Monday, December 13, 2010 at 10:53AM | by Otter What is certainly true is that whether the pattern was set by God in inspiring Psalm 22, or whether Jesus / Mark found in the Psalm the highest expression of meaning for the crucifixion, the aim was to transform suffering into the victory of Israel’s god.
Saturday, December 11, 2010 at 8:57AM | by Otter 
Before the Song of Solomon was read allegorically, the poem was quite simply an erotic poem, filled with sensual imagery of a kind that surprises and often delights student-readers: it's not the disconnected individualistic sexual imagery of modern day fucking-around. It's rooted in both the land and in the local community. While it is wrong to say (as Christian books about it constantly do say) that "it's a celebration of married love" (details in the poem indicate the couple is not married), it would be right to suggest that the poem captures the psychology of marriage, the desire to be, and the necessity of bringing sexual energy into a productive relationship to protect it from the shame that it causes when it's left unregulated.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 8:28AM | by Otter 
The golden bowl, the lifegiving womb and the seat of the feminine energy of procreation. (Can we please stop talking about sex?) Yes, Virginia: your golden bowl will be shattered.This strange little book... what nonsense it has urged from interpreters afraid of its message, which is just that your life counts for nothing in the scheme of the enormous universe... Did Ecclesiastes mean to use sex as a metaphor for some "spiritual" life? I doubt it. Or if it did, it was because sex is (biologically speaking) coextensive with continuing life for apes like us, and we are only spiritual insofar as we have a belief in our connectedness to things beyond ourselves, a connectedness that comes with all the energy and creativity and lifegiving power of sex.
