The double entendres of this song are indeed cleverly crafted, and some of you have failed to grasp what is obvious to many male teenagers with a steady diet of porn. These are not poorly-written lyrics, they just belong to a Protestant praise-and-worship song that is not appropriate for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, but perhaps a Baptist wedding liturgy with electric guitars, drums and a lot of hand-clapping.
I am sorry that you are offended by my comment, but it was meant rhetorically, and seems to me the logical conclusion of some of the reasoning presented by others in this thread.
…hopefully it’s not Christian male teenagers who have a “steady diet of porn”
…
but I get what you mean. It is wrong to use suggestive language that conveys an intimacy best suited to the privacy of sacramental marriage. Even the Song of Songs would be inappropriate to use as a hymn (never knew it was read at a Nuptial Mass).
In his encyclical
Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI explains the difference between natural human love and love that is supernatural, it’s quite an eye opener and might be of help in this discussion:
“Eros” and “Agape” – difference and unity
3. That love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings, was called* eros* by the ancient Greeks. Let us note straight away that the Greek Old Testament uses the word * eros* only twice, while the New Testament does not use it at all:… The tendency to avoid the word
eros, together with the new vision of love expressed through the word
agape, clearly point to something new and distinct about the Christian understanding of love.
… According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Christianity had poisoned
eros, which for its part, while not completely succumbing, gradually degenerated into vice.
[1] Here the German philosopher was expressing a widely-held perception: doesn’t the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life? Doesn’t she blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?
- But is this the case? Did Christianity really destroy* eros*? Let us take a look at the pre- Christian world. The Greeks—not unlike other cultures—considered* eros* principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a “divine madness” which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness.
All other powers in heaven and on earth thus appear secondary… In the religions, this attitude found expression in fertility cults, part of which was the “sacred” prostitution which flourished in many temples.
Eros was thus celebrated as divine power, as fellowship with the Divine.
The Old Testament firmly opposed this form of religion,…combating it as a perversion of religiosity. But it in no way rejected* eros* as such; rather, it declared war on a warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit divinization of* eros* actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it.
Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing “divine madness”: far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited. An intoxicated and undisciplined
eros, then, is not an ascent in “ecstasy” towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man.
Evidently, *eros *needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.
- Two things emerge clearly from this rapid overview of the concept of eros past and present. First, there is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence. Yet we have also seen that the way to attain this goal is not simply by submitting to instinct. Purification and growth in maturity are called for; and these also pass through the path of renunciation. Far from rejecting or “poisoning” eros, they heal it and restore its true grandeur.
This is due first and foremost to the fact that man is a being made up of body and soul. Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united; the challenge of* eros* can be said to be truly overcome when this unification is achieved.
vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html
