ As well as living in a world driven by social media, we inhabit a culture that is thoroughly imbued with pornography by way of the very same devices that have alienated humanity from conversational intimacy, creating a culture that has been perverted by an obsession with the physical instead of understanding the significance and life giving love of another’s nephesh. The Song “affirms as incomparable the joy of faithful sexual relationship.”[5] Pornography drives a perspective that is relentlessly selfish, brazenly promiscuous, and ruthlessly exploitive, while the Song so beautifully demonstrates the goodness of God’s gift of sexuality that is mutual, generous, and faithful. Our bodies and our relationships were deemed very good by God, something God took on himself in Christ in order to redeem it all from the fall.

Finally, and perhaps, just perhaps most important of all, the Song in many settings celebrates the beauty of the lovers with language that evokes the beauty and bounty of God’s good creation. [6] Davis makes note that the Song never gives a clear picture of what the lovers look like, rather instead, it portrays the very clear image of love for a lush and abundant land redolent in spring. [7] Affirming love for creation and its inherent goodness serves the “indispensable function…in our age [to] remind us that loving attachment to land, our particular homes and fragile planet that we share with other living creatures, is a religious obligation.” [8] It was, after all, our first obligation and the implications that come from our shirking responsibility become more compelling with each day. As Gilmour intoned: It doesn’t have to be like this. All we need to do is Make sure we keep talking

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[1] David Gilmour, Richard Wright, Polly Samson, Keep Talking, vol. Division Bell, Pink Floyd (London: Columbia, 1993).

[2] Carol M. Bechtel, “Lecture on the Song of Songs Part IV,” Western Theological Seminary, Holland Michigan, June 16, 2018.

[3] Ellen F. Davis, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, 1st ed, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 235.

[4] Sherry Turkle, “Reclaiming Conversation,” Sherry Turkle (blog), January 19, 2018, https://sherryturkle.com/reclaiming-conversation/.

[5] Davis, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, 235.

[6] Chapter four is notable as the male voice extols the beauty of the bride with references that allude to the promised land of milk and honey: “Your lips distill nectar, my bride; honey and milk are under your tongue; the scent of your garments is like the scent of Lebanon. A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a garden locked, a fountain sealed. Your channel is an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all chief spices – a garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon.” Song Songs 4.11-15, NRSV

[7] e.g  see chapter 2, verses 8-15.

[8] Davis, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, 236.