Letter: O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

There were many of them, hundreds perhaps. 

Several were etched with messages of endearing love, a never-letting-go love, a number of them symbolizing their forever love by two matching locks being intertwined and locked together.

Presumably, the keys to all were tossed to be forever lost in the loud and raging waters cascading to the rocks below, the stream flowing on and on eventually to the wide expanse of the seemingly never-ending ocean far beyond.

A mist arose from the nearby waterfall resulting in the likelihood that many of the locks had long-since become rusted in place. 

Ironically, it was not a lock but a pen that gave birth to the hymn entitled “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go.”

And it was not a heart-promise that might have prompted the author to place a lock on a fence, but rather a most painful heartbreak that caused George Matheson to put pen to paper.

He was 17 and going blind, which blindness would be complete by his twentieth year.

When his fiancée learned that he was going blind – that there was nothing the doctors could do – she told him that she could not go through life with a blind man and broke off the engagement.

“O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go” was then written, in Matheson’s own words, “in but five minutes,” on the evening of his sister’s marriage, June 6, 1882, as he sat alone.

But that five minutes was both a reflection of the intense pain he bore, and yet at the same time that song would be a thread that would both bind the volume and weave the story that would define all of the rest of his life, a life in which he never married, but preached nonetheless of a love that would not let him go.

“O Love that wilt not let me go,

I rest my weary soul in thee;

I give thee back the life I owe,

That in thine ocean depths its flow

May richer, fuller be.”

That evening when we returned from our adventure in which we discovered these locks – and though of course unknown to her this story I would write the next day – her words were nonetheless prescient, perhaps being reflective of her own observations of the love locks we had seen, one of those locks inscribed in particular with the words so indicative of our own late-in-life love:

‘I may not be your first kiss, first love, but I want to be your last everything.’

As we held hands across the dinner table, she said what would bring us both to tears:

“My love for you cannot let you go.”

Oh, to be the recipient of a love like that.