The Music of Marriage

Though completely unmusical myself, since marrying a musician, I’ve been particularly attuned to musical analogies in theological writing; and its surprising how often they crop up. Tom Wright seems particularly fond of them.

I’ve read a few out to Mrs Lloyd, and she’s not always been terribly impressed. This one got a better response than most:

From Peter Leithart’s wedding sermons in A Great Mystery (Moscow, Canon Press, 2006).

Leithart is taking about Christ’s promise to build his church and the duties of mutual edification in the Body of Christ and in marriage. He says:

To capture the complex beauty of this picture, the metaphor of building eventually becomes unwieldy. We are not accustomed to buildings that build themselves, much less to buildings that turn around and somehow build their builder. We need something more supple to capture the whole biblical truth, and when we need something more supple we turn, naturally, to music. Christ and His bride are fugally related: Christ the Head is the theme, but the bride follows as a melody of her own, which keeps in step with the melody of her husband. Christ’s song blazes the path for the song of the bride and provides the aural space in which the bride’s song is song; the bride’s song is always to harmonize with Christ’s and never to drown out His voice. But responsive and secondary though it is, the song of the bride also builds up and adorns the song of the husband. The duet is miraculously richer than the solo. This is a great mystery, but I speak of Christ and his church.

So too, marriage is harmonics, the lifelong fugal dance in which the husband’s song calls for the bride, and the bride’s song adorns her husband’s, so that they are together a single song. Marriage is designed to be truly a Song of Songs.

None of this is within the range of human possibility. We are not capable of building another human being. In our sin and folly, we are instead like the foolish woman who tears down her house with her own hands. Nor are we capable of the kind of harmonizing required for two lives to become a single song, for discord rather than harmony is the fundamental condition of sinful human existence. Marital harmony is not within human possibility, but it is possible. It is possible by the power of the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, the Spirit who gives us the freedom to become and to be what we, in ourselves, could never become or be.

Otto and Bethany, this is our prayer for you on your wedding day: that you may build one another in the power of the Spirit, and that your lives may harmonize as you both harmonize of the melody of the Spirit, the melody that is the Spirit.

… the Spirit who is the Eternal Musician, whose movement is the eternal rhythm of triune life, who is the Eternal Music of the Eternal God. (pp62-64)

Or again:

… creation, according to David Hart’s summary of Gregory of Nyssa [in The Beauty of the Infinite, Eerdmans, 2003], “is a symphonic and rhythmic complication of diversity, motion and rest, a song praising God, [who is] the true, primordial, archetypal music, in which human nature can glimpse itself as in a mirror.” We are, in short, “music moved to music.” Faith means trusting God to play His infinite fugue through our finite lives, to sing His eternal song in our temporality, to transpose the harmonious polyphony that is His uncreated life into the key of created existence….

Joshua and Sara: Live in faith, trusting God to play out His eternal song with ever-increasing vibrancy through the harmony of your marriage. (p95)