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:
O Savior, Guest most bounteous
Of old in Galilee,
Vouchsafe today thy presence
With these who call on thee;
Their store of earthly gladness
Transform to heavenly wine,
And teach them, in the tasting,
To know the gift is thine.
That is really very fine. Most guests partake of what their hosts have to give, but Christ is the sole guest who himself makes the feast. The couple call upon Jesus to be present at their own feast now, so that he may repeat, in their married life, the miracle of Cana, transforming their “store of earthly gladness”—and notice that the hymn does presage for them no small gladness—into “heavenly wine,” a life on earth that participates in the great wedding feast of the Lamb. They will then not be like the chief steward, who tasted the wine at Cana and gently rebuked the bridegroom for saving the best wine for last. They will know, because Jesus himself will teach them, where that truly heart-gladdening wine has come from.
The Breath of the Spirit
In the third stanza, we invoke the Holy Spirit as the gentle indwelling presence that is to govern the lives of the husband and wife:
O Spirit of the Father,
Breathe on them from above,
So mighty in thy pureness,
So tender in thy love;
That guarded by thy presence,
From sin and strife kept free,
Their lives may own thy guidance,
Their hearts be ruled by thee.
We think here of that moment when the risen Christ breathed upon the disciples, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22), or when God breathed upon Adam the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul (Gen. 2:7). The breath of the Spirit is both mighty and subtle, like the “still small voice” that Elijah heard (1 Kings 19:12). Man and woman in their love should have dominion over their garden, their household, and they will have it, if they submit to the dominion of the Spirit.
Endless Love
Modern man, even in Ellerton’s time, has set about to suppose that he could have all the blessings of a Christian civilization without the faith that is its soul; and instead of the bread of life, he has gotten anti-cities of suspicion and isolation, banquets of mass-produced garbage for mind and body, no feasts, and no songs, unless we stretch the word to include angry and acidic outbursts of pride, hatred, vindictiveness, and lust. All of which was well summed up by the Psalmist long ago, as Ellerton cites in the first lines of the final stanza:
Except thou build it, Father,
The house is built in vain;
Except thou, Savior, bless it,
The joy will turn to pain;
But nought can break the marriage
Of hearts in thee made one,
And love thy Spirit hallows
Is endless love begun.
We need not insist here upon the relative likelihood that two secular people or two Christians who may be more secular than they suppose will divorce. The house of man is meant not merely to endure for a time, and then to pass away like the grass that withers and is tossed into the fire. But that is what must happen to all merely human homes. The best of them are bounded by death, and then their place knows them no more. The best of them end in the pain of loss, with no hope for reunion.
For there is no hope for man outside of the Redeemer. But if the Father has built the house, and the Son has blessed it, and if the Spirit has hallowed the love within it, so that the union of the home is a creation by, and a reflection of, the union of the three Persons in one God, never to be put asunder, then the love of the couple on earth does not, at best, look forward to the grave. It is open to “endless love,” when every tear shall be wiped away, and we shall be one, as Father and Son are one in their Spirit of love.
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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