The Broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah is not a praising song, although it might as well be. 

It is a sigh, really—one that grays the space between surrender and defeat. 

It is the cry which one utters when he is exhausted from a fight he has been very passionate about, but then he discovers a truth he has not seen, and this changes how he feels about the fight, except now, he is spent, and he could not be anything more. The fight in him has left, and so has everything else.  

I saw your flag on the marble arch

But love is not a victory march

It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah

The songwriter Leonard Cohen clearly alludes to the Bible, but he flits from one allusion to another, until the “you” he addresses in the song becomes unclear. At one point it refers to David, at another to Samson, and then to God, and finally, to some absent lover. A vagueness like this may start out to be appealing, but after a while, the lack of clarity becomes frustrating.

In the end, though, what I fail to understand does not matter as much as those that I do understand. A hallelujah is usually an exclamation of faith, a declaration of love--a single word for all of the words we cannot say. Praise You, God, for every thing.

I first heard the song's refrain in an episode of The West Wing. The refrain seemed to jump out of the scene, haunting and stubborn, demanding to be experienced on its own. And as I did, I was gripped by a surreal recognition: this is not the hallelujah that people know. 

This is my hallelujah.

It seems to me that this is how exhaustion would sound, if it had to be personified. And I know that there are those of us who wish that we didn't recognize it. In a song. Like an anthem of our soul.

The song alludes to how David's faith had been challenged by the bathing Bathsheba under the moonlight. David was a dutiful king during a very difficult time, but although his faith was strong, [God] needed proof. It baffled David, this test of his faith despite all the good that he did and all the struggle for it. It is understandable how, when he failed--in the song at least--he utters a cold and a broken hallelujah.

Perhaps I, too, like the "baffled king", think this "test" is cruel.

Too many of us are already doing the best that we can about what we are thrown in life, and when we have to struggle further because we are being "tested", in order to prove our worth for love, or in order to prove our faith...why, hallelujah.

None of it would make sense, to David, and to me, and I could imagine that no argument could ever come close to explaining the abandonment and betrayal that are afforded even to especially to the best of us.

Perhaps, like Cohen’s David, I, too, understand too well the privacy of this hallelujah. It is the resentment of a good man, undeserving of the Test of Faith he was bound to fail in. A resentment that is quieted now. I recognize the rebellion in the refrain, and the loathsome yearning to be rescued, and the resignation. And ultimately, the exhaustion for what never arrived. 

I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But You don't really care for music, do you?

In the end, who's to say that a cold and a broken hallelujah is valued less than its holier counterpart? Who's to say that confusion, or anger, or brokenness, cannot be a place for an exclamation of faith? Or who's to say that we risk heavenly favor if we question, quietly, what the suffering is for?

And about those of us who have been spent in the fight, who’s to say that we are not fighting still, here, with our very surrender?

Daunt/Less

I am putting to rest one persistent thought tonight.

Paton wonders in his book, Cry, the Beloved Country, “What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?”

And what about when he decides to take his own life? Does something break in him, as well?

Is the breaking unhurried, and unrelenting, and agonizing? Or is it a shattering--sudden and ravaging?

Or perhaps it is a birthing, rather than a breaking? A creation rather than a destruction? A filling up of the void which had been the very reason for the giving up; except that in the final moments, what fills the void is a dauntlessness that is unusable but for a singular purpose--ending one's life.   

Dauntlessness. It is neither courage nor a lack of it. It is only the absence of fear. In fact, it is only an absence--an absence of reasons to continue, rather than having reasons to stop.

And I believe if one pauses long enough, he will find in himself a fearsome capacity to empathize— the tabooed recognition of the human tendency to give up and stop.

Instead of hope.

Limpid Dewdrops

Mono no aware. The pathos of things. The poignancy of the awareness of the impermanence of every thing in the world.

The mono no aware is the Japanese aesthetic perspective that the sadness of transience is beautiful.

Scholars exemplify this with iconic examples: the last sliver of the waning moon; the last burst of summer; a flower in its fullest bloom. Zen examples make more sense: a dewdrop on a leaf, a rose and a horse by the roadside, a snowflake on an open palm, the stillness of an old pond. These images evoke a sensitivity towards a criterion of beauty—what makes something beautiful is not what already is; what makes something beautiful is the awareness that it doesn’t last.

Thus, in this perspective, the snowflake, the dewdrop and the still pond are beautiful because of their fleeting existence. A rose in full bloom is beautiful only because it wilts after that period of beauty. A dewdrop is a marvelous thing to behold only because it could roll to the ground without warning and disappear in an instant. The beauty of the stillness of the pond lies in the apprehension of it being disturbed, perhaps, by Basho’s wayward frog.

Transience. Sadness. Beauty.

I see it in the excited chatter of students, sudden and wonder-ful, when an idea—irrelevant until then—suddenly becomes the most important discovery of the day.

It is there, and everywhere else—

In the awareness of a pride that cannot be contained by the world for a class one mentors;

In the smile that steals into the eyes of a parent who has been tired for too long;

In the ridiculous affairs of a younger brother, or in the fierce passion of a younger sister’s dreaming;

In the lighting up of a child’s eyes at the arrival of an adult friend, making the latter wonder if it isn’t undeserved;

In the carefree laughter shared only among true friends, the rolling kind that renders one breathless;

It is there, especially in the silence that sits between two memories—the previous memory for which the laughter was, and the next one, still being sifted through for, in the minds of old friends who sit together, just for reminiscing. It is there in the quiet that lingers when they say goodbye, before they send each other off with silly jokes that speak what they do not say.

It never gets old. Each time I am confronted by the aware, I am struck by the same sense of discovery that washed over me nine years ago, as I sat in my AsianLit class, and a haiku suddenly made sense, opening to me a worldview that was as powerful as it is honest and beautiful.

Oh white, limpid dew

With what poor judgment you choose

The place where you lie.

Limpid dewdrops, we might all be. And are we not all placed in the midst of great uncertainty, at times rolling to the ground before we are ready, and at times, lingering long enough to catch a ray of light, and lending a tiny burst of colors to the world around us?

Mono no aware. It is the uncertainty—the gray—that makes that tiny burst of colors, and everything else, precious.