"I opened to my beloved, but he had turned and had gone. My soul failed me... I sought him, but could not find him. I cried out, but there was no answer.
Making their rounds, the Sentinels came upon me - they beat and wounded me, taking away my mantle - the 'guards' of the city walls" Song of Songs 5:6 & 7.
It is terrible when hope is taken from us. As with the woman in this love poem, we die inside, but something even worse can then follow. When we loose our intimate connection with the one who is the dayspring of existence, we find ourselves left only with the rude and punishing requirements of the 'sentinels' - those precepts which wish to reduce to something viewed as unworthy of any such splendour and affection.
A good example of this manner of trouble is seen in John 5, with the healing of a man who had been lame for 38 years. The "crowd" are so perplexed by their pedantic fixation on what was lawful, that they entirely loose sight of Jesus, and end up not knowing who had actually performed the healing. As with the guards of the city in the song, they have absolutely no conception of what is actually taking place around them, or its profound significance, so they behave purely from their own, entirely incorrect instincts.
The writer of the song was very wise. In his book on the subject (proverbs), he speaks of the 'first tier' of such understanding being evidenced when we live our lives with genuine virtue. The 'second tier' is when we learn to accomodate suffering, respond well to injustice, and work through numerous times of hardship and perplexity. Jesus teaches us that there is a vital third tier - the 'dying' to live, the loosing to gain - the 'wild' drive of the lover in the poem, in other words, which compels us like her to pour out our lives in what is so risky, or viewed as wasteful, or foolish... pouring it all out as if there was an infinite capacity to expend what you are and what you have.
The 'guardians', no doubt, believed their role was to maintain some semblance of 'first tier' order, but the truth, of course, is their behaviour was well below even the most rudimentary requirements of such virtue (hence, their violence and malice in their behaviour). In contrast, the woman is acting at the highest level of what counts, because she faces her anguish and such aggression against her due to her total commitment to what mattered - re-uniting with the one she lived for.
Most of us, no doubt, vacilate on this scale. We can easily be as brutish as the sentinels in both our behaviour and our reductionism of what counts to a 'legal' rendering which leaves us way outside the actual bounds of what is desired to convey what is good, but hopefully, we will know the overwhelming beauty of the passion of the beloved - that all of life is worthwhile, even the painful aspects, because we are so totally and entirely loved by the one who has captured us.
It is when such virtue is in full flow that life reaches its true realm of joy bestowed through trial, because the love that surrounds us in such splendour cannot be quashed or denied, can never be suppressed, even by death.
May you and I be 'set as a seal' of such beauty upon the heart of the lover of us all!
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