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?