Thoughts on The Song of Solomon

Today’s reading: Song of Solomon 3-4, 2 Corinthians 1

I have a very difficult time with Biblical poetry…

In all reality, it would be more accurate to say I have a difficult time with poetry in general, and that that difficulty is compounded when it comes to Biblical poetry, but either way, I have such a hard time feeling like I understand much of anything happening in The Song of Solomon.

I don’t know if this is the reason for it or not, but I generally assume the reason I struggle with poetry is Aphantasia (the inability to visualize things in your head). I only recently learned that this was a thing, and it made so much more sense of the world, since I’ve never understood why people tell you to close your eyes and visualize things when doing that has never shown me anything other than nothing. But it turns out that some people (myself included) simply lack the ability to visualize things mentally. This includes when I’m reading, that I can think about characters and scenes, but I can never visualize them. My theory is that this is why poetry is so hard for me, because it relies so much on evoking meaning and emotion through imagery.

But whatever the reason, I struggle with regular poetry, but then Biblical poetry tends to be an extra level of difficult. Biblical poetry is written differently, employing parallelism as the primary poetic device rather than rhyme or meter, and the imagery is much more foreign to me than contemporary poetry. I just have a much harder time imagining a herd of goats descending Mt. Gilead because I’ve never seen a heard of goats descending any mountain before.

But the wonderful thing is that, for as much as I struggle with Biblical poetry, I know people who absolutely love Biblical poetry, and feel drawn incredibly close to the Lord through it, but who really struggle with other parts of the Bible that I find fascinating. It’s almost as though God, having created us, knows that different people enjoy and need different things, and so has revealed Himself to us in various ways so that He might draw all of us to Himself in individual ways!

So I don’t really worry about how much I struggle with Biblical poetry. I want to understand it better, and I can lean on the people who do love and understand it well to help me understand it, but it doesn’t bother me to have parts of the Bible that I struggle with.

I guess that’s really the point of this post, to encourage anybody who feels like they have things in the Bible they struggle to understand or that they struggle to even read because they find them so boring, that that is perfectly okay! You don’t need to love and understand the whole Bible equally. We should continue to learn and grow in our understanding of it, but if/when there are areas we struggle, we should never let God’s enemies use that to whisper in our ears that it’s not worth it, we can’t do it, and we should just give up trying. God is so much bigger and wiser than that, and in His infinite wisdom He has revealed Himself to all of us in incredible ways.