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Except the
Lord Build
Anthony Esolen on Education & Houses of the Lord (A Graduation Address)
Ladies and Gentlemen, parents, friends, and graduates, hear the word of the Lord as the Psalmist speaks it to us:
Except the Lord build the house,
they labor in vain that build it;
Except the Lord keep the city,
the watchman waketh but in vain.
It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late,
to eat the bread of sorrows;
for so he giveth his beloved sleep.Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord:
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man,
so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak
with the enemies in the gate. (Ps. 127)
My family and I used to play a game sometimes as we went out driving on a sunny afternoon. We would see in the distance, set far away from a country road, a sprawling, low-lying, brick complex, looking as if the chain-link fences might be intertwined with barbed wire. The trick was to guess what it was before we saw the sign.
“It’s a prison!”
“It’s a factory!”
“No, it’s a school.”
Sure enough, it would be a school, more often than not. We concluded that the builders were wise to construct the vast, modern, soulless school to look like a prison or a factory, because the three institutions serve many of the same functions.
School Looks
It has not always been so. “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” Something of the wisdom of that magnificent verse, I think, stirred in the hearts of the old builders of schools. Look at what they did. They made the schools look like town halls, where the citizen of a free country could meet his neighbors, and, in the felt presence of what was greater than themselves and worthy of reverence, made manifest in a flag or a portrait of the Father of our country, they could discuss the common good.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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