The other day, my dad asked me about the meaning of a song and, loving both the song and discussing meaning, I immediately took the bait and plunged in to the discussion. "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen is a song that has stuck with me for quite some time and, while I often feel the lyrics and recognize it as a beautiful and heartbreaking work, I've never really taken the time to consider it in its entirety, to see how it coheres and how it can be understood as a complete work of art. What is Cohen saying through all of his imagery and allusion? What is he relating to, relating with?
Listening to the song, my dad felt that it's title didn't suit the song - at it's best being a mistake, at its worst being nearly blasphemous. And I suppose I've always seen the song as a somewhat sarcastic proclamation that "God be praised:" "Life are awful, yet God is good," as though a positive proclamation is a pouring of salt into a wound. However, if one approaches the song believing that Cohen means what he says, that there is some irony to the fact that God is good yet life so often isn't, and realizes that the Bible is a story of this irony and of God intervening into lives of brokenness and despair as people seek Him, I think the song takes on an earnestness that isn't evident at a glance, or isn't obvious to a culture that readily dismisses any hint of earnest yearning.
See what you think:
First of all, in reading or listening to the song, I think it's important to remember that Leonard Cohen has deeply Jewish convictions and writes/creates from that point of view (in his poetry he writes G-d instead of God). So the word "Hallelujah" to him means "God be praised," not "Jesus be praised" as a Christian would recognize it.
Secondly, I believe that he is writing a worship song that is very Psalm-like in the sense that it is written from the posture of a broken, confused, frightened person seeking to praise God. For him, this emptiness results from broken love, and he starts with two Old Testament stories.
The first two stanzas:
Now, I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and proceeded to write many of the Psalms from the baffled (bewildered, perplexed) brokenness that resulted from his sin:
"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence...Deliver me from my bloodguiltiness, O God, the God of my salvation; Then my tongue will joyfully sing of Your righteousness" (Psalm 51 - the whole Psalm works to this effect).
And Samson, in a similar way, lost his anointing because of his sin with Delilah in disobeying God by telling her the secret of his strength. Afterward, realizing the disaster, he cries out to God:
"O Lord God, please remember me and please strengthen me just this time, O God, that I may at once be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes" Samson (Judges 16.28)
Sin is simply, and impossibly complexly, separation from God, and I think everyone knows this in some way, though they might never use Christian language to express that. We're all longing for wholeness, for connection, for clarity, and these songs and cries express that - Cohen's no less than the others'.
The third stanza is a bit trickier:
You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
In singing this, I think Cohen is recognizing the fact that, at some level, we're all agnostic: we never have complete certainty of who God is, of his name ("We all see through a glass darkly, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13). If we did, there wouldn't really be room for faith, or for trusting him (you haven't anything to seek if you've already found it in its entirety). He does exhibit frustration, though, at this disconnect: "What's it to you if I said your name without believing in You? You decided not to fully reveal yourself to me," and I see that as coming more from frustration than humility. However, he then says that, no matter how "holy" or "broken" our praise is, it doesn't really matter: we're simply trying to praise God, no matter "which word You heard." Ultimately all of our attempts to love God are imperfect, yet there is a "blaze of light in every one," and I interpret that as meaning that our praises of God are charged by the part of God that is in us that wants to praise himself, the image of God in us connecting with Himself. CS Lewis describes prayer as "God speaking to God" in the sense that we become conduits for his love and praise. And sin, separation from our Source, certainly inhibits that.
The last stanza is one of humility:
I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
I think the first two lines are a kind of defense as to why Samson and David committed the adultery they did: they couldn't sense God's presence with them, and, ultimately in the wake of that sense of disconnect, "touched," or tried to recreate some semblance of that sense of connection in sleeping with the women in their stories. They didn't consciously think "I don't sense God, so I'm going to give in to temptation," yet on a spiritual level this seems to have occurred. And I think this is ultimately the motivation behind sin: trying to reconnect with God, to mend that disconnect, in ways that aren't God. And it's our struggle, while on earth, to connect with God and help others to do so while existing in the chasm between the proclamation that "God is good" yet "life isn't always great." There is a tension in living there, in recognizing how far we are from God yet imagining what life might be like in complete connection with him. Faith is responding to that might be like, living toward that and from that. It's not an easy thing to assert that life as we know it isn't all there is, that there is a true possibility for restoration and that, I think, is the very definition of hope.
And so Cohen sings from that posture "even though it all went wrong" (even though I completely messed up), "I'll stand before the Lord of Song" (a brilliant name for God) "With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah" (I became lost and hurt in my wandering - yet I only want to praise you, what I'm made to do).
So, that's how I see it. When I first listened to the song, I thought Cohen was saying "Hallelujah" with his tongue in his cheek, yet the more I think about it and listen to it, the more I see it as an earnest Psalm.
Thoughts?
(PS - more on Oxford soon... I haven't given enough time to updates!)
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