ArticleBlog | Love without release – written for someone on the brink of commitment to the Christian faith but uneasy about the implications
Love without release – written for someone on the brink of commitment to the Christian faith but uneasy about the implications
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 17.09.21
Divine love There is a poem about the divine love that pursues us in our lives as we search restlessly for love and contentment. Written in 1890 by Francis Thompson (1859-1907), The Hound of Heaven depicts God’s determination to overpower us with his love if we will submit to him. The poem begins:
‘I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years;’
Thompson struggled all his life with opium addiction, which was a sort of f light from reality in his search for meaning in his life. He at first had an ambition to become a priest and his sense of a divine presence never left him. One writer has said of The Hound of Heaven that it describes the author’s flight from and recapture by God. His flight was fuelled by the fear that he would have to give up other, less savoury aspects of his life:
‘For, though I knew His love who followed, Yet was I sore adread Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.’
So, 150 lines later, comes the climax as God the pursuer declares:
‘Rise, clasp My hand, and come!’ and ‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He Whom thou seekest!
Rock of faith
An almost exact contemporary of Francis Thompson was George Matheson (1842-1906), author of a hymn that bears traces of The Hound of Heaven. It echoes my personal Christian pilgrimage which began with my being at first affected by, then influenced by, eventually overpowered by a sense of the presence of Jesus Christ in my life.
