I have been thinking about the words from the song, A Broken Hallelujah. In the world that I grew up in we wouldn’t have considered a man like Leonard Cohen a good person to follow. His life was too messy. He wasn’t “Christian” enough — which in my old language may just have meant “not moral enough,” or “without the proper theology.” Yet his song, A Broken Hallelujah, has caught the depth of the Scriptures better than any other explanation I’ve ever heard or read.
How can this thing be?
I have been pondering whether our obsession with right and wrong has caused incredible damage. Perhaps it has kept us shallow and blind, unable to do what Cohen did in understanding the deeper wisdom of the Holy Scriptures. Perhaps our infatuation with right theology has served as a blindfold, keeping us trapped with surface issues, rather than radical metamorphosis.
What is it that enables genuine transformation?
Is it fear?
Power of the will?
Is it learned methods of discipline and structures?
Is it knowledge and information?
Is it shame?
I recently listened to a man talk about an experiment that had been done. They took five groups of rabbits and fed all of them the same toxic food. Yet one group thrived. Four groups were only given the food and then left alone, but the fifth group was deeply cared for. The man feeding them took time to pet, hold, kiss, and talk to his group of rabbits. Turns out that because of the love they received, they were fine, even with a toxic diet.
Maybe great harm doesn’t come from some of the things we’ve been taught? Things like brokenness and failure and falling. Maybe even sin doesn’t harm us that much. Maybe it’s lack of love that’s actually killing us. Maybe it’s lack of care that damages the body and soul most of all. Cohen writes about how deep failure draws the broken hallelujah. What if the flames in the hell of my own making are Love upon Love upon endless Love?
What if we’ve become terrified of a thing meant to draw us to the holy?
I think I know why. It’s because we’ve made sin into something shameful, rather than an invitation into beauty. And because we’ve come to believe it’s shameful, we’ve learned to hide. Oh, how hard for those of us who were raised in this culture to be okay with not being okay.
What if my thorn in the flesh is actually the Holy?
What if it’s the pearl of great price?
What if hiding and despising my brokenness
is actually keeping me from the bosom of God?
What if Loves deepest name is right there
on the adultery bed?
I’m not saying that we should try to fail. But would David have understood grace without it? Would the woman caught in adultery have met Jesus unless she had sinned?
As long as I can pull myself up by my own bootstraps, I’m damn well gonna do it.
What I hope for is a rising awareness of how we hide from the very thing that is meant to transform us. What if we paused long enough to listen to the voice that speaks from the midst of our failure? What if we leaned down to listen to the whisper within our sin?
Maybe there is a broken hallelujah just waiting to be sung.
************************************************
“I tell you,
this screwed up one,
not the moral person,
will return home
justified before God.”
-paraphrase of Jesus in Luke 18:14-