Triune Home
by Anthony Esolen
When I was growing up, I attended a lot of weddings—I had 39 first cousins, so there was a stretch when, every year, one or two of them were getting married, and it was almost always in a church. If you asked me what was sung at those ceremonies, the only song I remember was “There Is Love,” a lugubriously tuneful and sentimental song that manages to toss in some words from Scripture, to refer to Christ by pronouns and indirectly, and yet to be all about the love between the man and the woman—yes, there was a time when liberal songwriters took it for granted that you had to have a man and a woman for a marriage—and not at all about the love of God.
You could do worse than that, I suppose. I have a dogged suspicion that I heard, at one wedding, “Once, Twice, Three Times a Lady,” but it may be a mischievous demon in my memory playing tricks on me. And now, if you go to a Catholic wedding, you are apt to hear one of the four or five wearily familiar songs you might hear on any indiscriminate Sunday, banal, poetically inept, often heretical, and with melodies that only a soloist, and not one with especially good taste, could love.
So I turn to The English Hymnal (1933), in my estimation a neck-and-neck contender with the Episcopalian Hymnal (1940) for the greatest of all hymnals in English, and I find, in the section devoted to the sacraments, a fine poem written especially for the marriage ceremony, though it has since disappeared from almost every Christian hymnal, Catholic or otherwise. It is “O Father All Creating,” by John Ellerton (1876). I have heard it sung to the melody Aurelia, the same melody used for “The Church’s One Foundation,” but I prefer the baroque melody Dank sei Gott in der Höhe, harmonized by Bach, simply because when you sing Aurelia, you cannot help but be thinking about the other hymn, and the confusion isn’t helpful.
The Father’s Earliest Gifts
Each of Ellerton’s first three stanzas invokes one of the persons of the Blessed Trinity. The first returns us, as Jesus himself did when he gave his law as regards divorce, to the union of man and woman in Eden, before the fall:
O Father all creating,
Whose wisdom, love, and power
First bound two lives together
In Eden’s primal hour,
Today to these thy children
Thine earliest gifts renew:
A home by thee made happy,
A love by thee kept true.
Perhaps Ellerton had Milton’s mighty verse in mind, when Satan first sees the innocent couple, eavesdrops on their conversation, and then watches “with jealous leer malign” as they embrace and kiss, as he says, “emparadised in one another’s arms, / The happier Eden.” For the garden is within Eden, and Adam and Eve’s bower is within the garden, and their embrace is more intimate still, with the soul of their love both sheltered and expressed by their arms and their lips.
Ellerton thus begs these gifts for the newly married couple, “thy children”—taking for granted that in the ordinary case, men and women will be young when they marry, not seamed with age and the long habits of sin. And the happiness of their home and the fidelity of their love depend not on themselves, in the first instance, but on God and his grace.
The Bounteous Guest
The second stanza brings us to the Son of God at the wedding feast at Cana, but with a surprising and important difference:
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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more on music from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
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