Child of Love

Saturday afternoon, I officiated Libby and Larry’s wedding ceremony at the Four Seasons, on the Peninsula Papagayo, in Costa Rica. Here are the remarks I shared with them and their guests:

Why on earth would a rabbi base his personal remarks at a wedding on a song that proclaims, “I found a friend in Jesus,” seems like a fair question. You might say what Ricky said to Lucy, “You got some splainin to do.”

When I was thinking of Libby and Larry’s love story, I just happened to be listening to Child of Love an extraordinary song from the contemporary Christian music band, We the Kingdom. And the truth is that listening to Christian music for inspiration was historically quite common. Famous rabbis and cantors would even visit churches to listen to worship and then adapt the tunes for Jewish prayers.

What really captivated me, though, beyond the superb music, IS the message in the song. Obviously, the lyrics are written in a specific Christian context, but there is a universal message embedded in it too.

Listen to some of the words, “I was walking the wayside, lost on a lonely road, I was chasing the high life, tryna satisfy my soul… Then I saw lightning from Heaven, and I’ve never been the same. I’m gonna climb a mountain, I’m gonna shout about it, I am a child of love... I found a world of freedom, I am a child of love”

Franni Rae Cash Cain, the main female vocalist, explains what is behind these words and the name of the song being Child of Love, rather than what we might expect, Child of God, “I think sometimes I tend to think of God as an angry God who wants me to do everything perfectly all the time; and that’s been my tendency growing up to view God, the Father, that way. This song has helped renew my understanding of who He really is as such a loving Father, and so I’m just excited about how this song is going to speak to other people and hopefully communicate God’s love to them.”

This tendency to think of God as angry is deeply embedded in our American culture. One of the first works you will study in American Literature 101 in college is Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hand of Angry God. This puritanical strain of American religion has been tremendously harmful to generations of Americans and has separated us from one another.

What Libby and Larry’s marriage and the presence of her brother and I up here together show us is that we are better off with Franni Rae’s spiritual convictions. Connection is better than separation. Forgiving our differences and inadequacies and reflecting the divine love that all around us is the best path.

That to me is the message of this beautiful song. That to me is the message of this beautiful couple. We are all children of love.