O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go

Scripture and biblical echoes

• Romans 8:38–39Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God.
• John 8:12Christ, the light of the world, whose light the believer follows.
• Genesis 9:13–16The rainbow set in the cloud as a sign of promise.
• Psalm 30:5Weeping may last for a night, but joy comes in the morning.
• John 12:24A grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, and bears much fruit.
• Revelation 21:4God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

The beauty of the hymn

George Matheson was a Scottish minister whose eyesight failed in youth until he could not see at all. He wrote this hymn in 1882, at Innellan on the Clyde, on the evening of his sister’s wedding. Her marriage was a joy to the household, and it also marked the end of the care she had given him for years. Tradition adds that a broken engagement lay somewhere in his past. Matheson himself said that the words came to him in a few minutes, as though spoken from within, and that he never needed to change them.

The hymn does not argue with sorrow. Each of its four stanzas addresses one gift of God and hands something back. The singer offers a tired soul, a flickering torch, a heart that cannot close, and a life laid in the dust. Every return is enlarged, so that giving back becomes a way of receiving more.

Four stanzas, four gifts

1. Stanza one

   Love

   A weary soul finds its rest in a love that holds it. The life owed is given back freely and without fear.

2. Stanza two

   Light

   The singer yields a flickering torch to the source of all light, so that it may burn brighter and fairer.

3. Stanza three

   Joy

   Joy follows the singer through pain. The rainbow is traced through the rain, and the promise of a tearless morning holds.

4. Stanza four

   The Cross

   The cross lifts the head. Glory lies dead in the dust, and from that ground life blossoms red and endless.

The final stanza does not deny the dust. It places the cross inside it and draws a life that has no end from the same soil.

My reflection

We must have sung this hymn often in church when I was growing up. It was far more popular then. My first conscious memory of it, though, is from when I was about eight or nine.

It was sung at the funeral of a prominent educator from the Teachers’ Training College, who had died in tragic circumstances. A word of clarification is needed. I did not know him, and I doubt my mother did either. That did not stop her from going, to stand with others and to register her disapproval of the manner of his passing. My mother was a serial funeral-goer, and after school we were often required to meet her there. A funeral could be a convenient meeting point.

This one stayed with me. I never got inside the church. We were late, and the crowd was too large. The instruction to attend did not always mean going in, unless the person was better known or closer to us. So I kept to the churchyard of the Moravian church. Funerals were social occasions in the country then, and people came as a courtesy. Sorrow and conjecture moved through the crowd together.

What caught me was the singing. The hymn rose from that gathering as from one voice. I have never forgotten it. The words burnt in, and I have returned to them many times since.

Until that day, the aptness of the hymn for a funeral had escaped me. I had thought of it simply as a hymn about love and the sacrifice of Jesus. Standing in that churchyard, hearing it carried by so many voices, I began to see how well it fits. Later reflection confirmed it. I have never confined it to a funeral song, though. Love and loss, life and death, birth and rebirth remain inescapable balancing forces, and the hymn does not separate them. The soul rests, weary, in a love that holds it. The singer gives back the life he owes. The stanzas personify Love, Light and Joy in turn and close on the Cross as a symbol of salvation and glory. Life’s glory lies dead in the dust, yet it feeds the circle of endless life. We can trace the rainbow through the rain and feel that the promise of a tearless morn is not in vain.

It is a deep, powerful and uplifting hymn, and it is uplifting because it does not deny the dust.

Musical guidance

St. Margaret is in 88.88.6 meter, with four long lines and a short closing line. The melody climbs steadily and then settles, which gives a large congregation room to swell and then to rest. Sing it slowly, at a walking pace, and let each stanza begin quietly. Hold the short final line longer than feels natural, so that it lands as an answer to the three lines before it. A simple organ or piano accompaniment is enough. A crowd that knows the tune needs no embellishment, as that churchyard showed.