In a week’s time, December 27th, Ruthie and I will be married 50 years. We started dating in May of 1969. The best “awful” thing that happened to me was when my dad’s company transferred him from Chicago to St Paul, Mn during the summer before my junior year in high school. As a junior in a whole new high school, St Bernard’s on Rice Street, I felt very isolated until I went to band practice. There playing first French Horn was this vision of beauty, Ruth Ahmann. She smiled that fantastic smile at me, kindly welcomed me (she was the first person who talked to me that first day of school), and I was smitten.
She graduated in May of 1969 from high school, worked a year, and then studied to be a Registered Nurse. I graduate from high school, in May 1970, majored in music at the College of St Thomas, and graduated in December 1974 (I did my student teaching the Fall quarter of 1984).
Two weeks following my graduation, we got married at St Bridget of Sweden Catholic Church in Lindstrom, MN. on a very cold, December 27th evening. Fortunately, there were not blizzards that day (that happened one week later). Ruthie recently asked me why we got married on that day in December. It was because the church would be brightly filled with Christmas decorations, and besides, what more festive a time can one get married than on Christmas. Am I correct? I did compose a song for our wedding. Got an good friend, a music major from St Kate’s, to sing at our wedding. Arranged some music for trumpet and organ etc. The only music we could not have in our wedding was “our song”, “Midnight at the Oasis”. As a liturgist, later on, yeah, that would not have been appropriate for a wedding … perhaps better sung and enacted on the honeymoon night. But I digress …
Needless to say, the best day of my life was when Ruthie and I got married December 27th of 1974 and married to her every day following continues to be the best day of my life.
God’s Love Be With You
God’s Love Be With You is a choir hymn composed as a blessing. The text I adapted from some blessings in the Book of Psalms, and, from the Book of Numbers. I composed the music and adapted the text during the summer of 1984. Here is the text:
GOD’S LOVE BE WITH YOU
Refrain
God’s love be with you.
God’s peace be with you.
God’s love and peace be with you.
Our God proclaims peace to all people.
And to those who put in God all their hope.
Near indeed is God’s salvation to those who hear God,
Glory dwelling in their land.
Refrain
May peace be in your walls,
Prosperity in your buildings.
With all my relatives and friends, I say,
“Peace be within you.”
Refrain
May our God bless you and keep you.
May the face of our God shine upon you.
May our God be gracious to you and look upon you,
Kindly and give you peace.
Refrain
The music:
God’s Love Be With You (c) 1984 music and text by Robert Charles Wagner. All rights reserved.
How Lovely Is Your Dwelling Place
My favorite psalm is Psalm 84. I love this psalm so much, that I composed a musical setting of the psalm, and then presented the psalm to the person I love so much, Ruthie, and gave it to her as a Christmas present in 1989. I worked on this song throughout most of the Fall of that year. Here is the text:
PS 84 – HOW LOVELY IS YOUR DWELLING PLACE
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O God of Heav’n and earth. (repeat)
My very essence longs with deepest desire
For the courts of our God.
My heart, my soul sing out with joy to our God,
The living God.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O God of Heav’n and earth. (repeat)
For even the sparrow you provide a home.
The swallow nest her young at your altar, O God.
My God, my all. My God, my all.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O God of Heav’n and earth. (repeat)
To spend one day in your courts,
Is all I desire.
To rest upon your doorstep,
I prefer to all dwellings.
For you, my God, are a sun and a shield,
You bestow your grace on those
Who walk with you.
How happy are they who trust
in you, O God of hosts.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O God of Heav’n and earth.
Here is the music:
How Lovely Is Your Dwelling Place (c) 1989, music and text by Robert Charles Wagner. All rights reserved.
