Enoying the Heart of God

Song of Songs Ch. 1, Vs. 3.

"For your loves (breasts) are more delightful than wine."

The revelation of God's heart, his emotions, his deep love, his whole inner Person is so powerful and inebriating that when it touches our spirit and fills our heart with it's reality it is truly a delightful experience that far transcends any experience in this world.

This love must be received and internalized.  Like drinking wine, it is nothing to know about the wine, to describe the wine, to smell the wine, to know all about the process of wine-making.  What impacts a person is the drinking of the wine.  In the same way, God's love--His heart--must be received and internalized into the deepest part of ourselves.  In fact, our healing process is taking the deep part of ourselves out of protective hiding and allowing the fire and presence of God's love to touch those places until our heart is overflowing with the realities of this love.  We must drink it in.  We must take it into ourselves.  Then it becomes in us an experience that transforms.

Some would say that "wine" represents all the pleasures and pursuits of this world.  It is true that God's love and heart internalized are far more pleasurable than anything this world can offer.  Yet wine itself, literally, describes a chemical change that causes the body and emotions to experience, for a time, a sense of pleasure.  In a very literal way, God's heart, when revealed to our spirit and heart, produces a chemical change in our bodies and emotions that is truly, and without later regret, truly pleasurable and enjoyable.

The mystics tell us not to pursue God solely for our own sense of pleasure.  Yet they, nevertheless, describe these kinds of pleasurable experiences as normal for those who pursue God first, wanting to lay aside all other pursuits as dross compared to the gold of His presence.

Saint Teresa says it thus:

Oh, my daughters, may our Lord grant you to understand, or, rather, to taste, for in no other way can it be understood, how the soul rejoices when this happens to it.  Let worldlings come with all their possessions, their riches, their delights…even if all these could be enjoyed without the trials that they bring in their train, which is impossible, they could not in a thousand years cause the happiness enjoyed in a single moment by a soul brought hither by the Lord."