Marching Together
There is a moment in John Ford's heartfelt tribute to West Point, The Long Gray Line, that for its manly power and decorous simplicity is probably unlike anything you will have seen or heard in church in the last fifty years. The men are at chapel, and the news has just broken that the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. They all stand, and they sing out the great verse from the song we have known simply as "America":
Our fathers' God, to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright
With freedom's holy light;
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King!
Ford did not have to think of it, because he and everyone else took it mainly for granted, that men are made one not by politics or by education, but by a common love for what transcends the individual person. And that is how the love we owe to our homeland, what the old Romans meant by pietas, can be brought into harmony with our love of God.
A Hymn for a Marching Faith
And yet the Christian is also in an unusual position, or rather he is called to a dynamic homelessness: he is meant to be on the way. His is a pilgrim Church, and a marching faith. No doubt, all the good we have known in the earthly homes God has blessed will be restored to us in that city of peace, Jerusalem, not made by human hands. But just as he who would save his life must lose it, so we who love our homes, as we ought to do, must leave them, fully trusting in God. The old hymnals are therefore full of marching songs, songs for setting forth on the pilgrimage or, what is usually the same thing, for going out into spiritual combat.
Hence we have a fine and sturdy Danish marching hymn, "Igjennem Nat og Traengsel," somewhat loosely translated into English by the Anglican priest Sabine Baring-Gould as "Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow," for which I prefer the bright melody Sussex, although Martin Shaw's melody Marching, composed specifically for the poem, is also very fine. The first two stanzas—making up one eight-line stanza in the Danish—set the scene both without and within:
Through the night of doubt and sorrow,
Onward goes the pilgrim band,
Singing songs of expectation,
Marching to the Promised Land.Clear before us through the darkness
Gleams and burns the guiding light;
Brother clasps the hand of brother,
Stepping fearless through the night.
Reader, can you see it? The world is dark, but a band of Christian pilgrims braves the night, not hushed and creeping, but singing out, and looking toward the holy light that guides their way. Yet we might not have the strength to do that on our own. We need one another. Suddenly, a hand seizes our hand, and we see, we feel, that the brother is there.
How rare it is, in our time, to go that last mile of life while in the company of our brother Christians, singing! I imagine that the nurses would call the hospital security guards, lest someone somewhere hear again a sound both human and divine, not like the beep of the intravenous machine, not like the television, not like the cold official summonses of the intercom.
How Men Are Made One
The import of the next four stanzas can be summed up in a single word: one. Secular thought since the Enlightenment has presumed to seek the brotherhood of man without the fatherhood of God; to make men one by means of the right education, the right politics, the right tempering of raw hedonism by social niceness, the right political mechanics, the right universal and compulsory diversity—some steamroller or other, rendering human beings one by reducing them to indistinguishable clots of mud. Mostly these things make enemies of friends: let the evil Leon Trotsky testify, who both caused and suffered the enmity. Only God makes friends of enemies: for he loved us even when we were at war with him.
But the pillar of fire that went before the children of Israel as they fled from Egypt is now the beacon of our redemption, and we do not look back, we do not long for the fleshpots and the easy slavery. The poetry here is urgent—it does not even pause to end the sentence before all is said:
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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33.3—May/June 2020
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