Senior Living

In the early 1900s, we sent people we did not know what to do with to asylums.

They weren’t prisons but they also were not hospitals.

People with mental illnesses, birth defects, epilepsy or cerebral palsy were sent to live in these care facilities.

It was in such a time and place that part of a long Jewish poem was found scribbled on a patient’s wall.

The poem in Hebrew is called Akdamut (Introduction to the reading of the 10 Commandments) and dates from the 11th century:

“Could we with ink the oceans 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 tho’ stretched from sky to sky.” These words were adapted in 1917 by Christian songwriter Frederick Lehman as part of the great hymn, “The Love of God.”

What is amazing is to think that these few words, found by some unknown person in a most unlikely place, written there by an unknown “patient” on a non-descript wall, ended up in a song that captures the nature of God’s love. It has been sung around the world for over 100 years.

A real concern for senior adults is the thought that after we die this incredible story and this masterpiece of hymnody may slip away into church music oblivion along with many other great hymns of our faith. But then, the same God who miraculously gave us this song certainly has the power to make it happen all over again.

If the words to this hymn were ever forgotten, maybe this article in The Chronicle will be found 200 years from now in a drawer somewhere, put there by an unknown person, found by an obscure song-writer who will write a new tune for it and make it popular again in the New Jerusalem.

Next week: Father’s Day