Wondrous Love - Marilynne Robinson Pt 2

Here is another paragraph from the same chapter, 'Wondrous Love', of When I Was a Child I Read Books, by Marilynne Robinson. The last couple of sentences are interesting (and lovely). The story of Christianity is definitely history, but it is also so much more than history.

There is a great old American hymn that sounds like astonishment itself, and I mention it here because even its title speaks more powerfully of the meaning of our narrative than whole shelves of books. It is called “Wondrous Love.” “What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss / to bear the dreadful cross for my soul?” If we have entertained the questions we moderns must pose to ourselves about the plausability of the incarnation, if we have sometimes paused to consider the other ancient stories of miraculous birth, this is no great matter. But if we let these things distract us, we have lost the main point of the narrative, which is that God is of a kind to love the world extravagantly, wondrously, and the world is of a kind to be worth, which is not to say worthy of, this pained and rapturous love. This is the essence of the story that forever eludes telling. It lives in the world not as myth or history but as a saturating light, a light so brilliant that it hides its source, to borrow an image from another good old hymn.

I tried to find a good youtube of this song. When we were kids my best friend and I used to listen to her Dad's Hymns Triumphant record (yes, we were wild little rebels), which had the most euphoric recording of this hymn, but I can't find it on youtube.