George Matheson was born in 1842 and within a year of his birth his sight began to fail. By the time he was 17 he was almost completely blind.  Even so, he was a brilliant student who gained a B A at the University of Glasgow at the age of 19, his M A the following year and became a Bachelor of Divinity four years later.  He was ordained as a minister in the Church of Scotland in 1868 at the age of 24 and was appointed Parish Minister at Aniline (Innelan) in Argyllshire.  He had hoped to be a writer of biblical theology and did manage a number of scholarly works but some of his writing was challenged because of slipshod mistakes – mistakes he made because of his failing eyesight. Even so, he was regarded as a Scholar and gave many important lectures.  Yet he was, in many ways unfulfilled in this hoped-for role. He was also to suffer in another way.

As a young man he fell in love with a girl with whom he became engaged but then, abruptly, she broke off the engagement – saying “I’m sorry, George, but your illness (meaning his blindness) means I can’t marry you. Please release me from this betrothal.”  George, with heavy heart, let her go and he continued towards the ministry.

He became a successful preacher and was in great demand. He was able to fulfil all his engagements thanks to the care of his sister.  Then, in June 1882, his sister got married and the whole family went to Glasgow for the marriage service. All that is, except George. His support – his sister – was being taken away from him and he felt bereft. How would he cope?

In mental anguish, the memory of that earlier abandonment by his fiancée came flooding back bringing with it intense sadness.  George turned to God and that evening he wrote the beautiful and intensely moving hymn – O Love that will not let me go.

This is what Matheson wrote about it:

My hymn was composed in the manse of Innelan on the evening of the 6th of June 1882, when I was forty years of age. I was alone in the manse at that time. It was the night of my sister’s marriage and the rest of the family were staying overnight in Glasgow. Something happened to me, which was known only to myself and which caused me the most severe mental suffering. The hymn was the fruit of that suffering. It was the quickest bit of work I ever did in my life. I had the impression of having it dictated to me by some inward voice rather than of working it out myself. I am quite sure that the whole work was completed in five minutes, and equally sure that it never received at my hands any retouching or correction. I have no natural gift of rhythm. All the other verses I have written are manufactured articles; this came like a dayspring from on high.”

Heartbreak, a sense of being abandoned, a life unfulfilled, the pain of blindness which could not be cured, George Matheson found in that hymn the healing that he needed.  Just to read the words shows a turning from despair to hope – assured from its first line that no matter what the circumstance of life we find ourselves coping with – we are held by a Love that will not let me go  - a love in which our weary souls can rest and from a God to whom we can abandon ourselves in all our frailty and find that our lives are richer, fuller.

When George yielded his flickering torch  to God he was giving the gift of his blindness and his pain  to the one who is the Light that followest all my way  and opening his heart to that greater light that would flood his failing light with sunshine’s blaze.

In the third verse he wrote of Joy which seeks him through pain  and finds in God’s presence a promise that there is hope even in seeming hopelessness – I trace the rainbow through the rain ­– that image of hope in the dark storm that it will pass and fairer weather will come.  But it is in the last verse that George Matheson finds the meaning of the hope and the strength to carry on: 

O Cross that liftest up my head...

It is the sacrifice of Christ which reaches out to us as we lie in dust  and from the ground there blossoms red, Life that shall endless be.  Whatever we are having to cope with – of whatever we need healing – be it a physical illness which threatens us; or a heartache that tears us apart, or a lack of fulfilment in our lives there is in God a way forward. It is the Cross but it is the Cross from which springs new life rather than a Cross of despair.

Love will not let us go, least of all when we are suffering because God knows what that means – and the Cross is there to prove it.  In the search for Healing, we do not always find an immediate cure for an illness or an immediate sense of purpose which moves us out of despair. George Matheson did not stop going blind nor was life, even after the hymn O Love that will not let me go, without its struggle.

To be healed is not to enter into some fairy never-never land where we are suddenly immune from what Life brings or throws at us.   To be healed means to reach beyond to where God is and where Love is – Love that will not let us go.

Sometimes cures come; anguish is conquered, pain disappears but sometimes healing is about living with pain or hurt or disability and knowing that of itself it is not everything. There is a hope that transcends and transforms and in that hope is a healing.  It is when we throw ourselves on God – when we seek His strength that we find ourselves held by a promise that is not vain.

Sometimes when we come to a service such as this we come in the hope that like some of the people in the Gospel we might encounter Christ and find in his healing touch a cure – and sometimes we do find that and we experience a miracle. It comes through the skills of others or it comes through the mighty working of the Lord.  But sometimes that doesn’t happen and maybe we feel cheated or let down, disappointed or dismayed.  And we might say that even God has failed us.

But Matheson’s hymn says something very different. It speaks to us powerfully from a wounded heart and a fragile body but it speaks of a soaring soul. It speaks of transcendence and of hope.  Its power lies in the man who wrote it or heard its words in his heart and the faith he clung on to come what may. Matheson’s life was a physical struggle but from the moment he threw himself on God it was no longer a mental one, nor an abandoned one.

He was reassured of God in the midst of his pain; of Christ showing Him that the sacrifice of the Cross – which he understood intellectually and theologically – was a personal spiritual experience which promised Life that shall endless be.  When in the midst of this life, we discover or catch a glimpse of the eternal – we have reached the point of healing. When, as now, we pray for such healing, then we may be surprised that God deals first with the soul for it is through such prayer that we are strengthened and in that strengthening there is a healing.

For when the soul is strengthened by the power of God’s grace acting upon it, then we caught up in the healing process and in the knowledge of that healing we can go on – no matter what happens because, as Matheson insists, we are held by  a Love that will not let us go.

By a Love which holds us, come what may.