Your Face Is Lovely

I'm spending my summer working at my church in Durham and living in community with 5 other Duke undergraduates. We have a variety of communal spiritual disciplines and the like, one of which is our weekly Thursday night worship and theological reflection. Last night, our theological reflection ended with three girls crunched together on a couch crying as we all prayed for each other. It was pretty amazing and, I think, healing in some way.

What had started as a discussion of how to begin a conversation with a homeless person with whom you seem to have nothing in common evolved into talking about why one of my housemates was upset by catcalls received from those seeking help from the shelter where she works. I think she surprised herself with the intensity of the emotion that was elicited when we pressed the issue. Another female housemate of mine spoke up and shared this verse from the Song of Songs:

O my dove, in the clefts of the rock,
in the covert of the cliff,
let me see your face,
let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely. — Song of Songs 2:14

She said that a mentor of hers had once told her about this verse in order to help her understand why comments about a woman's physical appearance can be so damaging and hurtful, even when they're supposedly complimentary. In this verse, she said, Jesus calls you to a cleft in the rock, where it's just you and him, and says "let me see your face." He sees you and knows you as you are, and he tells you that you are beautiful. This, she said, is what women really, truly long for, but that deep desire is often confused with a desire for attention from men and can sometimes be destructive. The reason that catcalls can be so upsetting is that they cheapen the whispered "your face is lovely" and compound the world's insistence that what matters most is the approval of man (mankind and, in this case particularly, men).

I didn't put it as eloquently as she did, but the conversation deeply affected me and is forcing me to think and pray hard about my self-image and the kinds of attention I seek. Of course, these issues are nothing new to me, but hearing that verse and her interpretation of it gave me a greater sense of the degree to which this really matters. I'll be praying about this a lot.