A life in letters: O love that will not let me go

A hymn by Church of Scotland minister George Matheson (1842-1906) which meant a great deal to me when I was struggling with sadness in the 1980s.

Matheson’s eyesight had been poor from early childhood. He lost his sight completely while studying for the ministry and as a result his fiancée broke off their engagement.  With the help of his sisters who read to him and tutored him George Matheson completed his theological studies despite his blindness, and served as minister first at Innellan on the Clyde Estuary, and then at St Bernard’s Church, Edinburgh.

Matheson left as description of how he came to write the hymn:

My hymn was composed in the manse of Innellan on the evening of June 6, 1882. I was at that time alone. It was the day of my sister’s marriage, and the rest of my family were staying overnight in Glasgow. Something had happened to me which was known only to myself, and which caused me the most severe mental suffering.

The hymn, he continues ‘was the fruit of that suffering’, although he does not disclose the nature of his pain. The four stanzas were written quickly, with a sense of their givenness. ‘All the other verses I have written are manufactured articles; this came like a dayspring from on high.’

O love that will not let me go is a personal affirmation of the unshakability of God’s love, and a personal response to it in that yielding, or surrender to God which, on my clearer-seeing days, I realise leads to the flowering of the Christian’s true identity:

O light that followest all my way,

I yield my flickering torch to thee,

My heart restores its borrowed ray,

That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day

May brighter, fairer be.

The line of the hymn which most spoke to me, years ago, was ‘O Joy that seekest me through pain.’

I think the line has two levels of meaning. The Joy which is God seeks to penetrate our pain, so that we catch glimpses of Joy, just as you see the sun’s bright circle through a swirling mist before a denser fog hides it once again.

But the words also suggest that pain can be a vehicle through which God comes to us, as if our hurt and depression sweep aside all the things which distance us from God. The beauty of the rainbow is seen only during, or immediately after the storm. This can be true in Christian experience, though it is not invariably true.

I’m not sure if the words of this line themselves brought Joy to me, but they certainly brought comfort and a fragile conviction that Joy was indeed still out there, and that once again Joy would come to me, like ‘a dayspring from on high.’