These are rough times. Hard times. It is difficult to see a way through it all. Greed, and hatred, and endless false certainties seem poison enough to destroy our species. And, sadly, likely will.
Tears seem the appropriate response. Or, rage. Despair.
And yet.
And yet, there’s something that takes my broken heart and transforms it into a deep affirmation. Why? I don’t know. I don’t know.
But it is there. Rising out of my body in the face of it all. Trying to put words to it feels a near impossible task. Some images help. Kali. Mary. Quanyin.
And fortunately there are those bards of the spirit who sing for us.
One person who most caught the fragility of it all and the confusion and hurt and self-destruction, as well as the great and yet, and yet in a single song, at least for me, was the immortal Leonard Cohen and particularly his Hallelujah. The near universal touch of it, the secret heart of it, is one reason, I’m sure, there have been so many covers.
And as I sit with the tragedies all around, and feel both despair and the call to act as best I can, I find what might best be called the last word.
May that word be on my dying tongue.
My faithless heart’s prayer.
My own broken hallelujah.
While I tend to feel this is an old person’s song, the truth of it belongs to all of us as proven by Regina Spektor’s version recorded when she was twenty-five.
Hallelujah.
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