Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one’s house for love, it would be utterly scorned.
Song of Songs 8:6-7 (NIV)
As Strong as Death
The glass man works with his back to the door, because the light he wants comes in over the bench. He draws the wheel across a sheet of new amber and snaps it along the line with his thumbs, and the piece falls away exactly where he drew it. The bin under the bench holds the curves he cut away to get this one.
In the Song of Songs, a woman asks to be worn like a seal over his heart and a seal on his arm, somewhere she can’t be taken off. Then she gives her reason: love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.
Anyone who has stood at a grave knows what the other half of that comparison weighs. She sets the two level with each other, death on one side and love on the other, and they come out even. Even is enough for her to build on. Many waters cannot quench love, she says, and rivers cannot sweep it away.
Today a lot of people will drive out to a cemetery and stand there a while. What they take out with them has been through the whole flood of it, the first year and every year after, and it’s still burning. The water has had all this time and it hasn’t reached the fire.
A woman had been standing in the doorway behind him, waiting for him to finish the cut. She came about a cracked pane in a storm door, and she said Thursday would be fine, and then she said she was driving out to the cemetery and would come by after, and she left.
The glass man put the wheel down. He could fix a storm door.
A Prayer to Remember
Stay in it with me today, Father, in the part that hasn’t gotten any easier. Don’t let anybody talk me out of missing them. Some days the missing is the truest thing in me, and I’d rather keep it than have it worn down. Do something with it that I can’t do.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
