Between Prayer
and PassionWhy devotion borrows the words of love
Every tradition that tried to describe the love of God ran into the same problem: the only vocabulary strong enough already belonged to lovers. So they took it. This is what happened next, in three places.
The holy of holies is a love poem with no God in it
The Song of Songs sits in the Writings, among the five scrolls, and it is read at Passover. It is also, by any plain reading, erotic poetry. Two lovers, mostly unnamed, largely in the woman’s voice, describing each other’s bodies at length and with enthusiasm.
God is not mentioned. Not once. It shares that distinction with only one other book in the Hebrew Bible. The single possible exception is a word in chapter eight, shalhevetyah, which can be read as “a flame of Yah” or simply as “a mighty flame”, and scholars have not settled it. Dating is unsettled too: the superscription credits Solomon, the language points to a much later hand, and the honest range runs several centuries.
None of which stopped it. When the rabbis argued about which books were sacred enough to “defile the hands”, Rabbi Akiva ended the discussion about this one:
All the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.
What followed was a thousand years of allegory. In Jewish reading the lovers are God and Israel. In Christian reading they became Christ and the Church, and then Christ and the individual soul. Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six sermons on it and died before he finished chapter three.
The perfume is not a metaphor here
What is striking, for a house that works with these materials, is how physically the poem is built out of them. It is not scented in passing. It is scented structurally.
“A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.” “Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense?” The orchard of chapter four is a materials list: henna, spikenard, saffron, calamus, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh and aloes. The same resins that were burned in the temple are, in this book, worn on a body. Nobody had to invent the confusion between worship and desire. It was already in the supply chain.
Bernini carves the moment and refuses to tell you what it is
In 1562 Teresa of Ávila founded her first reformed convent. She went barefoot, she founded seventeen houses, she argued with the Church for twenty years and won, and she was made a Doctor of the Church, the first woman ever, in 1970. She was not a delicate person.
In her Vida, chapter twenty-nine, she describes an angel with a golden spear tipped with fire, driven into her heart and drawn out again. Her own account is the problem, because she is the one who refuses to keep the two vocabularies separate: the pain was so great it made her moan, and the sweetness of that pain so surpassing that she did not want to be rid of it.
Nearly a century later, between 1647 and 1652, Gian Lorenzo Bernini put that sentence in marble for Cardinal Federico Cornaro, in the left transept of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. The angel is smiling and holds the spear low. Teresa’s face is turned up, her mouth is open, her foot hangs. Gilded rays fall behind her, lit by a window you cannot see from the floor.
The boxes are the argument
The detail everybody forgets is the audience. Bernini carved members of the Cornaro family into the side walls as if seated in theatre boxes, mid-conversation, watching. He did not stage a private vision. He staged a performance, with spectators, and put us in the stalls behind them.
Which is why the sculpture has been an argument since the seventeenth century. An anonymous contemporary called it indecent. Lacan, three hundred years later, was blunter still. Yet Teresa wrote the description herself, and she was describing a pain she called the love of God. Bernini simply declined to choose. He carved exactly what she said and let four centuries of viewers do the deciding.
The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it.
And in Barus, a poet writes it in Malay
The third place is ours. On the northwest coast of Sumatra there is a port called Barus, known to the Arabs and Persians as Fansur. It was one of the oldest trading towns in the archipelago, and the world knew it for one reason: it exported the finest camphor on earth.
Ptolemy may have recorded the name in the second century. A merchant compiling accounts of China and India in 851 wrote of “plantations called Fansur, where one obtains a superior quality of camphor”. Marco Polo said the camphor of Fansur sold for its weight in fine gold. The Malay word for camphor is still kapur barus, the chalk of Barus. Benzoin left from the same coast, and reached Europe under a name borrowed from the Arabic for “frankincense of Java”.
Out of that port came Hamzah Fansuri, which is to say Hamzah of Barus. He is usually placed in the later sixteenth century, though the dating is genuinely unresolved and a disputed gravestone would push him decades earlier. What is not disputed is what he did: he was the first to write Sufi metaphysics and mystical verse in Malay rather than Arabic, and he did it in syair, four-line stanzas, a form he made the vehicle for the deepest thing he knew.
The wine that is not wine
His titles give the register away. Sharab al-‘Ashiqin, the drink of lovers. Asrar al-‘Arifin, the secrets of the gnostics. He wrote in the tradition of Ibn Arabi, of wahdat al-wujud, the oneness of being, and he reached for exactly the images the Persians had reached for: the beloved, the tavern, drunkenness, the longing of a thing for the whole it came from.
The Arabic word underneath all of it is ‘ishq, from a root meaning to cling, like ivy. It covers the whole range without embarrassment, from wanting a person to wanting God, and Sufi writers distinguished the grades rather than the vocabulary: ‘ishq majazi, the metaphorical love, and ‘ishq haqiqi, the real one. The first is not a lie. It is a rehearsal.
It did not end well. In 1637 Nuruddin ar-Raniri arrived at the Acehnese court, declared the teaching heretical, and by the standard account had the books burned. The poems survived anyway, in copies, in other hands, the way these things do.
What this has to do with a bottle
Three traditions, three continents, roughly two thousand years apart at the extremes, and the same decision in each: when the feeling got too large for ordinary language, they did not invent a new vocabulary. They took the one that belonged to lovers, and they did not apologise for it.
Amor Hosanna is named for that decision. Amor is the love. Hosanna began as a plea, hoshia-na, save us, we pray, and ended as a shout of praise with nothing left to ask for. The perfume does the same thing with materials rather than words: it opens in cold water and cut stems, moves through two roses that will not agree, and ends in musk, sandalwood and oud, which is to say it ends on a body.
What begins as longing becomes an offering. That is not a marketing line. It is the oldest structure there is.
They did not invent a language for loving God. They borrowed the one that was already burning.
Written in Indonesia, 2026