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The Bible’s Song of Solomon celebrates the intensity of love between a man and a woman, its feelings of overwhelming desire and its consummation in physical delight. The love between them, the desire they have for each other, and the physical intimacy for which they yearn, awakens every dimension of their being and they are filled with life. ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave’ (Song of Solomon 8.6). These words sing to us from an ancient society in a way that rings true with couples today, many of whom choose these words for a reading in their own wedding and receive them in the blessing prayed upon them.

‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’ (Song of Solomon 6.3), she says, her soul and spirit joined to the force of her body. ‘You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride’ (Song of Solomon 4.9), he says with equal passion, longing for their love to lead into life shared together.

God’s good gifts of sexual desire and intimacy, with all their power and potential for good and harm, find their proper place and freest space in marriage. Here, the ‘natural instincts and affections’ that God has planted within us are ‘hallowed’ and to be ‘rightly directed’ for the purposes of love:⁴⁶

Marriage is given,

that with delight and tenderness they may know each other in love,

and through the joy of their bodily union,

may strengthen the union of their hearts and lives.47

The Song of Solomon rejoices in love, desire and sexual expression without any obvious reference to procreation. Although we should not lose sight of the likely consequences of intercourse in conception, and all its implications for the family and community which the Song’s ancient world would have known, the primary reference in its poetry of love is to sex as God’s gift for the expression of the couple’s love and the deepening of their life together.

As we will see later in this book, after a long journey of deliberation in the Anglican Communion, the 1930 Lambeth Conference agreed that ‘other methods [than abstinence] may be used’ in order ‘to limit or avoid parenthood’.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, the Conference emphasized the intrinsic connection between intercourse and procreation, making clear that as well as sex serving the love between the couple, its generative capacities for the life of another belong also to its character and function, as indeed is implied by the practice of contraception itself. So if sex serves mutuality, it clearly, under many conditions, serves fruitfulness. The imagery of husband and wife becoming ‘one flesh’ (Matthew 19.5,6) which Jesus lifts from Genesis 2, echoes the original creation and commission of humanity in Genesis 1 where:

God created humankind in his image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

God blessed them, and God said to them,

‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.’ (Genesis 1.27,28)

The action of sexual intercourse joins a man and woman together for the purposes of both love and procreation.

The life-giving joining of bodies in sexual intimacy also serves the sacramental character of marriage. We can see this mirrored in the giving and receiving of a ring each to the other as ‘a sign of our marriage’, symbols of ‘unending love and faithfulness’,⁴⁹ physical signs carrying great emotional and spiritual value. This exchange of rings points to the sharing of bodies – a profound physicality of mutuality that demands great trust (1 Corinthians 7.3,4). The ‘delight and tenderness of sexual union’,⁵⁰ as the liturgy describes it, powerfully conveys the reality signified by the rings: the giving of all that a man and woman are, the sharing of all that they have, honouring, adoring, revering and respecting each other as they receive and return a hallowed gift. Where this ‘vow and covenant’⁵¹ is honoured and enacted, bodies are not commodified (as by some forms of commerce) or idolised (as they are by some forms of religion), enslaved (as they are by some forms of criminality), weaponised (as they are by some forms of war and conflict) or just objectified (as they are in many forms of human practice). They are dignified with immense worth. Joined by God, sanctified by God’s grace, they are created for life and life-giving together.

More than that, bodies joined in this kind of passionate, tender, faithful mutuality are an icon that opens to us a reality beyond themselves. As Jewish and Christian readers of the Song of Solomon have seen over the centuries, its story of desire and faithful loving points beyond the couple’s yearning for each other to the human longing for God and God’s delight in humanity: ‘I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me’ (Song of Solomon 7.10).

Further discussions about the gift of sex, including an exploration of the Song of Solomon, can be found in Chapter 12 (here–here). Chapter 5 (here–here) considers sex in contemporary society and Chapter 6 (here–here) explores the relationship between sex and well-being. Chapter 7 (here) reviews the development of ideas about sex and contraception within the wider context of the Anglican Communion.