Three children playing in a park turn instantly and eagerly run across the green grass when their father calls.  

A man runs swiftly down a hospital corridor to the room where his fiancée is recovering from surgery. 

“Run,” says the heart in love; “run, don’t delay.”  

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It’s the urgent energy of Peter, John, and Mary running to the grave on the first Easter morning. Of the faithful reaching for the new light from the paschal candle on Easter night.

“Stay with me!” pleads the heart on fire with love.  “Stay with us,” urged two friends ending their long hot walk, to the stranger who’d walked with them—now, reaching Emmaus, they couldn’t bear to be parted from him.  

Imagine if your beloved dead turned up radiantly alive. Would you ever let go?  Notably, when he “vanished from their sight” while breaking bread, they didn’t return to despair, but to the community (requiring another seven-mile walk) because they couldn’t wait to share the good news.

“I found him whom my soul loves.  I held him and would not let him go” (Songs 3:2-3.)

The coming of the beloved makes all things new.  When he’s here, water is changed into wine, sin is met by mercy, death leads not to annihilation but to radiant life.  With him, all things are possible. Nothing, “no principality or power, no height nor depth,” can come between us and his love.  

Just as the lover falls all over himself to do everything his beloved asks, we want to “do whatever he tells us.”  For we’re no longer servants drawing water from stone jars, but friends drinking wine at a feast.  We too will be poured out like wine and flow with abundant life. The water-become-wine becomes the blood of communion.  We’re all blood-brothers now, infecting one another not with disease but with joy and courage.  

Let us dare once again to fall in love!  Nobody can fall in love and stay in control. Love knocks you off your feet. “The measure of love is to love without measure” (St. Francis de Sales). “My little heart loses its limits in joy” (Tagore).  “His heart grew three sizes that day” (Dr. Seuss).  

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Today, many of us, even our youth, have forgotten how to fall in love. We’ve become controlled, white-knuckled, self-sufficient; wary, informed, smart like phones, scrambling to keep up with artificial smartness.  As Linus van Pelt observed, we’re never quite so stupid as when we’re being smart.  But we’re never so wise as when we’re drunk with love.  

Tucked into the centre of the Bible, the tiny Song of Songs is liturgically connected with Passover in the synagogue, and with Eastertide in Christian lectio divina.  Most of the rabbis who debated disagreed with including the Songs in Scripture. Then one rabbi convincingly showed the Songs as the Scriptural Holy of Holies because it contains all that the Torah and the Prophets describe: God’s love for his people. 

Innumerable Church Fathers and mystics have commented on this poetic little book. St. Gregory of Narek (Doctor of the Church), following the Armenians, calls it the Blessing of Blessings.  It shows God’s love for us, and ours for God—our hearts urgently, brokenly, seeking the one we love—at the heart of Scripture.  And of our human life.

Even our addictions, so rampant and destructive, witness in a bent way to our hearts’ thirst for love.  Mushrooming in endless new forms – just when you think you’ve taken care of one, more pop up like gophers on the prairies – our addictions help drive the economy, along with the enmity and violence among us.  

Yet our addictions stem from our thirst to fall in love, our hunger to have the beloved “stay with us.”  We’ll run even to the grave at the merest chance that the one we love is alive beyond all hope, to do whatever the beloved asks, to taste the finest wine and become the finest wine too.  

Addiction has variously been categorized as mental illness, moral failing, coping strategy, “cunning powerful and baffling” enemy, or normal part of life, to name a few perspectives on an experience that affects us all.  Many words we use for addiction, and things available to be addicted to, are new; but the experience is not.  St. Augustine described long ago the human predicament of “running after less and less, mistaking it for more and more”: how wretched we become, yet how pure and natural is the source from which our desire springs so waywardly.  

Our thirsty hearts will never stop seeking the living water.  Even sickly water attracts us, fooling us into believing we’re no longer thirsty, or there’s no water to quench our thirst.  Yet there’s a pure river sparkling like crystal flowing through the city (Revelation 22:1), from the temple gate (Ezekiel 47), out of the pierced side of the crucified and risen one (John 19:34).

Eat friends, drink deep, till you are drunk with love (Songs 5:1).

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