Banqueting in Love

Banqueting in Love

Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century monk and theologian, spent much of his life meditating on the Song of Solomon as a picture of the soul's relationship with God. He wrote: 'The person who loves God needs nothing else. If you have found Him, you have found the feast.' His sermons on the Song — over eighty of them — describe a God who pursues, who feasts with, who unfurls a banner of love over those who come to Him. Bernard knew poverty, illness, and the harsh life of a medieval monastery. Yet he described the experience of God's love with a warmth and immediacy that has drawn readers for nine centuries. Real love transforms the plainest circumstances into a banquet.

The Song of Solomon has puzzled and delighted readers for millennia. At its surface it is a passionate love poem. At a deeper level, Jewish tradition read it as describing God's love for Israel; Christian tradition as God's love for the Church and for the individual soul. The 'banner of love' in verse 4 evokes military imagery — a standard raised over territory, claiming it. God raises the banner of love over those who come to Him. This is not a quiet, polite affection. It is a declaration: this one belongs to Me and I to this one. The banqueting hall is not a reward for the spiritually advanced — it is the invitation extended to the hungry, the lonely, the one who has been looking for a table at which they actually belong.