A Lifeline From The Asylum

A Lifeline from the Asylum

He was one of those wretched souls locked away in an insane asylum in the 1800s. He insisted that he wasn’t crazy. But the science of psychology was still in its infancy. In those days, asylums were more like prisons. The misdiagnosed, the mildly eccentric, and the “raving lunatics” were all thrown in together. Methods for treating the mentally ill were cruel and primitive. If you weren’t mentally unstable when they committed you, you were certain to lose your sanity afterward.

When he finally died, the workers who came to clean up his cell discovered a poem scribbled on the wall next to his bed. The doctors were perplexed. How could a lunatic articulate such beauty? Actually, they weren’t his words. Before they locked him away in the asylum, he had memorized lines written by a Jewish rabbi some nine hundred years earlier. He must have scratched them on the wall as a lifeline of hope when he was drowning in a rising sea of insanity. Years later, a discouraged evangelist turned these lines into the last stanza of a famous hymn:

Could we with ink the ocean fill

And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill

And every man a scribe by trade,

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry.

Nor could the scroll contain the whole

Though stretched from sky to sky.

O love of God, how rich and pure!

How measureless and strong!

It shall forevermore endure

The saints’ and angels’ song.

Maybe you have joined the countless millions who have sung the hymn “The Love of God.” You probably didn’t know that it was based on the words of a medieval rabbi who was defending a group of Jews from anti-Semitic attacks or that it was later scribbled on the wall of an insane asylum. There’s something poignant about this poor soul clinging to those words as the light of his soul slowly dimmed and then went out. Were these words his last touch with sanity?

How that story was passed on is a story in itself. A worker who cleaned the room wrote them in pencil on a scrap of paper. That paper passed through many hands over several years. A discouraged evangelist found it lying on an apple crate in the corner of a room and turned its words into the third verse of his hymn.

These words run like a thread of hope through so many stories: a rabbi running for his life; an inmate fighting to keep his sanity; an evangelist trying to find hope; and countless millions who have been inspired by a hymn. Isn’t the sustaining power of a story amazing? Now the words have found their way to you. Maybe you should scribble them on your wall too.

Hope is the raw material from which faith builds the house.

Hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

Romans 5:5, NIV